Quote of the day

Don’t shed any tears. You think about this. Here I am, the grandson of a slave. And here the whole world was excited about whether I was going into the Hall of Fame or not. We’ve come a long ways.

~Buck O’Neil

Buck O'Neil
Buck O’Neil with the Kansas City Monarchs (public domain/Wikimedia Commons)

Infographic: The Negro Leagues map

I really like this map. It depicts the most well-known and notable teams that existed in the Negro Leagues, along with some information about each team. You can find the years each team existed, the name of their home park, and any titles won.

The text in the graphic below is a bit small, so for a larger view, just click on the image.

Negro Leagues infographic - Bill Sports maps
Bill Sports Maps

In memory of Hank Aaron

Major League Baseball and the Atlanta Braves held a memorial service for Henry Louis Aaron yesterday. If you haven’t had the opportunity to watch it yet, I found the service quite moving.

A few days ago, MLB had also put out a tribute video honoring Hammerin’ Hank. It is also worth a watch, if you can spare a few minutes.

The Kansas City T-Bones become the Kansas City Monarchs

In case you missed it, yesterday, the minor league team Kansas City T-Bones announced they have changed their name to the Kansas City Monarchs. The name change comes as part of a partnership with the Negro Leagues Museum (also located in Kansas City).

Upcoming webinar: Negro Leagues 1920-2020

For anyone who is interested, the African and African-American Studies department at the University of Kansas has just announced that they will be holding a webinar about the Negro Leagues. The webinar will take place on September 17th at 7:00 pm Central Time.

Registration for the webinar is taking place here.

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Ken Burns’s Baseball: The Sixth Inning

The Sixth Inning of Baseball: A Film by Ken Burns explores the national pastime during the 1940s, which was quite the tumultuous decade in American history.  It was a decade of war as the United States recovered from the Great Depression and found itself in a position of having to enter World War II.  It was also the decade of Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio, of sixth inningwomen’s professional baseball, and of Jackie Robinson.

In a chronological sense, the Sixth Inning was an easier one to follow along with than any of the Innings that preceded it.  The first part of this disc was dominated by two of the game’s greatest hitters.  1941 was the summer of Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams, whose hitting performances captivated the baseball world.  Joe DiMaggio’s fifty-six game hitting streak and Ted Williams’s .406 season average have both remained unmatched ever since.

The 1941 World Series resulted in a devastating loss for the Brooklyn Dodgers to the New York Yankees.  At the end of the season, Dodgers general manager Larry MacPhail , drunk and belligerent, threatened to sell off all his players.  The Dodgers instead opted to let go of MacPhail and brought in Branch Rickey, thus setting the stage for the breaking of the color barrier in the coming years.

When the United States entered the war, Franklin Roosevelt insisted that baseball ought to continue.  The country would be working longer and harder, and thus recreation became more important than ever, he said.  However, this didn’t shield players from the draft, and baseball still suffered as a result.  Players like DiMaggio and Bob Feller joined the war effort.  Meanwhile, baseball turned to signing players (and umpires) who didn’t meet the usual caliber of play just to keep going.

As the war also drew away a number of minor leaguers, Philip Wrigley came up with the idea of starting a women’s professional baseball league in order to fill the baseball void as minor league teams fell apart.  Women from all over, particularly softball players, were recruited.  They had to be able to play ball, but they were also required to remain unequivocally feminine.  Off the field, any time they were in public, they were required to be in skirts, heels, and makeup — a requirement that I, for one, would find very difficult to swallow.

Following the war, the disc goes into the story of Branch Rickey and Jackie Robinson.  The story from Rickey’s time coaching at Ohio Wesleyan University, checking into a hotel in South Bend, Indiana to play Notre Dame, is absolutely heartbreaking, and certainly explains a lot regarding his determination to integrate baseball.

Branch Rickey certainly did his homework when choosing a player to break the color barrier, and clearly, he choose well.  Promising not to retaliate and turn the other cheek for three years (three years!), Jackie Robinson signed with the Montreal Royals.

Burns breaks from the Jackie Robinson saga long enough to cover the 1946 World Series between the St. Louis Cardinals and the Boston Red Sox.  Though the Sox were the heavy favorites to win, the Cards employed the “Williams shift” to prevent Ted Williams from having much success at the plate.  Thanks in part to this strategy, the Cardinals won that year’s Series.  Roger Angell says it well when he explains that baseball is not a game about winning, like we think it is, but rather, it is a game about losing.

Jackie Robinson’s debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947 was certainly an event, one that we continue to celebrate today.  As expected, he endured an endless stream of taunts, threats, and even attempts at actual bodily harm.  Through it all, he bit his tongue.  Instead, he let his performance on the field speak for him.  Not only was he named Rookie of the Year at the end of the season, he was also determined to be the second most popular man in America, after Bing Crosby.  Robinson’s efforts eventually allowed other black players, including the great pitcher Satchel Paige, to break into the majors as well.

Ken Burns does a good job of pointing out that, for all the virtues that surrounded Robinson’s trek into Major League Baseball, it was a devastating event for the Negro Leagues.  The Brooklyn Dodgers became the team of black America, and attendance at Negro Leagues games declined.  As we know now, the Negro Leagues would eventually meet its end as a result.

The disc ends with the death of Babe Ruth in 1948.  It’s only appropriate that the Sultan of Swat would receive this kind of nod (and convenient that he would die at the end of a decade — not to be morbid or anything).  Burns never touches on what Ruth thought of Jackie Robinson, nor on what Robinson thought of Ruth.  Perhaps nobody knows.  But as Buck O’Neil points out, both men were giants in the game.  Each of them, in their own way, changed baseball forever.

Ken Burns’s Baseball: The Fifth Inning

Continuing on with the journey through Baseball: A Film By Ken Burns brings us to the decade of the 1930s.  The United States, indeed, the world, was facing off against the Great Depression during the 1930s.  As a result of high unemployment rates and widespread poverty, few could afford the price of tickets to attend professional baseball games, and as a result, attendance fell drastically.  Baseball did what it could to try to draw fans back in, from the first All-Star game to the creation of the Baseball Hall of Fame.  However, the financial difficulties that faced the nation at this time were too great.

Even as the Depression was getting underway, the Yankees signed Babe Ruth to the biggest contract in baseball history in the early 1930s.  It was a move that seems only too-appropriate, given Ruth’s ostentatious lifestyle.  Meanwhile, Lou Gehrig continues to stay merely in the shadows of the spotlight, in spite of his consecutive game streak and consistent high level of play.shadow ball

Subtitled “Shadow Ball,” the Fifth Inning of this series by Ken Burns focuses on black baseball.  (The subtitle, by the way, is not a reference to race, but rather to the illusion that these games weren’t being played with a ball at all, because it could barely be seen.)  While white baseball suffered during the Depression, black baseball flourished.  Many black teams came under control of racketeers, as they were among the few who could afford to fund baseball during this time, but interestingly, this seemed to be to the advantage of the Negro Leagues.  And the crowds flocked to watch the black teams play.  Listening to the nostalgia in the voices of former negro leagues players, you can tell there was a true love for the game, even in spite of inequality, the hard road trips, and the racism they faced.

We learn about Satchel Paige, considered by some to be the greatest pitcher in all of baseball.  He had such an arsenal of pitches that few could hit off Paige.  Some saw him as black baseball’s equivalent of a Babe Ruth, in that he drew large crowds to ball games.  He even seemed to hold true to this comparison in his off-field personality.  He hated to drive slow and cultivated a persona for those around him.  Buck O’Neil, however, indicates there was much more to Paige than often met the eye.

Babe Ruth himself became the center of attention yet again during the 1932 World Series in Chicago when, in Game 3, he appeared to call his shot.  No one will ever know for certain whether he really did, or if Ruth was merely engaging in a different gesture altogether, but it was a moment that, as we all know, has remained a part of the baseball psyche for decades.  As the decade went on, however, Ruth’s level of play would decline, as it always does as a ballplayer gets older.  When the Yankees made it clear they would not offer him a manager position, he did a brief stint with the Boston Braves, then retired from baseball.  Meanwhile, new stars stepped into the spotlight.  Not just Lou Gehrig, but also figures like Mel Ott, Jimmie Foxx, Dizzy Dean, and Bob Feller.

As for home run hitters in the Negro Leagues, catcher Josh Gibson was well-known for this ability.  While many called him a black Babe Ruth, Burns notes, there were some who thought they had the comparison backwards, and that Babe Ruth was actually a white Josh Gibson.  Indeed, the list of accomplishments for Gibson certainly seems to pass those of Ruth, including a season with seventy home runs, some of which exceeded 575 feet in distance.  The Negro Leagues’ version of the Yankees were the Kansas City Monarchs, led by first baseman Buck O’Neil.  In his commentary, O’Neil speaks about the camaraderie between the players and the fans.

We learn about the 1930s Brooklyn Dodgers, “dem bums,” and we learn about the 1934 St. Louis Cardinals, the “Gashouse Gang.”  In 1936, Joe DiMaggio made his first appearances as a rookie with the New York Yankees.  DiMaggio would help lead the Yankees to four World Series.  Also in the thirties, we see the first night game in Major League Baseball (though night games had been played in the Negro Leagues for some time) and the increasing popularity of radio broadcasts, especially those by Red Barber, created new fans, as more and more people came to understand the game.

During the off season, many black players traveled south to Mexico, Latin America, and the Caribbean.  In doing so, they were able to play baseball year round.  They also discovered that the racial attitudes south of the United States were very different.  They were paid more and welcomed more warmly by the locals than they were back home.

Discrimination didn’t stop with just the black population.  Hank Greenburg came into prominence as first baseman for the Detroit Tigers.  He wasn’t the first Jewish player in the game, but he was probably the first to really make a name for himself.  Greenburg faced a considerable backlash of anti-Semitism, but his stellar play eventually helped to win fans and players over.  Greenburg felt his role was of particular importance in light of the actions of one Adolf Hitler in Europe.

In 1939 came Lou Gehrig’s ALS diagnosis, and thus the end of his streak and his baseball career.  On July 4th of that year, Gehrig gave his “Luckiest Man” speech at Yankee Stadium.  Two years later, he passed away from the disease, which now bears his name.

1939 also saw the opening of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and the induction of the first Hall of Fame class.  It was the 100-year anniversary of the myth of Abner Doubleday‘s founding of baseball in 1839.  The disc then ends with Buck O’Neil describing the long-awaited matchup between Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson — Negro League Baseball’s best pitcher versus it’s best hitter.  O’Neil’s account left me with a smile.

Toni Stone: The first woman to play in the Negro Leagues

Major League Baseball has yet to see its first woman player, but the Negro Leagues were ahead of the times in this regard.  Three women played professional baseball in the Negro Baseball Leagues, the first of whom was one Toni “Tomboy” Stone.

Toni Stone (Biography.com)
Toni Stone (Biography.com)

Born Marcenia Lyle on July 17, 1921, in St. Paul, Minnesota, Toni Stone signed to play second base for the Indianapolis Clowns in 1953.  It was a path that went against the hopes and dreams that Stone’s parents had for her and her siblings.  From a young age, Toni Stone loved competition, and she excelled at a variety of sports as she grew up, including baseball, track, and ice skating.  Her parents, who would have preferred that she focus more of her attention on her schoolwork, went so far as to set up a meeting for her with the local priest to try to talk her out of baseball, but by the end of that meeting, the priest had invited her to join his team in the Catholic Midget League.

By the age of fifteen, Stone had joined the Twin City Colored Giants, a traveling men’s baseball team.  In the 1940s, however, she moved to San Francisco to help a sick sister, taking a brief hiatus from baseball.  But then in 1949, she joined the San Francisco Sea Lions of the West Coast Negro Baseball League.  In her first plate appearance with the Sea Lions, Stone earned two RBIs.

Being a black woman playing on a men’s team in Jim Crow America, Stone’s experiences playing ball weren’t always fun, of course.  She often dealt with a barrage of jeers and insults from fans and players alike.  Stone was quite proud of the fact that the male players were out to get her, however, wearing it as a sort of badge of honor.  At one point, she said, “They didn’t mean any harm, and in their way they liked me. Just that I wasn’t supposed to be there. They’d tell me to go home and fix my husband some biscuits, or any damn thing. Just get the hell away from here.”  As a woman, Stone was not allowed into the men’s locker room, but if she was lucky, she was sometimes permitted to change in the umpires’ locker room.  In spite of the hardships, she took advantage of the exposure that she gained playing with the Sea Lions, and in 1953, the Indianapolis Clowns signed Toni Stone to its roster.

Stone appeared in 50 games that year.  She hit .243, including getting a hit off the legendary pitcher, Satchel Paige.  She also had the opportunity to play with the likes of Willie Mays and Ernie Banks.  Stone’s time with the Clowns did not last, however, and in the off-season, she was traded to the Kansas City Monarchs.  She retired at the end of her season with the Monarchs, however, due to age and a lack of playing time.  Stone had compiled a .240 career batting average.

In 1985 Stone was inducted into the Women’s Sports Foundation’s International Women’s Sports Hall of Fame. Then, in 1993, Stone was inducted into the Women’s Sports Hall of Fame and into the Sudafed International Women’s Sports Hall of Fame.  Toni Stone died of heart failure in 1996.

Middlebury Magazine
Middlebury Magazine