Last December, Major League Baseball bestowed major league status to the Negro Leagues from 1920 to 1948, which means the statistics will be added to the official game records. The difficulty is that many of the games were poorly covered in the media, if at all. A box score is required for a game’s statistics to be included. Still, the record books are catching up to history.
Black baseball goes back to the 1860s, when ball clubs were cropping up in towns all across the nation. Though, with few exceptions, there were white teams and Black teams. In 1887, white owners made a “gentleman’s agreement” to keep the athletes segregated. It was an unwritten rule that didn’t need to be written; it was just accepted.
Crossing the ‘color line’
Cincinnati ballplayer Charlie Grant nearly broke the “color line” in 1901.
Crafty baseball manager John McGraw was starting a new Baltimore Orioles team for the American League. He went to recruit players down in Hot Springs, Arkansas, a popular off-season baseball training site, and saw Grant play.
McGraw cooked up a plan to pass Grant off as a full-blooded Cherokee named Charlie Tokohama as a way to overstep the “gentleman’s agreement.”
But McGraw’s nemesis, Chicago White Sox owner Charles Comiskey, recognized Grant from the Negro leagues and blew the whistle before he could play a game.
“Somebody said this Cherokee of McGraw’s is really Grant, the crack negro second baseman, fixed up with war paint and a bunch of feathers,” Comiskey said in a special dispatch to The Enquirer.
Grant played for several Black teams, including the Cuban X-Giants, Philadelphia Giants and Cincinnati Stars (1914-1916), but never in the majors.
Cuban stars
Reds business manager Frank Bancroft made some of the first overtures to other leagues. In 1895, he scheduled the Reds to play exhibition games against the Page Fence Giants, an all-Black barnstorming team out of Adrian, Michigan. The Reds won both games, 11-7 and 16-2.
He also took the Reds on barnstorming trips to Cuba.
“Bancroft was quite the pivotal link between Cuban and organized baseball dating back to 1879 when he took the first professional team of North American players to Cuba,” said researcher Adrian Burgos.
José Méndez pitched 25 consecutive scoreless innings against the Reds in Cuba in November 1908, including a one-hitter. A legend in his homeland, he played for the Kansas City Monarchs in the Negro leagues and was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2006.
Two lighter skinned Cubans, Armando Marsans and Rafael Almeida, were signed by the Reds in 1911.
“The majority of the native players were colored men like Mendez and his crack catcher Gonzales. These players had no chance to break into organized baseball, as it is played in this country, and as Almeida and Marsans have done, being barred by their color,” Enquirer sports editor Jack Ryder wrote in 1912.
Both had played on the All Cubans team in the Negro league in 1905. Almeida played for the Reds until 1913. Marsans played for the Reds, St. Louis Browns and New York Yankees through 1918.
Negro League started 1920
There were a number of unsuccessful attempts to form Black leagues before the Negro National League became the first official one in 1920.
The League of Colored Baseball Clubs formed in 1886 with the Cincinnati Browns, made up of local talent, but the league collapsed after a week. The Browns continued to play for a time, but there was little news coverage and no records available.
Black baseball pioneer Bud Fowler led the Cincinnati Black Tourists in 1905. Fowler was the first African-American to play organized ball in 1878.
For the 1921 season, the Cuban Stars of the Negro National League leased the Reds’ ballpark, Redland Field (later Crosley Field). In one game, opposing hitter John Beckwith of the Chicago Giants hit the first home run over the fence in the park’s nine-year history.
The Negro American League, formed in 1937, briefly had three Cincinnati teams: The Cincinnati Tigers in 1937; Buckeyes Baseball Club in 1942, splitting games at Crosley Field and in Cleveland; and the Cincinnati Clowns from 1943-1945, which became the Indianapolis Clowns in 1946 and signed Hank Aaron in 1952.
The Cincinnati Crescents, an all-Black barnstorming team founded by Harlem Globetrotters promoter Abe Saperstein, toured in 1946, powered by rookie Luscious “Luke” Easter, who later played for the Cleveland Indians.
Cincinnati Tigers
Cincinnati’s Black athletes were best represented by the Tigers, organized as an independent club by DeHart Hubbard in 1934. Hubbard was the first Black athlete to win an Olympic gold medal, for the long jump in the 1924 games in Paris. He had an eye for baseball talent and led the top-notch local amateur team, Excelsior. The core of that team became the Tigers, funded by businessman Henry Ferguson, who published the Black newspaper, the Mirror.
The Tigers joined the Negro American League in 1937 under manager Ted “Double Duty” Radcliffe. Sportswriter Damon Runyan had given him the nickname after seeing him catch the first game of a doubleheader, then pitch a shutout in the second. After one season, the Tigers were sold and became the Memphis Red Sox.
The star was Neil Robinson, regarded as one of the best left fielders in the Negro Leagues.
“Neil Robinson is one of those unheralded players who never got the recognition he deserved: he just played hard and played well…,” Hall of Famer Monte Irvin wrote. “He wasn’t flashy, and he didn’t have the reputation that some of the better-known players like Josh Gibson, Cool Papa Bell, Buck Leonard and a lot of others had, so he was bypassed when it came to the Hall of Fame.”
Tigers pitcher Porter Moss was a strike-out artist and as brash as Satchel Paige. “When other teams came to town, Porter would go over to their hotel and tell them what he was gonna do to them the next day when he was pitching,” recalled teammate Marlin Carter. “They say it ain’t bragging if you can do it. Well, he wasn’t bragging.”
Moss was shot on a train by a belligerent passenger in 1944, and the doctor at the next stop refused to treat him because he was Black. He lost too much blood by the time he made it to the hospital and died.
Jackie Robinson broke the color line three years later. The game integrated slowly. A few of the biggest names among Black players trickled into the big leagues. Chuck Harmon played for the Reds in 1954. The Negro American League faded away in 1963, and Black ballplayers had fewer options to play.
Sources: “The Negro Leagues: 1869-1960” by Leslie A. Heaphy, “In the Shadows: Cincinnati’s Black Baseball Players” by Lonnie Wheeler and John Baskin, “Few and Chosen: Defining Negro League Greatness” by Monte Irvin, Enquirer archives, reporting by John Erardi and Steven Rosen
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