Vol. 4 Issue 9 (#143) February 27, 2013

JOSH’S HOME RUNS,

By John Holway Guest Columnist

There were many Joshes, there weremany Satchels.

--Satchel Paige

I’ve been covering baseball since 1948, when I saw Satchel Paige pitch for the Cleveland Indians in the World Series. Three years earlier I had seen him pitch in the Negro League against Josh Gibson, the last time those two titans ever faced each other. It was also one of the first professional games Jackie Robin-son ever played. The memory of that contest lay dormant for almost 25 years be-fore I decided to write about the long-dead Gibson. I sent it to the Washington Post in 1969, based on an interview with Josh’s old teammate, Buck Leonard. The manuscript came back filled with red-penciled marginalia of disbelief by the editor. But I appealed to his boss, and the piece was accepted. Leonard sent me to Cool Papa Bell, in St Louis, who sent me to Hilton Smith in Kansas City, etc. It was like eating popcorn. It was the first step, though I didn’t suspect it at that time, of an obsession that would lead across the country, seeking out and taping the sto-ries of the great men of blackball history. Eventually more than 70 interviews had wound their way around the spools of my recorder. It’s the world I would spend the next 40 years discovering. Every ring at each new player’s doorbell brought new adventures. Like that Post editor, my own eyes were opened to a universe I had never known. As the stories unfolded, I realized, incredulously, that this was not a footnote to baseball history. This is was half of base-ball history. How good were they? My own boyhood idol, Ted Williams, summed it up. As a rookie in 1939, making his first tour around the American League, he said, the older players pointed out at each new park, “That’s where Josh Gibson hit one … Gibson hit one over

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AN UNFINISHED SYMPHONY

there.” “Well,” Ted whistled, “nobody in our league hit ‘em any farther than that.” As an awe-struck 12 year-old in San Diego in 1931, Ted had seen Paige throw a one-hitter at the local team. He was convinced that Satch deliberately let the weakest hitter on the team get a single. Twenty-five years later, Ted faced Paige himself. He recalls Satch going into his windup and turning his wrist at the top of his stretch. “Everybody in the park saw it - he made damn sure I saw it.” “Jesus,” Ted thought, “curve ball.” Instead, a fastball whooshed over the plate. Strike three. The next afternoon Satch ducked into the Red Sox dugout, demanding, “Where’s Ted? Where’s Ted?” “Right here,” Satch,” Williams replied. “You ought to know better than to guess with Ol’ Satch,” Paige laughed. In all, Ted and Satch faced each other 15 times in the American League. Ted drew five walks. “Pitchers who don’t walk Ted lose,” Satch shrugged. In their ten other face-offs, Ted got two hits. That gives us a taste of what we had been missing in those long, dark years before integration. The long blackball era had been a tragedy for the black players and the white fans alike. I have written nine volumes recounting that missing half of our common baseball heritage. Meanwhile I was also building a data base of statistics. I spent endless hours of slowly turning microfilm reels and copying thousands of box score numbers by myself and others, both paid and volunteer. Game by game, we were amassing new home runs to count and new victories to chronicle. By 1991 Dick Clark and I were ready to publish them in the “bible,” the Macmil-lan Encyclopedia. Incomplete though they were, we at last had some reliable numbers to correct the fables, exaggerations, and ignorance that had surrounded the subject. It was becoming clear that Josh and Satch were not, as the white world had in-sisted, two freaks standing alone, above a league of semipros. I brought what pressure I could to admit some of these old-time blackball giants into Cooperstown. I wrote articles in the New York Times, the Post, and magazines and newspapers from coast to coat, pleading their case. I also hounded commissioner Bowie Kuhn and everyone in authority at the Hall of Fame. I made pretty much of a nuisance of myself. At first, Cooperstown planned to put up one plaque with the names of nine black all stars, representing all black players of the past. This was hooted down as tokenism.Their next plan was to give the players individual plaques but in a separate room seg-regated from the other Hall of Famers. After howls of “back of the bus,” this too was discarded. At last the Hall named a committee headed by Monte Irvin and Roy Campanella, two ex-Negro Leaguers who later starred in the white majors and thus had name recog-nition among white fans. At least they were the nominal heads. Writer Joe Reichler, a member of Kuhn’s staff, told me that he was the actual chairman, sort of an overseer to make sure the blacks on the plantation didn’t get out of line. In 1971 the committee chose Paige as its first nominee. I drove to Cooperstown for the big day with Buck Leonard, who said the event was as unbelievable as man walking on the moon. “We knew there was a Hall of Fame,” he said, “but we never thought it was our Hall of Fame.” Paige told a news conference: “There were many Satchels, there were many Josh-es.” When Reichler told him to “sit down,” Satch got so mad he said he’d never go back to Cooperstown again. And he didn’t. A year later, Buck himself was inducted, along with Josh. The fourth choice was a shocker – Monte Irvin. I was having a beer with the old second baseman, Dick Seay, the day after the news was announced, and Dick was pretty unhappy that Irvin had jumped in line ahead of Rube Foster, Oscar Charleston, Pop Lloyd, Joe Rogan, Turkey Stearnes, Smoky Joe Williams etc. Sure, Monte was a good player, Dick said, but not that good.

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Soon after, I published a piece on Cool Papa Bell in American Heritage. St Louis writer Bob Broeg re-wrote it under his own by-line, and, as dean of the Hall’s veterans’ committee, engineered Bell’s election the following summer. Number-six was William “Judy” Johnson, who, like Irvin, sat on the committee. I suspect that my story on Bell had interrupted the time-table, and that Judy had expected to be named right after Irvin. Although no one knew it yet, because statistics were still in their infant stage, we later learned that Judy’s reputation exceeded his empiric creden-tials. He was a .289 hitter compared to Jud Wilson (.349). Irvin and Johnson were only being human. Maybe I’d have yielded to temptation myself in the same situation. Many of us had criticized whites on the Hall’s former sepa-rate vets’ committee for overlooking black super-stars in order to elect their own white friends. Now here were blacks doing the same thing, though Irvin later strongly denied it. Finally, the committee picked two super stars, Charleston and Lloyd. The ninth slot went to Cuba’s versatile Martin Dihigo. The committee had elected nine men, an all-star team, or exactly what the original proposal had been. (Irvin, a shortstop was shifted to the outfield to open a slot for Lloyd.) Joe Williams or Rogan might have been named, but there were no more pitcher’s slots. And that was the end. Irvin and Campy abruptly announced that there were no more eligible veterans left, and their committee was therefore closing its doors! Irvin said later he had received “hints” that it was time to stop. Where the hints came from, he didn’t say. But his pay checks were signed by Kuhn. Kuhn later said the reason the committee folded its tent was “fatigue,” though it wasn’t clear what the mem-bers had been doing that had so fatigued them. Cooperstown argued that there were no statistics to confirm how good the Negro Leaguers were, ignoring the stats in the Macmillan. Reichler challenged me to name other eligible blacks. I reeled off some names: “. . . and Effa Manley and . . . ” Joe’s normally florid face suddenly grew even redder. “A woman!” he cried, and I thought I was going to have to call 911 and the cardiac arrest squad. I wrote to Ira Glasser, national head of the ACLU, and asked him to take an inter-est. On an appointed day, he, two other ACLU lawyers, and I arrived at Kuhn’s office. But instead of Kuhn, we met with an attorney on his staff. Glasser gave him the pitch: Cooperstown was violating the civil rights Act of 1964. The lawyer heard us out, then said he would have to “consult” and left the room. Some 20 minutes later, he returned with a reply: Since the Hall of Fame was a “private” organization, he said,, it did not come under the Interstate Commerce clause of the Constitution! This is preposterous. Fans from every state flock to Cooperstown, spending their money there, and baseball reaches every state in the nation via TV and at-tendance at 30 big league parks. And of course, as Kuhn, who was a lawyer himself, and the ACLU well knew, the Constitution is the supreme law for everyone in this country, including you and me. Nevertheless, Glasser and his two attorneys silently closed their attache cases and left. The bluff had worked. I never heard from Glasser again. I wrote to him but got no reply. My next move - I was really making a pest of myself - was to write to the Coo-perstown board of directors and ask them to let Webster McDonald, a kindly and soft-spoken former pitcher of the Chicago American Giants, speak to them at their meeting during Induction weekend. While Mac and I waited outside the room, no invitation was ever issued. When the meeting broke up, I tried to introduce him to the departing mem-bers. They brushed past in tight-lipped silence. (Kuhn and I would later make peace, and we had some pleasant conversations about a man we both admired, Ted Williams.) However, success at last! The Hall announced that the election of Negro Leaguers would resume, and the job was given to the white veterans committee, which had for years resisted pleas to name Negro Leaguers. It would be expanded to include two black members, Irvin and Campanella, who had already announced that there were no further

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black veterans eligible. Nevertheless Rube Foster, the greatest figure in the history of the Negro Leagues, finally got in. He was followed by Irvin’s old teammate, Ray Dandridge. Ray was an excellent player, but again not in a class with Stearnes, Rogan, Bill Foster, Biz Mackey, Mule Suttles, Willie Wells, Joe Williams, Dick Lundy etc. It could be argued that Dandridge was a living player, but so were Stearnes, Wells, and Foster. Mackey, perhaps the game’s greatest all-round catcher, black or white, was Irvin’s manager and Campy’s mentor. “He taught me everything I knew,” Roy said. “He was like a father to me.” Yet Roy never said a word to get Biz into Cooperstown. The veterans’ committee did, however, name Happy Chandler, the commissioner who had opened the doors to Jackie Robinson as soon as Kenesaw Mountain Landis died. Chandler was named soon after my piece about him appeared in the Times, though Broeg insisted that he had never read the article. Hmmm. Maybe. Anyway, Happy al-ways thought the Times piece had done it. He even made me a Kentucky Colonel. Tiger second baseman Charlie Gehringer, the dean of the committee, had played against Wells, Bell, Bill Foster, and Suttles in a memorable 1929 barnstorming series.

Seven future Hall of Famers were on the field, including Geh-ringer, Heinie Manush, and Harry Heilmann. Wells batted .409, hit three triples, and stole home twice. Sut-tles batted .330 with three triples and a home run. Foster gave three runs in 18 innings and had a no-hitter going for eight innings. Gehringer, who batted .339 in the American League that season, hit .190 in the series, which the blacks won three games to two.Charlie remembered Suttles and Foster but not Wells. Would any of the three be elected by his committee? I asked. Charlie said he didn’t think so. Under him the second vets’ committee was a failure as far as naming black veterans. It could name two men a year, or a total of 34 in 17 years. It named only two blacks. Twice it elected no one, and once it elected only one, a white man. It would rather give up the slots than name a black. So a third idea was tried. The vets’ committee was told to name one Negro Leaguer a year, plus one white. The first

black it named was Leon Day, another nominee whose numbers, though good, did not compare with the giants still waiting their turn. However, like Dandridge, Day also was a former teammate of Irvin. Monte may have been loyal to his teammates, but apparently he disliked his former managers. He had played under five of the best black stars of all-time - Lundy, Mackey, Suttles, Wells, and William Bell. Yet he never lifted a finger to help any of them reach the Hall. After Campanella died and Irvin retired, Buck O’Neil was put on the committee. A perfect choice. Since the white members didn’t know anything about the black candi-dates, and they had to name someone, they gladly followed whatever advice Buck gave them. Monte and Campy had focused mostly on men they knew, which excluded many great oldsters before their time. O’Neill corrected that by recommending Joe Williams.Irvin and Campanella had also been easterners, and all their nominees had played with eastern teams. O’Neill, of the Kansas City Monarchs, was a westerner, and he began naming some of the many excellent westerners so far ignored - Bill Foster, Wells, Rogan, and Stearnes. As the end of this committee’s mandate neared with no sign that it would be ex-tended, Buck did what Monte had done and named his former teammate, Hilton Smith. Hilton had very good credentials, but not as good as Suttles, Lundy, and Ray Brown, who were still being black-balled. However, a new generation had replaced the old. Dale Petroskey was president of the Hall, Jane Clark the new chairman of the board, and Bud Selig commissioner. The

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old mind-sets were gone. The new group announced a $250,000 grant to do the most comprehensive statistical study ever. that would be followed by an election en masse based on the stats uncovered by the study. Of course I bid on the grant. By building on my 30-year Macmillan project, which had cost me $20,000 of my own money, I thought we could bring it in on deadline. But my long record of stepping on toes - “stomping” is a better word - disqualified me, as I should have known it would. The grant went to Clark and Larry Lester, who, though good researchers and sympathetic to my crusade, had made no enemies. It turned out to be a blessing. I was able to complete my history of the Air Force Red Tails and sold it to George Lucas, who turned it into a major motion picture. They had 18 months to cover the history of the black leagues. They decided to start from scratch, without regard to what Dick and I had done. However, they cut corners by starting from 1920, whereas I had started from 1888. They asked for and received a 12-month extension. When the clock ran out, they had counted about half of what I had published in the Macmillan Encyclopedia of 1991 and The Complete Book of the Negro Leagues of 2001. Both those have since been augmented by further research, which will appear in the Superstars section of my upcoming website. A comparison of the studies shows for example:

Josh Gibson Satchel Paige HR WMacmillan 146 124Complete Book 224 142Hall of Fame 107 100Super Stars 249 159(Note: Negro League seasons were much shorter than white major league seasons.)

However, former Commissioner Fay Vincent pronounced it the most thorough study ever done. I wrote to him, pointing to the numbers in the Macmillan and The Com-plete Book and asked him to issue a clarifying statement. He never answered. The Hall of Fame numbers were often referred to as the “official” statistics; how-ever, HOF librarian Jim Gates says Cooperstown does not recognize any stats as official.There are undoubtedly human errors in both studies, since both were done by human be-ings. I probably have twice as many since I have twice as much data. I welcome all help in pointing them out and assume Dick and Larry feel the same. When I began, myths abounded. The stubborn white myth that had hung on for a century was that blacks were not allowed in the Negro Leagues because they weren’t good enough. The black myths were almost equally stubborn - that blacks were Bunyo-nesque mythical figures who performed prodigious feats. For 30 years I’ve labored to clear away both myths and try to reveal the truths that remain. One of the biggest challenges has been Satchel Paige. His biographer, Larry Tye, says that any tale about this Gargantua might be true, including such preposturous feats as pitching 2,000 games, driving ten nails into a board with ten fastballs, or knocking a cigarette out of a man’s mouth. Tye vacumed everything he found and emptied it all into his book without giving the reader any help in deciding what may be true and what myth.If all of it were true, how could Satch lose a single game, or even give up a single hit? His teammate and sometimes rival, Ted Page (no relation) shrugged, “There were pitchers who could beat him and hitters who could hit him.” (Ted was one of them.) In fact, Satch was not even the best pitcher in Negro League history:

W LSatchel Paige 159 92Bill Foster 157 75Bullet Joe Rogan 155 65Ray Brown 153 53William Bell 145 57

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The second step of the Cooperstown plan was to use the data it had commissioned to evaluate and elect worthy Negro Leaguers still outside the Hall. The Hall decided to include players before 1920 in the vote, though it had to rely on my data or reputation.A panel of ten electors was chosen. They were all conscientious people, but I question the qualifications of some and the absence of others. One elector had barely completed his under-graduate degree. Others had never done any significant original Negro League research. Still others had narrow parochial or regional expertise. Left off were such titans of blackball research as Jim Riley, Phil Dixon, Bill Mc-Neil, Lloyd Johnson, Jorge Figueredo, Fredrico Brillhart etc. O’Neil and Double Duty Radcliffe, two invaluable living history resources, should also have been included. I understood my own exclusion, but it didn’t matter as long as the results were good. The result was a cause for both joy and disappointment. Several excellent men were chosen, including Suttles, Mackey, Torriente, Jud Wil-son, Ray Brown, Willard Brown, and owners JL Wilkinson and Cum Posey. However, I can image the horse-trading that must have gone on. Ivory tower schol-ars can be just as guilty of human bias as writers, executives, players, or fans. A few questionable names made the cut. Pete Hill (.303) did not have the numbers to back up his reputation. His career ended although his stats were not compiled. Thus the voters had to go on my Big Mac totals or nothing. Effa Manley, the white co-owner of the Newark Eagles, was obviously chosen for her photogenic publicity value, but her husband. Abe, who actually ran the club, was ignored. Another owner who was elected, Alejandro Pompez, was a racketeer and fugitive from the law; he was obviously a concession to the Latin member of the committee. (However the group wisely rejected Minnie Minoso, who spent only two years in the black leagues.) Their slots could have been better filled by some of those left out – Lundy, Beck-with, Alejandro Oms, and Ed Bolden, founder of the Eastern League. Because of its small size, each voter had an influence far out of proportion to ear-lier, larger panels. Kansas City accounted for two of the ten. Thus the Monarchs’ Willard Brown was in, but his clone, John Beckwith, who played mostly in the East, was out. A cry arose of a cabal to blackball O’Neil, which, true or not, illustrated the po-tential for mischief. (I agree that he didn’t qualify as a player. The eventual outcome, a statue, was an excellent solution.) It is to be hoped that the door will be opened again, so all those still deserving will be admitted. Meantime readers may compare the records and decide which men still out in the cold deserve to be admitted. The fans will also meet 160 of the “many Joshes and many Satchels” that Paige was talking about. I hope you’ll enjoy getting to know them as much as I have.

I have loved my work … I have been uplifted by the thought that what-ever I have done will live long … and what I have done ill or never fin-ished can now be handed over to others for endless days to be finished, perhaps better than I have done.

-W.E.B Dubois

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MUSIAL, GRIFFEY AND GIBSON

By the end of the 1937-38 basketball season, colleges were sniffing around Donora, inquiring about the sharp-shooting forward from the local high school team. The kid was all knees and elbows with a long neck and a head that seemed far too heavy for his two-by-four torso, but he knew his way up and down the hardwood, scoring at will for the powerhouse Dragons. The kid averaged 11.3 points per game during the regular season and was known to score with either hand, both notable traits dur-ing an era when entire teams scored only 25 points during ballgames, and most free throws were shot with an awkward, underhand mo-tion. Although they carried only six players when most other schools in the district traveled with eight or ten or twelve boys, Donora didn’t need the extra man power. They ran roughshod over their district’s competition, going unde-feated in 12 conference games, making it all the way to the quarter-finals in the state’s regional tournament, where they lost a heart-breaker in overtime. What the college coaches didn’t realize was Stan Musial’s grades were mediocre at best and that the previous summer he’d signed a mi-nor league baseball contract with the St. Louis Cardinals organization, kept quiet to maintain his high school eligibility. 1938 was his break-out year as a prep high school ballplayer. In mid-April, playing at Tin Plate Field in Mon-essen, Pennsylvania, the 17-year-old southpaw mystified the host club, shutting them down on 3 hits, while striking out 17 batters. In addition to his leading role on the mound, Musial compiled the highest batting average in the league, .455, and walloped a legendary home run in Monongahela, which was said to have traveled 388 feet in the air be-fore rolling to a fence 452 feet from home plate. Musial’s teammates included his younger brother Ed, who’d play briefly in the minor leagues, and a young black kid named Buddy Griffey. Al-though he regularly batted second or third in the line-up, Griffey was known

more for his exploits on the gridiron and upon graduation from Donora, he accepted a football scholarship to Kentucky State College. Against his father’s wishes, Stan left home after his junior year to play professionally for the Williamson, West Virginia, Colts in the Class D Mountain State League. At 17, he was the youngest player in a league where the average age was 22 or 23. All things considered, Musial did okay in his rookie season, finishing 6-6 with a 4.66 earned run average. At the plate, he batted .258 with one home run. While Stan was playing baseball in West Virginia, the Homestead Grays traveled to Monessen to take on their blackball rival, the Memphis Red Sox, in a neutral site double-header at Tin Plate Field. Less than three months earlier, Musial had cemented his legend as a prep star on this very same diamond, when he struck out 17 locals in a shutout victory. During the first game of the twin bill, Josh Gibson, burly catcher of the Grays, caught hold of a Porter Moss fastball, depositing it over the furthest reaches of the center field fence, clearing both a large tree and a ga-rage, eventually landing in a flower bed at the office yard of the Page Steel Company. The fence itself was said to stand roughly 500 feet from home plate and had never been cleared by a batted ball. The next day, Mayor James Gold authorized a measurement of the blow, which came in at a staggering 538 feet. This would become one of the two or three most famous Josh Gibson home runs ever. After a disappointing freshman year in college, Musial’s teammate Buddy Griffey returned to Donora, ac-cepting a job at a local factory. He got married and had a couple children. His son Ken would also star in football at the local high school, but pursued baseball instead, eventually forging a solid 19 year career in the big leagues. And his grandson, Ken Jr., became one of the game’s all-time greats, amassing 630 home runs during his career. The elder Griffey eventually lost his job and moved to Cleveland to find work, his wife and kids staying behind. The marriage went from strained to broken, ending up in divorce. Sadly, Buddy was never really part of his son (or grandson’s) life. After his first minor league season, Stan Musial returned to Donora High to resume his schooling. Be-cause he’d been paid to play ball professionally, he was determined to be ineligible for prep sports his senior year. Instead, Stan worked at a grocery store, played semi-pro basketball during the winter, then trained with a local semi-pro baseball team in the early spring, before returning to West Virginia.

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OSCAR CHARLESTONPittsburgh Crawfords

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PART 6 OF A 26 PART SERIES

PITTSBURGH CRAWFORDS

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OSCAR CHARLESTONPITTSBURGH CRAWFORDS