by John Holway
The rush to raid the black leagues accelerated: their old fans deserted them, and their newspapers ignored them. One by one the black clubs folded.
In October 1948 Satchel Paige got together one more club of youngsters to barnstorm against his world champion Cleveland Indian mates, Bob Lemon and Gene Bearden, plus Murray Dickson, Al Zarilla, Roy Partee, and others. To bolster the youngsters’ morale, he added forty-five-year-old Cool Papa Bell to the squad to play a few innings and lend his experience. In the final game, with Dickson on the mound, Bell walked and Paige laid down a neat sacrifice that pulled the third baseman off the bag, a classic example of the hit-and-run bunt that Rube Foster had perfected almost half a century earlier. Bell was almost to second when ball hit bat and almost on third when the third baseman picked the ball up. When the startled catcher, Partee, ran down the line to cover third, Bell brushed right past him and raced across the wide-open plate. He had scored from first on a bunt!
Rube Foster’s ghost must have looked down and smiled. It was to be the last play in the history of the black ball days. A chapter of Americana had closed—forever.
THE CHAMPIONS
Gradually, scholars are filling in the blanks of black baseball history. Contrary to belief, quite a few statistics are already available from black newspapers of the day, and the Society of American Baseball Research is steadily at work reconstructing those that are not available now.
Before 1920, when no leagues were operating, championships were informal and based on challenges, or often on disputed claims. Sol White’s history of black baseball, published in 1906, is the source for much of the early history. Black newspapers fill in many of the later details. No eastern league existed from 1928 through 1932, but in 1930 the Grays defeated the Lincolns in a challenge series. Of course white papers ran little or nothing on the Negro leagues. Maddeningly, the black press was inconsistent in its coverage, which ranged from thorough to exasperating. Especially during the Depression, when presumably budgets were cut, black coverage of black baseball was too often amateurish.
I am indebted to the late John Coates for uncovering the batting statistics of 1921, and to Paul Doherty, who pored through hundreds of box scores to help reconstruct the 1926 statistics. (More often than not, box scores did not contain at-bats, doubles, triples, home runs or pitching statistics. At-bats thus had to be estimated.) Ric Roberts has supplied his own personal statistics on Josh Gibson, whom he covered for many years when Josh played with the Pittsburgh-based Grays. Although other players’ averages for some of those years are not yet known, Gibson’s are so astronomical that it is presumed no one else could have topped him.
The statistics are based on league games only. The majority of black games were nonleague against both black and white opponents, up to 180 total games a year.
NEGRO CHAMPIONS
Year West East
1887 NY Gorhams (Cuban Giants)
1888 Cuban Giants
1889 NY Gorhams (Cuban Giants)
1890
1891 Big Gorhams
1894 Chicago Unions Cuban Giants
1897 Cuban X-Giants (Gorhams)
1898
1899 Columbia Giants (Union Giants) Cuban X-Giants
1900 Union Giants/Columbia Giants Cuban X-Giants/Genuine Cuban Giants
1901
1902 Cuban X-Giants/Genuine Cuban Giants
1903 Algona (Iowa) Brownies (Union Giants) Cuban X-Giants/Philadelphia Giants
1904 Cuban X-Giants (Philadelphia Giants)
1905 Philadelphia Giants
1906 Philadelphia Giants
1907 Philadelphia Giants
1908
1909 St. Paul Gophers (Leland Giants)
1910
1911 Chicago Leland Giants
1912
1913 American Giants NY Lincoln Giants
1914 American Giants Brooklyn Royal Giants
1915 American Giants NY Lincoln Giants
1916 Indianapolis ABC, American Giants Brooklyn Royal Giants
1917 American Giants Lincoln Stars
1918
1919
1920 American Giants Bacharach Giants
East-West winner, if any, is in italics.
Playoff loser is in parentheses.
A slash indicates a disputed championship.
NEGRO LEAGUE PENNANT & WINNERS
Year West East
1921 Chicago Bacharachs, Philadelphia Hilldale
1922 Chicago
1923 Kansas City Hilldale
1924 Kansas City Hilldale
1925 Kansas City (St. Louis) Hilldale
1926 Chicago (Kansas City) Bacharachs
1927 Chicago (Birmingham) Bacharachs
1928 St. Louis (Chicago) —
1929 Kansas City Baltimore
1930 St. Louis (Detroit) Homestead Grays (Lincoln Giants)
1931 St. Louis —
1932 Chicago (Nashville) —
19331 Chicago (Pittsburgh)
19341 Philadelphia (Chicago)
19351 Pittsburgh (Cubans)
19361 Pittsburgh/Washington
1937 Kansas City (Chicago) Homestead Grays
1938 Memphis/ Atlanta2 Homestead Grays
1939 Kansas City (St. Louis) Baltimore (Grays)3
1940 Kansas City Homestead Grays
1941 Kansas City Homestead Grays (Cubans)
1942 Kansas City Homestead Grays
1943 Birmingham (Chicago) Homestead Grays
1944 Birmingham Homestead Grays
1945 Cleveland Homestead Grays
1946 Kansas City Newark
1947 Cleveland Cubans (Newark)
1948 Birmingham (Kansas City) Homestead Grays (Baltimore)
1949 Chicago (Kansas City) Baltimore
1950 Kansas City Indianapolis
World Series winner, if any, in italics.
Loser of Play-off, if any, is in parentheses.
CUBAN BATTING CHAMPIONS
Chapter 2
BILL DRAKE
Big Bill Drake, otherwise known as “Plunk,” had a good curve ball and good control, the old-timers say, “but when he put that uniform on, he was mean.”
“He liked to throw at people,” agrees George Sweatt, his teammate on the early Kansas City Monarchs. “He’d throw three balls—one at your foot, one at your head, one behind you. Then he’d pitch. You didn’t know what he was going to do, he was so crazy.”
Drake himself laughingly admits that his reputation for throwing at hitters was well-deserved. “I guess I was just too chesty,” he says, grinning. “I was a little like Jackie Robinson.”
Drake had a right to be chesty. In 1921 he pitched against the St. Louis Cardinals and came within an ace of beating them, losing 5–4 on an error in the eleventh inning. The next year, against the Kansas City Blues of the American Association, he won easily, 6–2, and smashed a home run in his own cause. In the regular season that year Bill won 20 and lost 10, one of only six men to win 20 games in the short Negro League season.
“Big Plunk,” smiles Sweatt, shaking his head. “That ol’ Plunk was something. He and Lemuel Hawkins were the craziest guys. When we’d go to a different town, they’d just walk through the halls all night, fooling around. That’s all they did!
“Big Bill liked to laugh. He’d laugh at anything. He was comical. He’d be sitting on the bench, you’d tell a story and he’d just fall out laughing. He’d stop the ball games lots of times he was laughing so loud.
“One time we were playing a World Series game in Philadelphia, and stopped by Baltimore to play an exhibition game. Big Bill wasn’t pitching that day, he was sitting on the bench. Now he and Hawkins were good buddies. Hawkins went to steal second, and when he went to slide, the catcher threw the ball and hit him right side of the head. It bounced about fifteen feet in the air, and Big Bill was sitting on the bench, and he laughed: ‘Ha ha ha!’ Hawkins started toward the bench after him and Big Bill cut out. I laughed. I never will forget that! They were good buddies,
but Hawkins was going to get him.
“And now somebody told me he’s a professional gambler. Well, I knew he wasn’t going to go to work!”
Cool Papa Bell introduced me to Bill Drake in 1969. He was still in bed after a night of cards, propped up on pillows. He flashed a constant grin as he regaled us with tales of how it was to be a black player in 1914 and after.
Bill Drake Speaks . . .4
I’ll tell you something—I don’t imagine you’ve been told this —but you know Satchel Paige had what he called a “hesitation pitch.” Do you know who taught Satchel to throw the hesitation pitch? You’re talking to him, man, you’re talking to him.
I met Satchel the first year he came out, 1926. He was with Chattanooga and I was with Memphis He had just come out of reformatory school, about seventeen or eighteen years old. I used to call it a “delayed” pitch—stride and then throw. Satchel called it a “hesitation” pitch. Whether Satchel copied it from me or some other fellow, I don’t know. I wouldn’t say definitely that he learned it from me, but if he didn’t, he learned it from someone who learned it from me. I don’t remember anyone who was doing it before me, and I started pitching in 1914. There aren’t many ballplayers living today that are much older than I am that played back there fifty-odd years ago.
I kind of had a bad name for knocking men down. If you got a toehold on me, down you went. That was my plate up there, don’t crowd me. One time we played in Fort Worth. Old Bib Haines, a first baseman there, he’d say, “Go on, you old ballplayers on the Kansas City Monarchs.” I turned his cap bill around with a pitch. He nearly died! Next time he came up, you could drive a team of horses between him and home plate.
In 1922 when the Kansas City Monarchs went down to Montgomery, Alabama, to train, they had a one-armed pinch hitter, Lefty Maddox. Made me so damn mad I blew the bat out of his hand.
I was managing a ball club in Tulsa once, and they had a kid down there, a doggone good pitcher, and I pitched against him. The ladies all brought their pillows to watch this big man from Kansas City. So this boy was pitching and he got a little too close to the plate, and I hit him. Hell, at nine o’clock that night he didn’t know whether he was in Tulsa or where he was. He was walking around looking up like that. I didn’t try to hit the boy. Of course, after I hit him, I won my ball game, but I never just deliberately tried to hit him. I’d get a man loose, now. But I didn’t try to just hurt somebody.
But you’ve got to be careful who you hit. I found that out real early. I was pitching down in Oklahoma one day. There was this big old boy, going up to the Cubs. He hit a home run off me I never will forget. When he sat down on the bench, it looked to me like he said, “Well, I sure hit that one off that shine.” Well, the next time he came up to bat, I stuck my thumb up like this, you know, for a curve ball. Next pitch, same thing: stuck my thumb up and threw him a curve. The third time I stuck my thumb up again, but I threw him a fast ball instead. Didn’t break, see? Hit him right in the side. But that was the end of that. I didn’t go back there again. The crowd didn’t like that at all. So you got to watch out who you hit.
Bill Drake, Kansas City Monarchs, back row center
I remember one year I was with Kansas City, and Bob Meusel and Babe Ruth were putting on an exhibition of long-distance hitting and throwing. It rained all that morning and I’ll bet there were two inches of mud on the infield, but we played anyway. Ruth was up four times and he hit four down through the infield that knocked up dust, let me tell you. Knocked up dust! They hit just that hard. But I didn’t do what I would have liked to do. I used to like to kind of brush them back a little bit. But you couldn’t brush one of those superstars like that. It would have been suicide. Cocked up like that—he never would have cocked up on me, I’d have laid one in there. But how could you afford to hit a ballplayer like Ruth? You don’t hit a ballplayer like that.
Ruth was a regular fellow though. He used to chew tobacco. I’d say, “Ruth, give me a chew.” He’d pull out a plug, give me a bite, he’d take a bite, put it back in his pocket.
And I used to cut the balls, I used to sail them. Here’s one of our old balls. See how that’s rough there? I’d put the sandpaper down on my belt, and when you hitch your pants up like this, you cut it, see. And when you throw it, you can make it break four ways: up or down, in or out. You hold the cut side up and throw it sidearm, she goes down. You have to throw it overhand for it to go in and out.
We were out on the Coast one year playing the White Kings—Ping Bodie, Buzz Arlett and some other big leaguers. They had a boy out there, Bill Pertica, a sandpaper man who used to pitch for the Cardinals. Well, our team got to squawking, and our pitcher, Rube Currie, said to Lonnie Goodwin, our manager: “Why don’t you put in old Drake? He can throw a cut ball.” So I went on in, and that stopped all that. I was sailing it right in on ’em. They didn’t want no more of that cutting the ball. They told Pertica, “Forget about it, get off it.” It was okay as long as Pertica was throwing it, but when I started throwing it, that was a different story.
There’s no ball club I played against twice that I didn’t beat at least one game, and that includes the big leagues. I threw a couple of no-hitters in my time. I threw one against an awful strong ball club in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and another against a ball club in North Dakota. That’s where I used to play baseball, with a white ball club. More money. See, back in those days the merchants of the town would take up about $7–8,000 and hire a battery, a pitcher and a catcher. All the rest would be local talent.
I started out playing in 1900 and 14. I’ll tell you how I got started in baseball. I was born in 1895 in Sedalia, Missouri. Used to be an old feller there in my home town would get us kids up on the prairie—wasn’t nothing but prairie back then—used to throw fly balls up to us. And then we had a preacher there who organized a baseball team. Well, I couldn’t make the team—I could not make that team, I wasn’t good enough to be on that team. Yet of all those boys, only one ever left there and made good, and that was myself.
Here’s a picture of the old Tennessee Rats. That’s the first team I played with, 1914, in a little town, Holden, Missouri. We had a baseball team and a minstrel show. We played a game in the afternoon and put on a minstrel show in the evening, and traveled around. My salary was $12.50 a week. I played a whole season and my salary was $144.
The next year I hit Brinswade, North Dakota. They asked me how would I like to stay there and play ball. I had one suit of clothes and it was in the manager’s trunk—Old Man Brown, the fellow who owned the ball club. I didn’t have a trunk, but we had a wardrobe trunk for the team. I said, “Where we going tomorrow?”
He said, “Cheyenne, North Dakota.”
“Give me my suit,” I said. “Shucks, I’m going to get me one of those Indian girls.” That’s the only way I had of getting my suit back. After I got my suit I said, “Well, I ain’t going no further.”
He got mad. “It’s a good thing you didn’t tell me, or I never would have given you that suit.”
So I stayed in Brinswade. We used to ride around going to different towns. We never had any trouble. On the road my roommate was a white boy. And the owner used to run interference for me. If there was any trouble, he would block it. And all the kids used to follow us around. You couldn’t hardly get in the park with all those kids hanging around. One would carry your glove, one would carry your shoes, one had your uniform roll. It used to take me ten minutes just to get all my paraphernalia together for the game. And the manager had one of those long sheep-lined black coats. He used to put that on me, say, “I don’t want you to catch cold.” Shoot, I lived like a king in that town—lived like a king. Brinswade, North Dakota.
And you talking about lights. They say the Kansas City Monarchs were the first team with lights, but they weren’t. The Nebraska Indians were first, in 1913. Guy Greene had the Indians out of Lincoln, Nebraska. They were a regular Indian team and traveled and played in chautauquas and things like that. They used to p
ull the outfield in a little and put a white wall around the outfield. They’d hang gas lights with a flat round base around the outfield. They played with a larger ball than regular. I didn’t play against them, but I heard about them. At that time I was scared of Indians, I had never seen them except in a circus.
Then the All Nations team came through and I jumped to them and had a ball. At that time the headquarters was out of Des Moines, Iowa, the Hopkins Brothers sporting goods store. J. L. Wilkinson, a white man, and another man name of J. E. Gall had the club. We had four or five different nationalities and we had a private car that we traveled on. Here’s a picture: John Donaldson, Pancho Snider, this boy was from Hawaii, this is a Jap over here, this is Sam Coley. Coley caught for All Nations. He used to throw a curve ball to second base. His fingers were all gnarled, and when he threw the ball it would just curve like that. José Mendez was shortstop. Here’s me: “Plunk” Drake. That’s what I was known as. I don’t know where I got that name. Like this boy named Sue, I guess, I don’t know why they called me that. This girl, “Carrie Nation,” was with the All Nations then too, played second base. Oh no, she couldn’t play much, she was just a novelty, a drawing card.
Now that was the ball club! That’s all the men we had on it: ten men—two pitchers. You had to pitch; you had to win in those days. I was the right-hander. John Donaldson was the left-hander. I don’t guess you’ve heard of him.
All Nations used to go out to North Dakota and around, and I’ve seen Wilkinson get 90 percent of the gate receipts. I used to make him so doggone mad. He’d say, “They tell me that fellow is a pretty good hitter.”
I said, “If he’s any good, what’s he doing out here?”
He said, “You don’t know anything about it.”
I said, “I know that if he’s a good hitter he wouldn’t be out here. He’s a white boy. I’ve got to be out here, there’s nowhere else I can go. But if he’s that good, he’d be in the big leagues. What’s he doing out here?” I had to stay there. I couldn’t go anywhere but out there.