by John Holway
After the war I played ball in the AEF League—the American Expeditionary Forces—and I traveled all through the AEF. I was very fortunate, I had a lot of nice experiences.
Do you know where I was when I got my first letter from Rube Foster? I was in France. I had been C.I.’s third baseman. The papers were saying I was the greatest at third base. They knew I was—C.I. knew I was, Rube knew I was. I’m in my bunk in St. Luce, France, and they bring me a letter from Rube Foster, back in the United States, telling me he wanted me to play with him when I got back.
When I got out of the Army, times were rough. The Army gave me $60 and nothing else. That was standard. They sent me back to Indianapolis, where I had left from, and I had $60—not enough to even buy civilian clothes. So I went to C.I. and said, “Well, here I am back home. I want to go and see my mother and my girl friend. I’ve been away a long time from the folks down South, and I need $75.” Well, C.I. kind of hesitated a little bit. I guess C.I. had had a little difficulty with some of the ballplayers, letting them have a little money. They probably didn’t show up afterwards, didn’t appreciate it, so he said, “Naturally, when you put out money like that in the winter time, you just don’t know what will be the result....”
So the next morning I just took the train and came on to Chicago. I knew where Rube lived, and I went to see him, down on the 32nd block of Vernon Avenue. He was sitting at a big rolltop desk. He always had a rolltop desk. I said, “Well, I came to see you Jock”—all of the ballplayers called him Jock. He was such a fine guy. We talked a little and I said, “Well, the thing I came to tell you is I’m just out of the Army and I don’t have any money, and I want to go to see my mother and my sweetheart in New Orleans. I would like to borrow $75.” Same as I’d asked C.I. He just rolled up the top of that desk and reached in the drawer: “There it is.” He gave it to me just like that. He didn’t ask any questions, he didn’t say whether he wanted me to play with him or not. Smart enough to know that that’s it: I’ve got me a ballplayer. He didn’t even talk contracts or anything. That’s all, we talked about other things. Oh God, it really broke my heart to see an honest man. Well, you know a grateful heart. . . .
So I went on home. During the winter he wrote and said he would like for me to come to Chicago if I wanted to come, and offered me a contract. He offered me $150 a month. That was a lot of money then, a big salary. I said okay.
That’s the difference. Rube was just a great guy.
Through the years I got raises, and when I left I was getting $600 a month.
This is a picture of the American Giants in 1920. We had Jimmy Lyons, Cristobel Torrienti and Jelly Gardner in the outfield. They were all fast. We had George Dixon and Jim Brown catching. Brown was fast, could push and bunt, and hit too. He played first base and caught. I was on third, I’m fast. Bobby Williams shortstop, real fast. Bingo DeMoss second, he’s fast. Leroy Grant playing first base was the only slow man on the team. He usually hit way down by the pitcher. Tom Williams was pitching, plus Otis Starks, a left-hander, and Dave Brown, a great left-hander.
From 1920, when the league started, the first four years we had a powerful team, a powerful team. Because we had gotten together the speed, the daring, the men that could really hit, a good pitching staff, good catching. See, Rube was smart enough, a genius, to know how to pick men to fit into his plays, and he used to say all the time, “If you haven’t got intelligence enough to fit into this play, you can’t play here.” That’s all there was to it. It isn’t generally known, but Rube was so superior in his knowledge of baseball that from 1920 to 1923, the first four years of the league, we were so far out in front of the league by July, they had to break the season up into two halves so there would be interest in the league the second half. Rube was so superior in management that he got to the point that he just didn’t cover up his signals a all. He just got so that he would give them openly. And of course the other ball clubs were smart enough to watch and see what was going on.
We traveled always in Pullman cars, not these buses that people go in. Whenever we were in Pittsburgh, for example, and he wanted to be in Chicago for the next day, Rube would just call up the railroad and have them put on an extra sleeping car for us. We were well rested when we got there. In the morning we’d get up and have our breakfast in a private car right from the diner. See, we were in shape to play baseball the next day. When the guys were traveling in buses, that’s when I got out of baseball, when they started that stuff, riding all night. Rube was high class in every way. He really was. Now some of the players that we would meet would tell us about the hardships they had and so forth—and they did—but I never experienced that until after Robert Cole and those people got the American Giants, and that is when I quit. With Rube and C.I. everything was high class. I got my money every first and fifteenth of the month.
I became manager after Rube went to the hospital in 1926. Rube had broken up the team that spring and left only Gardner, Jim Brown and myself. Just the three of us who had been with the team from 1920. I was made captain in the spring, and when Rube became sick and went to the hospital it was about mid-season, just about the end of the first half of that season, and I was made manager. Well, I knew his system, having observed it and seen the results of all that he did. All the time I managed the American Giants I was never out of my seat on the bench, not a day, not a ball game. Every play started with me. And the ballplayers liked it. You have no trouble directing them if they know you are smarter than they are. Why? Because when that man is under direction, he doesn’t have to figure, “What should I do now?” All he has to do is execute. If you know what to tell him to do, and he gets a great deal of success out of it, every time he comes up he’s looking for the order. He’s looking for it. Every play started with me. That’s the way Rube did it, and that’s the way I did it.
I was very fortunate that Jelly and Jim Brown were left on the team. With those two men as a nucleus, I made them fit into the team. They were getting on the bases, and every time they got on the bases, the other ball club was in trouble. That’s why I say Gardner and Brown were very valuable to me. Very valuable.
We won the pennant in the West that year, and the Bacharach Giants won in the East. We were playing them in the World Series. Jelly Gardner was on first base, and I was at bat. I was a switch hitter, and I was hitting left-hand at this time. No one knew how I gave signals when I was at bat. Cummings was playing first for the Bacharachs, and he figured I was going to bunt with Jelly on first, a fast man, speed. So we put on the hit-and-run play, and when he charged in to get the bunt I hit a line drive by his ear! If it had been straight at him it would have knocked him out. Jelly scored all the way to the plate.
You see, the thing that makes a hitter so much more valuable when he plays a diversified game is that always the opposition is thrown off guard as to what you will do. They can’t stand back on the grass and wait for you to hit a hard liner on the ground that’s easy to handle. Professional ballplayers like that, you know, because, look, the ball is down there in a minute and all they have to do is field it and throw it over there. But if a man can hit the ball hard and do all of these other things too, they don’t know where to stand.
You know about Turkey Stearnes? Great outfielder, fast man, good hitter. When we played against him up in Detroit, he was a trick for us. Our pitchers—Willie Foster, Willie Powell, those fellows—used to strike Turkey Stearnes out like nothing. But some of the teams in the league didn’t know how to pitch to him, and naturally he did a lot of hitting. Well, he finally came to the American Giants to play with us. He was fast, I knew that. One day I said to Turkey, “Now that you’re here, we are going to diversify your play.” He’d been a slugger, hit a lot of home runs. But I said, “If a guy, at the wrong time, just happens to hit a fast ball to the infield, it’s a double play.” I said, “You have to fit into our plays.” So I knew that he was fast, and I would make him bunt quite a few times. I’d tell him exactly where I wanted him to lay it do
wn: “Let the pitcher field this one. I don’t want the third baseman, I want the pitcher to come over and get it.”
Well, this particular day, we had a man on first and a man on second, and we needed two runs to win the ball game, one to tie and two to win. Turkey comes to bat, and he loved the crowd. The crowd’s cheering—clap, clap, clap. This is Stearnes, the great slugger, you know. And I said, “Now, Turkey, I want you to lay this right down on the third base line. I want the third baseman to field it, not the pitcher, because then he can’t get the man out on third.” He said, “Okay, Cap.”
So Turkey comes to the plate, people cheering, you know. The man pitched him a perfect ball to bunt, right down by the knees. He acted like he was going to bunt, but he didn’t. He looked up at me, I gave him the signal again: “Same thing.” The man pitched him another good one to bunt, but he didn’t bunt. He looked up, figured, “He’s bound to tell me to hit now,” because he had confidence he could knock it out of the stadium.
He looked over at me and I said, “You come on down a peg, come on out.” Of course he looked worried, being taken out of the ball game. That broke his pride. He came over and sat down right by my side and I said to Powell, the pitcher, “You go up there and lay this one down.” He did, the next man singled, and we scored a run.
I didn’t say a word to Turkey. After a while he said, “Cap, I really was going to lay that next one down.” I said, “I knew you were, Turk.” And I never had to tell him again. He developed into a really great diversified player after that. Turkey could bunt, and he could pull them down to first base—and fly—and then when his time to hit came, he could really plaster them.
During those times all ballplayers developed to a high point of professionalism. I look at some of the players that are supposed to be good ballplayers today, and they are hitting balls down at their toes sometimes, over their heads, way outside. In those days the balls had to be in there for those guys. They would have to be strikes. They were really professionals. None of that swinging like amateurs. As Rube said, “The easiest way in the world to get out is to strike out.” I doubt very seriously if I ever struck out in a ball game. A professional ballplayer ought to be able to hit the ball, whether it goes fair or not. You should make contact. You know, hit it someplace. And with men on the bases, Rube could depend on me to hit that ball and hit it hard somewhere, not to strike out. That pitch had to come in there. And I would hit it, because if you hit it, it may go safe. But if you just strike out, the catcher is going to get that. That’s professionalism, and that’s what those fellows were then.
In my case, I learned from Rube that the best thing to hit is the best ball. You know, not to hit at a bad ball. The only time I swung when it was the least bit off the plate was the third strike, so that I wouldn’t get called out on strikes. I never let myself be called out. But the pitcher had to pitch until I got two strikes. He had to come in there.
I used to slide headfirst quite often. I didn’t try to slide high. The easiest way to get safe is to slide as low as you can. But ballplayers get the idea that if you slide a little bit high once or twice, you are rough. Naturally I was trying to get safe all the time, but I wasn’t really trying to hurt anybody at all.
Years after I had gotten out of baseball, I was walking down 61st Street here one day. I passed the barbershop and the fellow saw me going by and said, “Hey, you’re Dave Malarcher, third baseman for the American Giants. Come in here.” He said, “You don’t know me, but I’m one of your fans. I was a real good friend of one of your pitchers, Tom Johnson. I used to see you out there, gentlemanly-looking little fellow.” Yes, that’s what he told me—“gentlemanly-looking little fellow”—“and I would say to Tom, ‘Tom, this little fellow, sometimes I feel sorry for him out there with all of those great big guys ripping and running and jumping. I feel sorry.’ So Tom said, ‘What! You feel sorry for him? They better get out of his way. Don’t you feel sorry for him any more!’ ”
I played third base eighteen or nineteen years, and I never paid too much attention to the other fellows sliding into me at third. I always tried to keep the runner in front of me as much as possible. If you keep him in front of you, you can see him easier. But I’ve been spiked several times. I broke my shoulder once to prevent a guy from getting to third on a bunted ball, but I put him out.
Two games I took part in are very significant. One was in Detroit in 1916, which I told you about. The other was when I was managing the American Giants in 1932. Leo Durocher came down with his major league all-stars and played us in Cincinnati. We beat them 2–0. That was Leo’s first acquaintance with Negro ballplayers, I’m sure. Jim Weaver, who used to pitch for the Cubs, pitched for Leo’s team that day.
Remember Steve O’Neill, the catcher? Well, he was manager of the Toledo team, and I think they finished on top one season, and Steve was being heralded as a truly great manager. It was the year before he went up to manage Brooklyn. We played his team in Toledo. And when we came out that day to talk to the umpire before the game, you know, to check the ground rules, Steve just walked around like it was a common thing to be up there playing against a Negro team. So the first game we beat them 3–0, I think. The next day we beat them 2–0. We beat them three days without a run—they didn’t get a run. After that Steve was friendly. But the papers didn’t say too much about it. They carried it, but not much.
I have had so many white people tell me that they saw me play, that I should be in the major leagues. And if I should be in there, what about Cristobel Torrienti, Oscar Charleston and those really outstanding stars? I say that the ballplayers I’m telling you about are of the caliber in baseball of Jack Johnson and Joe Louis and Rafer Johnson in the world of athletics. They are the tops. Now those fellows proved that they were tops in all these fields. And even in science, you have some men in science who have measured up, you know. So when you talk about great Negro baseball players, you’re talking about the tops.
When they admitted Roy Campanella to the Hall of Fame, he said he couldn’t even carry a glove with Josh Gibson. Well, he should know that Josh Gibson wasn’t the only catcher we had. He should have seen Bruce Petway! He was a great, a great ballplayer.
We could have had two ball clubs in the major leagues through the years that would have made it. Now, if we had picked a Negro team for the major leagues in those days, we wouldn’t have had weaklings, we would have had the stars, because we would have had all the Negro stars to pick from. Just like when you picked the major league teams, you picked the best from all of the race. If we’d picked a Negro major league team, we would have been picking the best from all our teams. For example, we would have had DeMoss at second, Pop Lloyd at short, Petway catching. We would have had Dave Brown as pitcher, Frank Wickware, Bullet Rogan. We wouldn’t have had a weak man on the team. All through the years we could have had a ball club that probably could have won the pennant in the major league. All Negroes. Do you see what I’m trying to say?
Well, let’s look at today. In the major leagues today there are many outstanding stars. They’re Negroes too, just like we were. I guarantee you, from my knowledge of baseball, I guarantee you, that if we had gotten in there in our times, in Rube’s time, we would have had some real stars in there. Because Rube knew that if we organized a league and tried to measure up to big-league baseball standards, we would get our chance. That was his aim, to organize. And we had to have high standards. All we were waiting for was an opportunity to get in, and it finally came.
Fortunately for us, it came not too late, because Negro baseball was starting to deteriorate. The new owners that came after Rube’s time did not know the value of having high-class athletes and treating them as such. They were riding them all night in those buses to break them down. It’s fortunate that the major leagues let us in when they did, because under Cole and those people, they drove all night, didn’t eat, didn’t sleep at all. The standards were being lowered. So we were very fortunate that integration didn’t come too late.
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Harry Heilmann, who played with Detroit, made up an all-star team every year. I doubt that I can remember any of them other than Harry, but I think I could get records on that. Finally Judge Landis stopped him from playing against the American Giants. He said he couldn’t afford to have them beaten by us, it was bad publicity.
Now I know this, that Donie Bush, who played shortstop for the Detroit Tigers, used to come home to Indianapolis every fall, and he was making all the stops between Detroit with the ABC’s. The box scores and Indianapolis Star down there would show the players who played on each team and the results. Those records are available. There are many sources. You will be able to see who the players were and make comparisons. So there are many ways of proving it, many ways.
Certainly the big leaguers played hard. They wanted to win, of course they did.
Propaganda is a terrible thing. The propaganda of segregation and bigotry is evil. It deceives people. I used to have Negroes occasionally tell me, “Do you think Negroes can play in the major leagues?” And do you know what I would say to them? “Do you think so and so here, who is a barber, can cut hair like a white man?” I would say, “Do you think Doctor so-and-so, who is teaching in a medical school, can teach a white professor?” Well, certainly. And I would say, “What’s baseball that I can’t play it like a white?” And I used to say occasionally that if they say that the Negro is nearest to the savage, I think he would play better than a white, because baseball is only running and jumping and swinging a stick. He would be better. But the whole point is that the propaganda of keeping the Negro out of the major leagues made even some of the Negroes think that we didn’t have the ability. It started them to thinking it too. But I said, “Just wait until we do get in there, and see what happens.” And they used to ask me, “When do you think we will get in?” And I said, “When we can prove to the white man that we can bring him something, that’s when we will get in there.”