by John Holway
We didn’t tire back then, and we didn’t have much relief pitchers. Here’s one thing I can’t understand: I can’t understand why these fellows in the major leagues take two and three men to pitch a ball game. That’s one of the things I don’t see. Because you didn’t get us out in our league that fast. When we started a ball game, we finished it.
Looking at these ball teams now that are in the majors, I’d say that you can take the Kansas City Monarchs as a whole unit and put them in the league—any one of the major leagues you wanted to, National or American. They were short on bench, because they didn’t have twenty-five good ballplayers, they had nineteen—but take that team and put it in the majors. Take the American Giants, put ’em in Chicago, right there in the majors, with a little something added to the pitching. Now I don’t know about Detroit, I don’t know whether Memphis could have stood there, I don’t know whether Indianapolis could have stood it. But Kansas City, Chicago and St. Louis. You could have taken those three ball teams without any alteration at all, and put each one of them in the white big league. Go right back out in the East and take the Homestead Grays, take the Philadelphia Stars and take the Newark Eagles—you could put them in either one of those major leagues you wanted to. And you know what? They’d have been playing each other in the World Series for years to come.
The majors just missed a lot of talent there, they could have been so much further ahead if they had just stepped back a little bit on the race question. If they had just a little more aggressiveness, instead of Jackie being the first one to go in there, they could have picked up Satchel when he was twenty—he could have won thirty ball games for them. I don’t care whose team he had pitched on, he’d have won thirty ball games. And they could have picked up Rogan, they could have possibly picked up me.
And I don’t think you’d have had anything out there to discourage them. The propaganda or the insults, I don’t think you could have discouraged these fellows, because we were practically brought up on that stuff. I mean you can’t insult the man who’s been insulted all the time. The things you’re going to say, he’s heard so much, he’s immune to that. You might come back and say something just the opposite and he’d say, “What’d you say?” I don’t know of anything they could do to make me madder, but treat me very nice! If they’d treat me very nice, that might cross me up. But I’d be expecting all that other stuff, just like Jackie did. It didn’t hurt him, he didn’t worry about it. He knew about it already. If I’d have gone in there to pitch, I’d have known that. It would have only given me an incentive to go in there and pitch, to be a better ballplayer.
No, no, we never had any problems barnstorming. You see, it really wasn’t as bad as people might have thought. It wasn’t so bad. I just thought if it was all laid in front of the major league owners as it should be put—I don’t think they ever stopped to think, to consider it. It was a long time before they realized that the Negro could play baseball—actual, top-notch baseball. It was a long time before they found out that he could actually think technically. They thought we could think just generally, but they didn’t think that we could think things out in detail. They didn’t think we could think and remember a set of signals. But, you see, we knew. We had to do it for our bread, and we had to do it very well. We had to learn the technique of it. And it was a long time before the major leagues found out that we knew that technique. When they found out that we could, they started taking us in their league. Then we came up very fast.
Now where did it come from? It came from the old ballplayers, just like I am that’s coaching here. The Negro knows how to bat, he knows the fundamentals of the game. Not only that, but he’s always hungry. You give him forty or fifty thousand dollars a year to play something that he likes to play—and he’s hungry—boy, you’ve got a game on your hands! He’s going to play baseball. I’m hungry, and I like the game, and you’re crazy enough to give me $50,000 to play something that I like? Ooh, I’m going to play this game!
If I could stay in the twenty-game winning bracket for ten years and not lose over four or five ball games in any one year, for $450 a month——which was top salary for three and a half months’ play —what on God’s green earth would I have done if they said, “All right, you’ve got $75,000 a year to do the same thing”? You never would have beat me out there! I mean, if I could pitch for $450 a month and win twenty ball games, I could cut that loss column down to probably one or two. Like I said, you wouldn’t have beat Satchel in the majors at all hardly!
This is my tenth year coaching baseball here at Alcorn College. I stay in pretty good shape, really. At this stage of the ball game, I’m just three pounds over what I was forty years go. I played at 205, and I’m 208 now. I’m six feet two. And I feel good. I just don’t have an ache or pain. I had yellow jaundice in 1926, and that’s it.
I like to fish, I like to hunt. I’m either going to get killed in a car accident, fall out of a boat in a river, hit a stump and get killed, or I’m going to get killed on a deer stand, somebody shoot me for the deer. Other than that, I might live a long time. Now, I don’t want to live too long. I’d like to go another ten years, but I wouldn’t like to go beyond another ten years. I don’t want the time to come when somebody has to lead me around. As long as I can go fishing and hunting, and own a car, I don’t mind living. But once it gets to the place that I’m going to have to occupy somebody else’s time to get me somewhere, I’m too independent to say that I’m going to appreciate that.
I’ve had a wonderful life. I don’t regret anything at all that I can remember, up to this very night. Not a thing, no regrets. I don’t regret being in that age, especially when you fellows come by and say, “Let me check with you on this,” because that’s just as much history as the history of the major leagues. It needs to be known. It just wasn’t time then for Negroes in the major leagues. Oh, I could have made it all right, but it wasn’t time. I feel that whatever happens, whatever it is, happens for the best. I think in terms of the affirmative and positive all the time. I never look at the negative, the bad things.
I’m not bitter that I didn’t make seventy-five or eighty thousand dollars. What would I have done with it anyway? I don’t know . . . I don’t know. I don’t know whether it would have done me any good or not. They say, “You should have waited twenty years before you were born, you would have been in good financial shape.” Yeah, in that respect, but what about other respects? I might have been born with one lame leg, couldn’t walk; I might have been born with a two-year-old mentality. I didn’t have to be born strong and healthy like I am; I could have been born deformed some way. But no, I came in a healthy kid, so I appreciate that. I take it as it comes.
I don’t think you’re going to find anyone who’s bitter.
Bill Foster
American Giants pitching staff. Foster is third from left, Webster McDonald far left.
Chapter 11
LARRY BROWN
When old-timers talk about the great defensive catchers of black baseball, four names predominate: Bruce Petway, Biz Mackey, Frank Duncan and a wavy-haired, light-skinned, chirpy-voiced little spark plug named Larry Brown.
Larry came out of Birmingham with pitcher Harry Salmon to join the Pittsburgh Keystones in 1921. In his first game against the great Rube Foster and the Chicago American Giants, Larry threw out so many of the Giants’ speedsters that Foster’s eyes popped. “Where’d you find this man at?” Foster demanded of Keystone manager Dizzy Dismukes. “One day,” Foster vowed, “I’ll have him catch for me.” In time, he did.
Larry caught on the two great Chicago teams of 1926 and 1927, guiding them to victory in two World Series against the Bacharach Giants of Atlantic City. After a detour to Memphis and New York, he was back in Chicago for four years, 1932–35. They may have been the best years of his career. The American Giants narrowly missed another world championship in 1934. And in each of the first three East-West games, 1933–35, Brown was voted the fans’ number-one choice for starting
catcher. In 1934 he defeated Duncan by a two-to-one margin; in ’35 he easily outdistanced Josh Gibson, who finished third.
Larry never pulled his mask off for a foul fly, and he never staggered under them as many catchers do; he turned, trotted back a few steps and waited confidently for it to come down. The secret was simple, he once told James “Joe” Greene, a youngster coming up with the Kansas City Monarchs. A pop foul makes a figure-eight in the air. Larry diagramed the reason with a pencil and paper. When the bat hits the bottom of the ball, it imparts a terrific backspin to the ball on the way up, but that same spin will carry the ball forward again on the downward flight. Many catchers overrun the ball, then stagger back as it curves back toward home plate. “You never knew that?” Greene smiles. “You’ll find a lot of big-league catchers catching today who don’t know that. That’s what’s wrong with the game today. Some big-league catchers don’t know that, they don’t go into it that deep. That’s what’s wrong with the game today. Back then we weren’t playing for money.”
Larry Brown seemingly had only one weakness: alcohol. Many’s the night his teammates had to carry him home on their shoulders from a night on the town. “But he could recuperate quick,” says Baltimore second baseman Sammy T. Hughes. “One year we were at the East-West game and they brought Larry in about two o’clock. He had lost all his paraphernalia. Next day he went down to the store and got a brand-new glove. Ordinarily with a new glove the pitches just pop out of it. But Larry only had one dropped ball. The night before they were bringing him in on their shoulders. Next day you couldn’t tell he’d ever had a drink.”
I met Larry Brown in Memphis on a humid summer evening in 1970. I had traced him to a local city league game at one of the parks, and when I arrived I asked the public address to page him. A few minutes later a shriveled little man of sixty-five with bristly white hair shuffled over to me, and I introduced myself to Larry Brown. We took a seat in the bleacher-type grandstands to watch ex-pitcher Verdell Mathis’s black team get beaten pretty decisively by a white group. (Mathis, a top left-hander in the 1940’s, had been Larry’s special protégé.) But we barely looked at the playing field. Brown came alive when I explained my mission, and in a cheerful, piping voice began extemporaneously telling me the story of his life.
The next day we met again at Mathis’s home to continue the monologue and look at the many scrapbooks Larry had brought. In them I found dozens of photos of a husky, broad-chested, beaming athlete who dominated every group picture he was in. It was hard to relate the pictures to the man before me, but the resemblance was there indeed. Yet, as the public address man had warned me the night before, Larry Brown was but a ghost of the man he once had been.
In April 1972 I read in the Sporting News that Larry Brown had died.
Larry Brown Speaks ...
Did you ever hear about me being the first Negro to have a chance to enter the majors? That’s right. I was catching in Havana in 1926, Ty Cobb was down there, and I threw him out five times in succession, and I wasn’t nothing but a kid. I was born in 1905, so how old was I in 1926? Twenty-one. 9
I could throw Cobb out because I was quicker. See, he’d get a jump, but I was quicker than the average guy that had been throwing at him. That’s why he stole all those bases in the states. I don’t know who was catching—Mickey Cochrane and all those guys up in the American League at that time. I threw him out five times in succession. Shoot, I threw that ball—slap—like that. I ain’t kidding you. No, Cobb wasn’t mad, but every time he came in he’d say, “That son of a bitch got me again, but I’m gonna git him. I’m gonna git that little guy.” Shoot, he ain’t got me yet. But every time though, that sucker’d get on. He would either hit or get on, and every time he would try to steal, I’d throw that sucker out.
Naturally, Ty Cobb was noted for his running and his sliding, but he was on the type of Cool Papa Bell, the best base runner in the Negro leagues. Now Cool Papa, his snitch was to hug the base when he’s going to steal and take a lead when he wasn’t. Ty did the same thing, so that’s how I happened to catch him so much.
Mike Gonzales and Adolph Luque, who played in the big leagues, were down there and said, “Larry, goddamn, what in the hell are you putting on here, an exhibition or something?” I said, “No, that guy stole all those bases in the States, but he ain’t running against anybody.” You get what I mean? “Nobody’s throwing at him.” So I said, “Goddamn, he can’t run.”
Cobb raised hell a couple of times, but after we got in the clubhouse, he kind of cooled down a little bit. Ty Cobb asked Mike Gonzales, “Who’s that kid over there?” Mike said, “He’s from the States.” Cobb said, “He’s doing pretty good. I wonder if I can talk with him.”
So Ty came in and said, “Who do you play with in the States?” I said, “The Detroit Stars.” He said, “Well, how would you like to play on a real ball club?” I said, “Well, I’m playing on a good ball club now.” I wasn’t kidding him, because I think our team was as good as the Tigers. He says, “You married?” I says, “Why, yes I am.” He says, “Any children?” I says, “One expecting.” He said, “How would you like to stay down here and pick up on this lingua and come back to the States and pass as a Cuban? We’ll give you $750 a month just for you and your wife to stay down here a couple of years. If you need any more money we’ll pay you.” I said, “To be frank with you, I don’t think that will work, because I have been all over the western territory, I have been all over New York, Philadelphia, Kansas City, and naturally everybody in those states knows me and I cannot pass like that.”
Besides, I had heard a rumor that he had thrown a woman downstairs in the Book-Cadillac Hotel in Detroit. That was the same year, ’26. She was a maid in the hotel and she must have given him some smart talk, and he shoved her down the steps. That’s the reason his teammates didn’t so much approve of him after that. Whether he really did it or not, I don’t know, but anyway, I decided not to do it. I said, “No, I can’t accept that.” I passed it up.
I played ball for twenty-two more years after that. They called me “Iron Man” Brown because I used to catch every day. I didn’t miss a game. I caught 234 games one year, 1930—three in one day. Boy, was I tired! As long as I played they never called a passed ball against me, and I only missed one pop fly in my life. I got too “challantie” on it, too “olly-cott,” you know what I mean? Too nonchalant—I oversported myself. I’ve got my fingers broken on foul tips plenty of times. This one’s been broken a couple times, this one once. I can’t bend this one at all. A ball went through my thumb and first finger once and cut my hand down to the palm.
I don’t know who taught me to catch. I think it’s a pick up. You take a tap dancer, a girl who’s skating, or a girl or man in any performance. There’s some things that you gotta be taught, but stars are born, they’re not made.
I was born in Alabama, Pratt City, about three miles south of Birmingham. I’ll tell you how I got started in baseball. My mother had passed in 1918, when I was thirteen. I was just a kid. I left home in 1919, then came back to Alabama and went to Pratt City school. At that time catchers only used a muzzle [mask], didn’t have any such thing as a chest protector, shin guards or anything like that. The catcher that we had got hurt. The ball went through the muzzle and it mashed his nose. I was playing on the infield. The professor said, “Any of the rest of you boys think you can catch?” I raised my hand. I went back there and took a bat and mashed the mask out again and put it on and started catching. I proved satisfactory, so the professor says, “I’m gonna keep you back there.”
After that, I started working for the Tennessee Coal and Iron Railroad Company driving the mules, taking the men to where they worked, then picking them up to bring them back to the barn. All I had to do was get off the wagon and turn it over to the lady there and she’d do the rest of it. I was also playing for the company team, and I was beginning to prove satisfactory. There was a white boy named Larry Brown that played for the big team of the Tennessee Coal a
nd Iron Company, while I was playing with the little ‘jive’ ball club. They said, “That little kid there, if he keeps on going like he’s going, he’s going to be just like Mr. Larry Brown.”
So time marched on. In 1920 Knoxville had a ball club and both of their catchers had got their fingers busted. See how my fingers are? So when they got into Birmingham, somebody asked, “Listen, do you know where I can get a catcher?” A guy says, “Yes, there’s a little kid out there, he ain’t no man, he ain’t nothing like a man, he’s nothing but a kid.” He says, “Can he catch?” The guy said, “Yeah, he can catch.” So they brought the manager of the Knoxville Giants out to where I was working. The lady said, “Red”—they always called me Red—“two or three men’s been out here looking for you. They want you to come to the Dunbar Hotel tonight. They want to talk to you about your baseball.”
Well, I went home, got all sharp, put on the best I had. I walked in the Dunbar Hotel and said, “Where is Mr. Brooks, can I see him?” They said, “Yeah,” and gave me his room number. I said, “Mr. Brooks? My name’s Larry Brown, Pratt City, Alabama. I heard you were out there asking for me today.” He said, “Well, I’ll be doggone. You’re mighty small, you’re mighty little.” By that time here comes Steel Arm Dickey. That son of a gun weighed 240 pounds, and he looked like King Kong. Mr. Brooks said, “You see that guy there?” I said, “Yes sir.” He said, “You think you can catch him?” I said, “Yes sir, I think I can catch him.” He said, “You know we’re playing tomorrow at Ruppert Ball Park in Birmingham.” I said, “Yes sir, I think I can catch him. I think I can catch anything.” He said, “If you need any money for your paraphernalia ...” I said, “No, I got everything I need. I got my glove, my shoes, my jock strap, my sweatshirt—I don’t need nothing.”