September 1, 2016 • 54 mins
A decade before the U.S. officially segregated in 1896, baseball banned black players. A decade before the US integrated, baseball broke the color barrier. Between, the Negro Leagues produced some of the finest players to ever take the field.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to you Stuff you Should Know from House Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Josh Clark with Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry
and there's this Stuff you Should Know Sports the edition Sports.
(00:21):
I think really we should air on just the side
of history. Well I even put a note in here
if you don't like sports, listen to this one anyway. Yeah,
because this is about much more than baseball. Yeah, this
is about a history and about overcoming adversity. Yeah, like,
it's very interesting story because and we'll get into this,
(00:45):
but I think people tend to think of the negro leagues,
and that's what this is about, the baseball negro leagues,
which is what they were called. We don't use that
word anymore, but you called this that because that's what
it was. Um ethan to think of it in a
certain way, which is only Yeah, well, baseball was segregated
(01:05):
and they couldn't play in the white leagues, and that's awful,
which it is and was, but there's another side to it. Yeah, Yeah,
that's a good point where these men and these business
owners were empowered and uh and the players and yeah,
and it's yeah, that's just a tease. I just wanted
to whet their appetite, my appetite. I'm sitting here, like,
(01:25):
keep going. So I think we should start with a
little bit of history, right, So just a brief primer
of American history. We'll start with slavery. It's a good
place to start. The transit Atlantic slave trade built this country.
And frankly, I'm just gonna come out and say, I
think some of the major issues that the United States
(01:47):
faces today comes from a lack of accountability for slavery.
Um Really, it's contributing to a lot of the inn
a quality and a lot of the strife that we
still face today and have faced over the decades. So
you've got slavery, and then you had the end of slavery.
(02:08):
You had the Emancipation Proclamation, which a lot of people say, oh,
well that was great. Abraham Lincoln spoke some magic words
and freed the slaves and everything was great. Yeah, it
was just perfectly equal after that, right. No, So it
took the the Union to win the Civil War UM two,
begin to enforce the Emancipation Proclamation in the South and
(02:30):
in Texas. Apparently Texas were among the last holdouts, and
there was slavery going on in Texas like years after
the Civil War was over. Yeah, they were just like,
he's not going to pay attention to that. So um.
The Civil Wars fought. The the part of the the
Union victory of the Civil War was coming into the
South and saying like, all you Confederate you guys are
(02:54):
out of power. And as a matter of fact, this
power vacuum is perfectly willing to be filled by um,
freed blacks. Uh, so go ahead, run for office, UM,
become judges, like, become part of the reconstruction power. UM.
And that lasted for a very very short time. The
white Southern former power base who were leading the Confederacy
(03:17):
and even once who weren't necessarily part of like the
actual Confederate government or even the Confederate Army, which just
the people like in your town who used to own
the sawmill or whatever. That guy came back in power
within a couple of years. And the white Southerners who
have been supplanted, when they came back into power, they
remembered the black people who had tried to take their positions,
(03:40):
and so it got ugly. And so rather than having
actual legal slavery. It came in other different horrible, pernicious
forms which came to be called post reconstruction, the Jim
Crow South. Yeah, and boy, we need to do one.
I've had it on my list for a while on
Jim Crow period. Um about this. First of all, where'd
(04:01):
you get this other good, really good article? It's on
the Major League Baseball website. Um, in the prehistory section
of that one. And this is just to show you
the tone of things. In eight fifty seven, there was
a Supreme Court Chief Justice, uh Roger Tanney, who, Um,
(04:21):
it's funny that the way this writer put it, he
said he's campaigning hard for a spot in the American
Scum Hall of Fame. Like that's pretty funny. In his
official writing, this is the Chief Justice of the Supreme
Court said, uh, Negroes were so far inferior to whites
that they had no rights which a white man was
bound to respect. This is the chief Justice of the
(04:43):
Supreme Court. I think I need to say that like
four more times before it sinks in. That was two
or three. This is what was going on despite the
Emancipation Proclamation, despite the Fourteenth Amendment. Well that was actually
before it that was before that was during the slave
the time of slavery. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, just to
excuse that guy. But after after that, despite the amendments
(05:05):
to the Constitution, despite all of that, it's it took
to the nineteen sixties to even begin the slightest bit
of real progress. That's true, not quite true, because the
history is littered with people who made advancements. They I
don't want to knock that, but in a systemic manner,
you're you're right, it wasn't until the sixties. But part
(05:27):
of the problem too was and this is a valid point. Uh.
Other courts had said, like those is justice. Henry Billings
Brown said legislation is powerless to eradicate racial uh instincts
or to abolish distinctions based upon physical differences. Basically, what
he's saying is like, we can create laws, but you're
(05:48):
not going to change public's mind by creating laws. You
can't like abolish present prejudice. And so if white people
think that black people are inferior to him, who are
we the ever meant to say otherwise to try maybe
and legislate our way out of it. Even so, and
I think eighteen ninety six there was a court case
(06:09):
called plus e versus Ferguson, and in plus e versus Ferguson,
the Supreme Court upheld and legitimized and actually made UM
real the segregation that had already been going on UM
ever since reconstruction, or ever since the end of reconstruction,
the beginning of Jim Crow laws. Right, So, the United
(06:32):
States was officially segregated in eight but baseball had actually
segregated years before that, but not as far back as
people think, And a lot of people think that baseball
had always been segregated up until nineteen forty six. I
think Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier. I think people
(06:53):
think that Jackie Robinson was the first black American to
play baseball, including me until yesterday when we started. Yeah, oh,
did you know this already? Yeah? I mean I'm a
big baseball fan and a bit of a student of
its history, so I knew. Okay, So tell him, Chuck Well, uh,
who the guys were specifically? Well? Yeah, so in eighteen
(07:14):
sixty seven, I think, two years after the Civil War,
there was already baseball. Remember Avner double Day created baseball
eighteen thirty nine, and that's but that's a legitimate story, right,
that's not like he really did. He was the inventor
of baseball and it did happen in Cooperstown, New York
and all that, right, Yeah, Okay, I don't know, but
it was he in Cooperstown. Well that makes sense. So
(07:36):
within uh, just a couple of decades there was the
National Association of Baseball Players. They were the league, right, yeah,
I mean not within a couple of decades. A couple
of years. Yeah, like literally two years after the end
of the Civil War. That was an African American team
called I actually don't know what their name was, but
(07:57):
they were out of Philadelphia and they we want to
join your league, which was the National Association of Baseball
Players at the time, and they were rejected as a
team of course at the time. And uh, but that
didn't mean that there were not players individually. That's a
huge caveat. Yeah, it was a little bit later in
(08:17):
six finally and not for too long. We had two brothers,
h Moses Fleetwood Walker and well day Walker and uh
mostly they played for the Toledo Blue Stuff. That's right, baby,
my hometown integrated baseball team in the eighties. You were
totally right, Uh, Moses was he was older. He played
(08:42):
forty two games for the team. Well, they only came
along and played in six games. Moses hit two sixty
three that season. Uh. And they were the son of
a physician, like the first black physician in Toledo, and
um went to college played baseball at ober Only and
then Michigan. So I know the Wolverines. I didn't know
(09:05):
Oberlin even had sports. Well, this is the nineteenth century.
I think they phased the mount fased the Mountain favor
of debate, acoustic guitars and debate. I know a lot
of people that went to Oberlin weirdly really well, my
good friend Robert Shahadi from Boston that you met, that
came to our show, Uh, Lucy waynewright to Oberlin. David
(09:26):
Reese really went to Oberlin. And I feel like a
couple of other people. Yeah, it's got a nice reputation. Yeah,
great name too. It sounds ivy league, Yeah, Oberlin the
sound of quality. Oberlin sounds ivy league ish. That's on
their t shirts. Although we do need to give a
(09:48):
shout out. There was one guy in eighteen seventy nine,
William Edward White, who substituted and played one game. Who
was officially and this is a little murky history wise,
because we don't know much about him him or how
it happened. But supposedly he played one game as a
professional baseball player as a black man. Is that right?
And this is when? Okay, So the Walker brothers are
(10:11):
playing for Toledo in eighteen eighty six, right, And actually
this article on how stuff works gets it wrong. Says that, um,
they just played for the team for one year before
the team went under. Um, that's not the case. As
a matter of fact, the Moses Walker they may have
only played together on the team for that one year.
Moses Walker had played for years before them. And actually
(10:34):
Moses Walker and um, there were several other players at
the time in eight and eighties seven, there at least
four black players in the Miners. But the Walker brothers
were playing for Toledo, which was a major league team. Right, Um,
But the presence of Moses Walker actually brought to the
four this kind of simmering resentment, Um, and kind of
(10:56):
the big elephant in the room. There's a black guy
in your team. What are you guys doing? And so
Toledo actually went to go play the White Sox in Chicago,
and the White Sox had this like they're great player
of of that season I think in eight four cap
Anson great nicknames back then. So cap Anson said he
(11:19):
said some horrible things and ultimately was like, I'm not
playing if Batman's on the field, and um, Moses Walker
was actually injured and still was like, oh, well, I'm
definitely going on the field today anyway, So he dressed
out and um, I'm not sure if he actually played
in the game, but he was like part of the
team and cap Anson was not indulged. Toledo was like,
(11:42):
we're not taking our guy out. He's one of our players.
So cap Anson can go suck an egg. And cap
Anson went and sucked an egg. He was really mad.
But um, the the issue that day, that dispute at
Comiskey Field, UM brought to the four that the the
concept of integrade and ultimately segregation among Major League Baseball teams,
(12:04):
and it actually increased the pressure among owners and managers
to to get rid of the black players, not just
in the majors, but in the minors. There was another
player too, I read another story about and we'll we'll
get to Roy Campanella. He was a he was better
than Jackie Robinson at the time, a catcher who was
(12:24):
just amazing Hall of Famer, and he had ah there
was a white picture. It was like, you know, he
was a great catcher, but I didn't want to play
with him, so I would when I pitched to him,
I would just ignore his signs and through whatever I want, like,
to his own detriment and to the team's detriment. He uh,
he just wouldn't take the signs. Career sabotage essentially. I
(12:49):
don't think he lasted long either. And Campanella's in the
Hall of Fame, So write the other guy who knows.
I want to give these names all out though. The
four black men in the Miners in eighteen sixty six,
besides Moses Walker, we had Bud Fowler, Frank Grant, and
George Stovey. And as far as I'm concerned, all these
dudes are American heroes. So um, all of a sudden,
(13:15):
they succumbed to pressure in eighteen ninety after hate mail
and death threats to the coaches and managers and umpires
and uh, you know, basically everybody, the players themselves, and
they said, you know what, we're going to shut it
down as officially in eighteen ninety, we can no longer
have any black men in our league. So here's the thing.
(13:36):
They never officially did that. They had the minor league
band black players way into the major well, and it
was never on the rule books either. It was it
was an unofficial, non gentleman's agreement because which actually when
it was broken, it wasn't like a rule was broken.
It was just an unwritten rule, right exactly, which paved
(13:59):
the way for answer Ricky to break that unbroken rule
without actually breaking a rule. Yes, yeah, good point, Chuck,
you want to take a break. Uh yeah, let's do
it all right, man. So eighteen ninety, it's now there
(14:37):
are there are no black players resegregated in Major league
baseball or minor league baseball in America, right, that's right.
That actually paved the way for one of the great
unsung chapters in baseball history, which was the creation of
the Negro leagues. Yeah, in a in a true show
of American spirit and determination, and I just love the
(15:00):
the game. Uh. These uh, these men got together, they
formed their own teams, and they did what's called barnstorming,
which is pretty awesome. They would load up in cars
on a bus and they would go from town to
town and take their show on the road and they
would get a game up wherever they could and wherever
people would pay a couple of pennies to come watch
a baseball game. Um, they were playing white players and
(15:23):
these barn storming games or black players or Latino players.
Uh yeah, because that's a definite overlook segment of the
early baseball history, or Latino players. And one of the
cool things about the Negro leagues is they were integrated.
They had they had Latino teams like the Cuban Kings
out of New York, I believe, and one white guy.
All right, so barn storming is going on. Like I said,
(15:44):
they would roll into town, they would play whatever teams
they could play, and uh, it started to gain some momentum,
Like people started to follow these players. They actually got fans.
And there was a former player named Andrew Rube Foster
who owned to those teams, and he said, you know what,
I think we need our own league. They won't let
(16:05):
us in their league. Let's start around because besides the
fact that people want it, there's money to be made here. Yeah.
And as a matter of fact, So this barn storming thing,
I want to talk a little more about that, right, Um,
one of the reasons barnes storming came about was to
make ends meet, but it was also because these teams
had to figure out a way to put on games
(16:27):
as cheaply as possible. All of the stadiums at the
time were owned by whites, and the whites apparently were
not very friendly to the idea of black black teams
playing in their their fields. So if it were just
like black teams playing one another, the white owners of
the fields are just charged and exorbitant amounts. These guys
(16:47):
were going basically anywhere they could find a place that
would stand still long enough for them to play a
baseball game on. That's what they would play. And they
play like three games a day every day. And they
all traveled together and like um, hung out with one
another and spent a lot of time together. So like that,
the Negro leagues came out of this um kind of
(17:10):
camaraderie of barn storming together, which is pretty awesome. So yeah,
this guy, Rube Foster, he owned the UM Chicago American Giants,
And confusingly, there was also another Negro team called the
Chicago Giants into St. Louis Giants. Yeah, yeah, but like
versus Chicago. But if it was Chicago versus Chicago, well
(17:32):
which one the Giants? Well, which one the American Giants? Okay,
now I understand not just the Giants, but Rube Foster
was like this, this booster of boundless enthusiasm. This guy
literally put together the first real Negro league, and when
he was basically removed from it, the whole the whole
(17:54):
thing fell apart. That's how how much of a driver
this guy was. Yeah, he's in the Hall of Fame too.
Yeah he was a catcher, I think. Uh. Oh, I
don't even think he was in as a player, but
he was. Yeah, I think just for his achievement. Um,
although it may have been both, I don't know. But
in nineteen he said, all right, here's what we'll do.
Let me get these seven team owners of the Midwestern
(18:15):
League that are doing these you know, barnstorming traveling shows. Basically,
let's get together in Kansas City, seven all black teams. Uh.
In addition to those two Chicago Giants, we have the
Cuban Stars, the Dayton Marco's, the Indianapolis abc S, and
the very famous Kansas City Monarchs and St. Louis Giants
(18:36):
all and this is the really like great thing about
the story. All of these teams except for the Monarchs
were black owned teams. Right. So, so not only do
you have black players careers developing, yeah, you have like
black enterprise developing in a in a time when there
were very few avenues of opportunity for black people to
(18:58):
advance in business. Yeah, and in a sense where they
own the business. This is a really good way to
do it. Yeah. And not only that, like the Major
League Baseball site points out, like this was like it
should be embraced in some ways because this at a
time was the only one of the only ways that
minorities could fully like excel to their fullest potential. And yeah,
(19:23):
and that was a point of that article that I
thought was pretty cool, is that one of the one
of the things they lamented about the segregation of baseball
during this time, um, is that we'll never know how
Babe Ruth would have stood up against Sachel Page pitching
to them because they never got to play each other.
So the truly great players are truly great during this
(19:46):
time within their own skin color. You know, you can't
say they were the greatest in baseball because they were
too legitimate, um parallel leagues going on at the time.
And yeah, they played each other sometimes, but if you
wanted to sit down and put stats against stats, you'd
be very hard pressed to do that. Uh sure, Thy Cobb,
(20:07):
Babe Ruth Christie Mathison, Like, we know they were good,
Like we're not knocking their talent, but who knows what
it would have been like in a truly integrated league. Yeah,
And actually it's funny to bring up thy Cobb because
I was like, oh, yeah, Ty Cobb was a huge racist.
I wonder what he thought about the Negro leagues. And
I looked it up and I found an article from
a guy who argues that Ty Cobb was not the um,
(20:30):
the horrible racist that he's made out to be these days,
written by Jimmy Cobb. There he found, well, he actually
did cite his son, and I think his son's name
might be jim Really. Yeah. Um, But the guy found
an article from maybe the fifties or something, nineteen fifty
two where Ty Cobb is quoted at length coming out
(20:50):
in favor of UM integration in baseball, Yeah, saying, like
of course these guys should play as long as you
know they conduct themselves like, uh, professor and old baseball players, like,
why would they not be able to play? I'm totally
in favor of it. Interesting, like, did Ty Cobbs say this?
I think that bears more research. Yeah, you know, because
(21:11):
he was supposedly very racist. Yeah, that's not what this
guy says. All right, well I'm gonna look at that.
That's not what his son says. I'm not doubting you,
of course, I just wanted to know I'm with you.
I understand. Uh. So we talked about the integration of
the Negro leagues, which was awesome. Pretty soon other leagues
for him, not just teams. There was one right here
(21:32):
in the South, the Negro Southern League, with teams from
right here in Atlanta. Dude, do you know the Atlanta
team played directly across the street constantly on Park. Yeah,
where there's now a Staples and a home depot in
a pet Smart and a Whole Foods. How Like funny
is that? Yeah? Um, if you walk into Whole Foods
and listen, you can hear the ghost of a backing
(21:53):
a ball. Yeah. This I don't think this was the
first team in Atlanta that played in the Negro Southern
League because they folded that same year. But the Atlantic
Black Crackers. We also had the Atlantic Crackers, which was
the white team. Um, we had the Atlantic Black Crackers.
And it sounds funny that we say Ponce de Leon,
uh not Ponton, but that's how we say it here.
(22:13):
It's the street that fronts our office building. Puts Daileon
himself would have punch you in the stomach if he
heard you say his name like that. But that's the
street in Atlanta that fronts our office And if you
go and look on the internet, you can see these
awesome pictures of this cool little baseball stadium. Right they're
hundreds of feet from where we sit. Really neat um.
(22:38):
But now you have Whole Foods. You just have to listen.
Seven dollars for artisan mayonnaise if you're lucky, seven dollars.
Oh that's just for the the just for one s. Yeah,
just once, is you her? Whole Foods got caught like
(22:58):
with uncalibrated scales for their hot bar stuff, like it's
not already expensive and yeah that's not I expect a
lot more from them. Yeah, you know, never get anything
with bones at one of those oh never or liquid
what a waste? You throw half of that chicken leg away? Yeah,
you paid for it, or just you know, grind that
(23:21):
chicken bone up and eat it and get your money,
like peel off with your teeth, spit the meat into
your into your little basket, and throw the bone back
into the hot bar. Yeah. Oh I didn't think about that.
That's great idea. And then you can say I'm no chump. Yeah,
I just go around screaming and not paying for that bone. Um,
all right, So where are we where? The Negro Southern
(23:42):
League folded, the Eastern Colored League open in nine, and
then finally in nine the American Negue Grow League formed,
and that was that was when things like they called
eventually the American Negro League in the American I'm sorry,
the National Negro League. The mad years of the Negro League,
like that was where the crime della crime and um,
(24:05):
the everything's going pretty smoothly except two things happen, right, Um,
there's even like a Negro League World Series is the
best of nine the Kansas City Yeah, the Kansas City
Monarchs narrowly beat uh, the hill Dale team they're from Darby, Pennsylvania,
which I guess is near Philadelphia. UM in the first
(24:27):
one in ninety four, So there's like there's a there's
these leagues have established themselves by they have their own
world series going right, UM. But just within a few
years there are a couple of hits to the league
that ultimately led to the the Negro Majors disbanding. UM.
One is that Rube Foster suffered gas poisoning in a
(24:49):
hotel room. In a hotel room in Indianapolis, he was
found unconscious. And there's some theory that UM, like everyone
believed in oasts and spirits and mediums in the nineteenth
century because they were all being poisoned by the natural
gas that was like leaking into their kitchens and homes
all the time. Right, Well, this guy had like an
(25:10):
acute poisoning and was found unconscious. And after that, when
he regained consciousness and his nurse back to health, he
lost his mind and he just kept getting worse and worse,
and by nine I think it's happened in nineteen twenty
four five he was institutionalized in By nineteen thirty he
died of a heart attack at age fifty one. UM
(25:32):
and again his guidance was so integral uh in this
first incarnation of the Negro leagues that you know, when
he was institutionalized, obviously they weren't like, what was the
league do next? He was in an institution, Um, and
the league started to falter and fall apart. And eventually
that coupled with the depression, and the onset of the
(25:54):
depression really kind of led to the unraveling of the
first Negro League. Yeah, and this the Major leag baseball site. Um,
you know, these were they profited on certain days of
the week. Sundays were big days because they were played
double headers. But the fact is, um, Black Americans didn't
have a lot of expendable money to throw it going
(26:17):
to baseball games, even though they're you know, pretty cheap.
That was commiserate with what people made at the time,
unless you were one of the Walker brothers whose dad
was a physician. Yeah, they probably a little money. Um,
they were playing, so I'm sure their parents got in
for free. So it's all just a moot point. I
wonder if they did get free family tickets back then,
I would hope, So, I that's gotta be as old
as tickets, right, Probably we gotta do an episode on tickets, guest.
(26:41):
Let's uh. So they were making a little money on Sundays,
they weren't hugely profitable overall, even though they were known
as somewhat successful. Like, no, a lot of these guys
were still barn storming on their off days. Yeah. And
these are the players, you know, trying to make ends meet,
like the owners themselves were struggling here and there. Um.
(27:02):
White people came to see games sometimes, especially when they
were exhibition games against white teams, because they love to
go out there and see the see something they had
never seen before, which many times was the black team
mopping the floor with the white team. Um, although it
seemed pretty evenly matched, like from what I gathered, it
wasn't like lopside in one way or the other. Like
(27:24):
they were good competitive games. Yeah. There are plenty of um,
white players who are better than the black players, and
there are plenty of black players who are better than
white players. Yeah. Yeah, I would say evenly match is
a good way to put so if you had an
integrade league, you would get the best of both, which
is eventually what we got. Plus also in some of
these cities, Chuck, these there they were not just baseball
(27:44):
was segregated, but just within the city you had a
white team and you had a black team. And that's
that's evidence to the names of some of the black teams,
like the Black Crackers, the Black Yankees. Um, there were
the Yankees and then there were the Crackers. Right, So
if you were a white player or a white person,
you're probably a fan of the white team and you
weren't going and watching the black teams play, right. Um,
(28:07):
so they list out four things here on the site.
They said the two leagues, uh, the American and National
Negro Leagues were northern and basically city dwelling teams. A
couple that with, um, there weren't a lot of black
people living in northern cities at the time. Uh. The
South was, you know, was way more Uh well, I
(28:28):
want to say integrated, but it wasn't integrated. Uh, way
more black people living in the South at the time. Yeah,
which is I wonder why the Southern Negro League didn't
take off like a rocket then. Yeah. I mean probably
for the other reasons, like you couldn't afford to go
to the games and all that stuffy Uh black people
that were in the North, Uh, didn't have a whole
lot of money, and so basically all that adds up
(28:50):
to not a lot of audience buying tickets. And the
only way to keep a league afloat is to sell
tickets and to sell concessions, same as it is today.
So all those things coupled with Rube Foster the depression.
There the greatest champion and probably sharpest mind. Uh, sadly
succumbing to mental illness and then the depression. And that
(29:11):
was the end of the beginning of the Negro leagues, right, yeah,
that was the end of the first one. Yes, and
there were more to come, and we'll talk about it
right after this. I ski all right, So uh, it
(29:47):
didn't take long. Uh, the old saying you can't keep
a good man down. People wanted to play baseball, they
were good at it. Um. They thought there was more
money to be made in leagues. And so what happens
is these numbers guys get involved, and a numbers man
is the numbers game was basically like an illegal, unsanctioned
(30:10):
street lottery. Right, So numbers guys have a lot of money,
and some of them said, you know what, let's put
money into starting baseball teams. In leagues, and one guy
in particular in Pittsburgh, Gus Greenley, great name. He was
a bar owner in Pittsburgh. He bought the Pittsburgh Crawford's
in nineteen thirty one. He said, well, I've got a team,
but I don't have a league. So two years later
(30:32):
he formed the second Negro National League, and other numbers
guys bought in, and all of a sudden they had
another league going. UM and this basically kicked off what's
known as the Golden Age of the Negro leagues. UM
starting about nineteen thirty one thirty three, when when these
other teams came about, and um, Greenley's team himself, was
(30:56):
it his? No, I'm sorry, it would have been right
across the river, the Homestead Grays. Yeah, they eventually migrated
back to Pittsburgh over to Pittsburgh, so they were the
same team that went from one town to another. They
weren't rivals. Now, I think there was still the other
Pittsburgh team, but from what I understand, the Homestead Grades
(31:17):
eventually became part of Pittsburgh, or maybe there was another
team on that shirt, but I do know they eventually
get went to Pittsburgh because you know, Homestead. We've been there.
We did a show there. Ye yeah, okay um, and
I was like, are we going to the right place?
And the car was taking me. So Homestead used to
have not just a team, they used to have the
best Negro League team possibly ever. Oh yeah, wait easy.
(31:41):
For nine consecutive years they won the Pennant all right, yeah,
nine years in a row. Josh Gibson, cool, Papa Bell
and Buck Leonard some of their stars, yeah, just some
of them. In they had no less than five future
Hall of famers on on the team. Five. That's amazing.
Point to a team that has five future Hall of
Famers on it now or ever did well? So some
(32:05):
of the Yankees teams did over the years. But like,
I don't think anything right now now, Like even the
best team right now doesn't have five future Hall of Famers.
It's certainly not the Braves. We don't have one. I
don't know. I could see Freddie Freeman hit in the
Hall of Fame one day. M hm, oh really, I
haven't been watching the last couple of seasons. I mean,
(32:26):
he's our best player. But because the best player on
the worst team in baseball not very good at the bat, alright,
So we did mention that, um, there were exhibition games
going on, and things really picked up with the exhibition
games now because they were a little well funded. And
this is when UM, white players would come and see
(32:47):
the teams playing and mean it was basically more popular
than ever. Uh in both communities. Yes, and UM we
said that they had the UM the Negro League World
Series going on, right, UM, there was actually another game
that came out of this. I think it was UM,
it might have been Gus Greenley, I think it was
(33:09):
who came up with this is the East versus West
All Stars game, and that became bigger than the World
Series and whatever was in the Negro Leagues. It was huge. Yeah,
So UM that became kind of like the de facto
big game of the year rather than the World Series
for UM, and they played it every year I think
in Comiskey Field. Yeah, in Chicago, because you know East
(33:31):
and East West in Chicago. That's what it says on
the T shirts. At least, so players are starting to
make some like the top players are starting to make
some pretty good money at the time. You can't go
any further without talking about uh Satchel Page Leroy satchel page. Dude.
He was, um a picture very interesting dude, maybe the
(33:55):
greatest picture of all time in the sport of baseball.
Maybe he was eccentric, He was an entertainer. He was
like the US same Bolt of his day. People loved him, Okay,
except he didn't like to run. That would make a
little different. Even said he didn't like to run. What
was his quote? He said that, um, training for me
(34:16):
is rising gently from the bench, back onto the bench.
So he had have you ever seen video or I
guess you know film of him pitching, Yeah, with those
old timey baggy baseball pants, and yeah that was the style.
But his um, he had a weird wind up. He
had this sort of double windmill that he would do
with his pitching arm. And then um, when he was younger,
(34:39):
he had a great fastball, and he had he was
noted for his control like Greg Maddox, like in his
pinpoint control like supposed he could just put a baseball
within a half inch of where he wanted it to be,
which is a big big deal for a picture. Um,
As he lost his fastball over the years, he learned
basically every pitch under the sun. Like he pitched until
(35:02):
he was fifty nine years old. He first he first
signed in the Major's White majors at forty two. Forty two,
forty two year old rookie. He's the he's the oldest
rookie ever in the Major League Baseball and I think
the oldest picture ever. Well yeah, um, he was even
older than Gaylord Perry. How old was he? He was
(35:25):
in his forties, like Nolan Ryan, Gaylord Perry. Nolan Ryan
made it to fifty, not fifty, but he came close.
Like pictures notably have been a little older, which is
crazy because like their arms and yeah, but they're not
you know, they're not like running around and batting like
(35:46):
other players. Yeah, but you're right, like Freddie Freeman, like
the stress on the stress on the arm is amazing.
So one thing that that was problematic or is problematic
when you're going back in looking at the negro leagues
is that, um, a lot of teams were allowed to,
depending on the league, were allowed to set their own schedules. Um,
(36:07):
stats weren't kept quite as um well as they were
in the white leagues. Yeah, we don't know Satil pagees
real lifetime stats. No, but in full there are some
estimates and they are high. So the one that I
saw is that Sachiel page Head. I think it was
in this um this article on MLB dot com, which
(36:29):
eventually will say the author's name. Right. Um, they said
that he had three hundred career shutouts. Three career shutouts,
and this guy says in italics, not wins, shutouts. Right, Yeah,
if you don't know baseball, shutout means you have pitched
a game where no one scored a run. And back
then they were probably complete game shutouts, meaning he never
(36:52):
came out and was relieved by another picture. Right, he
would have pitched like all nine innings back in the
in the day. They should do that way more than
they do now. Okay, so he had three hundred career shutouts.
Fift hundred wins is the estimate that that's on MLB
dot com. Yeah, to put that into perspective for non
baseball fans again, if you have three hundred wins wins,
(37:15):
not shutouts, win, then you're a Hall of Famer. And
in fact, they don't think there will ever be another
three hundred game winner again because of they are more
pictures in the rotation now they usually have five guys
instead of four. They don't pitches deep into games. They
rest them a lot more. So it's just we may
not ever see that happen again, just because of the
(37:35):
way it's built. It To also put in perspective, cy
Young is um regarded as one of the best pictures
ever in in Major League Baseball, named the Top Award
after him exactly. He had seventies six shutouts, which is amazing.
He had the most wins ever still in Major League
Baseball at five eleven, so Satchel page Head conceivably three
(37:59):
times more. Yeah, then the the highest win count ever
in Major league and that's counting his entire career assume,
which again was very very long. It was a very
long career. But that just makes it all the more amazing,
especially as he gets older. Yeah, Like, let's let's say
that people don't say, don't count the negro leagues as
being in the top league at the time. I cut
(38:21):
it in half, and he's still way ahead of everybody
else if you subtract fifty of everything he did and
the fact that he sat in a rocking chair and
the dugout and had like a huge personality. Yeah, so
he learned all sorts of pitches. By the end of
his career, he was pitching knuckleballs and he was famous
for the hesitation pitch, which he invented, which was when
(38:44):
he got to the White major leagues, they were like,
that's illegal. He can't do that. It's called the bulk
and uh. He was like, all right, well know, He's like, no,
it's called the hesitation pitch. It was very sneaky. Um.
You know, it's like you you act like you're pitching,
then you stop. And because his theory, he was like,
you know, I got guys up there that are starting
to swing because I'm so fast, Like when they see
(39:06):
me winding up, they're starting to swing. So if I
just put a little slight pause there, then they're swinging
and then the ball comes. So it's very very tricky
little pitch. Um. And he was making between thirty and
forty grand a year and the Negro and this is
also with appearances and stuff like that, but in the
Negro leagues, which is about half a million dollars today. Yeah,
(39:30):
amazing amount of money at the time, you know, and
those appearances, um uh uh. If you were a team
owner that had Satual Page on your team, uh, you
might let him go make some scratch and probably take
a cut yourself by lending him to another team whose
attendance was struggling. And all you had to do was
(39:50):
advertised for a week that Satual Page is gonna be
pitching one day, and you would sell out, so he
would help other Negro League teams that were that that
we're struggling. Yeah, to be a draw. And here's one
little cool thing about our in Atlanta Braves and hight Satchel.
Page was lacking one more season to get his major
(40:12):
league baseball pension and was out of the league and retired,
and the Atlanta Braves signed him as a player coach
like Terry Pendleton. Yeah, he was never a player coach,
was he? No, But here's a player and then a coach.
Oh yeah, Pete Rose was a player coach. Was he really? Like?
He managed the Reds and played for them. I didn't
(40:32):
know and bet on them. Yeah, but they signed him
to a one year deal so he could get his
major league baseball penchion. That is awesome, which is really cool? Year?
Was that? That's really cool? Yeah, go brave. So if
you see a picture when I saw a picture of
him in the Braves uniform. I was like, wait a minute,
he never played for the Braves, and he really didn't.
(40:53):
It was it was sort of, you know, just a
little sneaky way to get him in there, which is great. Um,
all right, so Satchel Page is killing it, other players
are killing it. It would not be long before somebody
in the White League's somebody said the talent is too good.
(41:14):
Somebody has to be the first to make this move
and break the color barrier. Yeah, right, you know that
was the thing Like this. The Negro leagues were ultimately,
as we'll find out, victims of their own success. The
players that they supported and brought into the game, we're
of obvious major league caliber in any major league. They
(41:37):
were the best in the world. They were just playing
on segregated teams. And so finally a group of people,
but especially it usually comes in the form of one
guy named branch Rickey. Yeah. Did Tom Hanks play him? No?
Harrison Ford? No? Maybe? Well I didn't see them recent
(42:00):
jacket was Harrison Ford? Maybe I've seen him portrayed in
other movies. I can't tell if it was him or not,
because the actor didn't have a diamond studded earring in
but Harrison Ford could have taken it out for the role. Uh.
This guy named branch Rickey, he was he an executive
or a manager for the Dodgers. He was he was
(42:21):
with he was an executive. And he said, and this
was when they were in Brooklyn, right, He said, this
is ridiculous there that we need to break this color barrier.
There's plenty of great players out there that I want
to sign. I'm going to break this unspoken rule. And
he looked around to find a player who was not
only good, but who he felt could withstand this horrendous
(42:46):
reception that whoever the first black player would be would
definitely receive. And who did receive and he found it
in the in the person of Jackie Robinson. Yeah, that's
a that's a huge point, um, because like I said,
jet Roy Empanella was probably better player at the time
than Jackie Robinson. But if you see the Jackie Robinson story, Uh,
(43:06):
I didn't see the recent one, like I said, but
I just know a lot about his story. He was
the right guy. He had the temperament, he had the leadership. Um,
Roy Campanella, take your head off, Well, yeah he did.
He was a tough guy, but Jackie Robinson was was
the man in every way. And we should also shout
out to the road being paved by people like Joe
(43:29):
Lewis and Jesse Owens before Jackie Robinson, as far as
just white America accepting mainstream black athletes into their lives. Yeah.
And I don't know if it was on this or
on there's a site called negro League Baseball dot com
UM that has a really good article called Negro League
Baseball one oh one or something like that. This is
the basics. There's a definite story to the whole thing, right, UM.
(43:51):
But they point out that UM, probably more than anything
that helped break the color barrier was UM blacks serving
in World War Two, serving alongside UM white soldiers and
and stories coming back from the fronts of like, hey,
these guys are killing Germans just as fast as any
any white guy. UM. And at the time America was like, well,
(44:17):
we love that about people. So when they returned, UM,
the black soldiers came home to a different America that
they helped change by fighting in World War two. And
I mean that the timing of this apparently is not
coincidental that Jackie Robinson was signing the six a year
after World War Two. One. Uh So branch Ricky was. Um,
(44:40):
he was a very puritanical guy. He would often lecture
players on sex and drinking and stuff, and he was
he wasn't just some benevolent, benevolent champion of the black man. Yeah,
that's that's a good point, man, because a lot of
times stories like this end up being about the guy
who took the change and paved the way for the
(45:01):
black players. But he did, he did. But emphasis it's
just too easy sometimes for the emphasis to go onto
that where it's like, well, the black player like he came.
He was one of the greatest baseball players of all time. Exactly.
Let's let's put it this way. If branch Rickey hadn't
wanted to sell tickets by fielding a good team, he
(45:23):
would have never signed Jackie Robinson. He was a businessman.
The Dodgers sucked at the time, and um, but he
was an idealist. I mean he was very much like, no,
like this is wrong and they should be allowed to play,
so okay. So he was a complex human being like
all other human beings. He can't just be shoehorned into
an easy caricature. That's great. So branch Ricky complicated human being.
(45:46):
He selected Jackie Robinson and it was a great selection. Yeah,
Jackie Robinson played one year in the miners, which was ridiculous. Um,
they should have just like he spent his entire life
playing in the miners. Uh, they should have just promoted
him right away. But I think they just wanted to
ease that transition. He won the batting title in the
minors his only year there, and then uh, one Rookie
(46:07):
of the Year in his very first year with the
Brooklyn Dodgers, and uh that was April fifteenth, ninety seven
was when uh he made his debut, which was very
very historic day, an amazing day that Major League Baseball
is really like honored Jackie Robinson to the fullest. Now, yeah,
(46:28):
they should great. Jackie Robinson definitely threw up in the floodgates.
Within four months of Jackie Robinson being signed or no,
I guess actually being called up to the majors, two
other guys um were signed, both in July, and I
think that year there were a number of other um
black players suddenly playing for white Major League Baseball, which
(46:51):
is suddenly not now just Major League Baseball not white
major League baseball. That's uh. Larry Dobie Clea and Indians
Willard Brown, the St. Louis Brown's Henry Hank Thompson, the St.
Louis Brown's Dan Bankhead Leroy Satchel Page made it finally, uh,
and of course Roy Campanella, among others. These were the
first African Americans in Major League Baseball and UM by
(47:16):
nineteen fifty two, just a few years later, there were
a hundred and fifty black players, and by all but
four major league teams had black players. There were a
few holdouts. Yeah. The Boston Red Sox notably were the last.
They waited until nineteen fifty nine, thirteen years after Jackie
Robinson's debut season. Yeah, in the in the minors. So
(47:40):
with the signing of Jackie Robinson and all the players
to follow, like you hinted at earlier, UM, and like
this article UH plainly says it was, it was a
very bitter sweet end um. And one way it was great,
the color barrier was smashed, the league was being integrated,
and they were getting their due. Um, although it was
(48:00):
a struggle. But in another way, it was also sad
that this league that had so much gumption and such
a great like we'll do it ourselves then attitude, uh,
and empower these men to play, and these people to
own these teams and start their own leagues. So it
was definitely like a weird time in history. It is,
(48:21):
like I think nowadays there's much more of a reverence
and a bit of mourning for the disappearance of that league. Um.
But you know, in another way, like I said, it
was smashing the color barrier was way more sure, way
more better. We just went into hulk speak. So yeah,
(48:43):
it would have been a much more satisfying end of
the whole thing if the Negro leagues had poached the
best players in the um white Major League Baseball. Oh. Actually,
you know what the best possible thing could have been
was if the white major leagues absorbed those teams and
owners and ownership. It's part of one big league. But
(49:03):
they were like, no, we're just gonna take your players
give them to us. So, um, that is Negro League Baseball,
the history of it. YEP officially disbanded in and this
article says into the nineteen fifties, there were still a
few teams playing here and there, and in the early
nineteen sixties even that was like one final team or
(49:28):
I guess one final pair of teams. I guess they
had to play somebody still playing, right, or they could
scrimmage themselves. Yeah, it says the Negro American League was
the last to throw in the town early sixties. Yeah.
So yeah, more than one team. And this article makes
a point today, or at least in two thousand twelve, UM,
major League baseball was non white, which I was like,
(49:50):
what I would have guessed it was the opposite of
that that I would not have gues of Major League
baseball players are white. Yeah, and you know, there's a
big push I think, like the one of the least
represented demographics now in pro baseball or African Americans. Yeah,
(50:10):
partially because of the rise of Latino players, um, and
then partially because they there's not a big a push
to play baseball these days as kids in America, and
so they're there. There's a lot of concerted efforts to
try and get baseball going again in black communities, UM,
which is awesome. You know. Yeah, I know I was pushed.
(50:33):
My dad was like, get out there and get hit
in the head with the ball. Let's see. I wouldn't allowed,
I would I had to play church softball, so lame.
Uh So, then the color bears broken, and now the
last vestige of any sort of color issue is the
Native American slurs that are rampant in in all sports
(50:55):
as far as teams go. Yeah, if you want to
know more about the negro Leagues, you can type those
words in the search bar at how Stuff works dot com.
You can also go check out this amazing article uh
called negro Leagues a Kaleidoscopic Review. It's on MLB dot
com by Stephen Goldman. Yeah, he's a great author. And
check out negro League Baseball dot com. They have like
(51:18):
all sorts of great profiles on the players and all
that stuff. We never said the nicknames? Oh yeah, should
we rattle off a few of those? Alright, boy, these
are some good nicknames. How about Jelly Gardner or Spooney Palm,
Turkey Sterns. Turkey Sterns he's the Hall of Famer, Copperney
Thompson or steel Arm Davis. I think you mentioned um
(51:39):
cool Papa Bell. Yeah, cool Papa Bell. That is the
greatest name ever. Uh, Possum Poles, Ace Adams, King Tuck,
Smokey Joe, Williams bullet Joe Rogan Not yeah, Joe Rogan.
Did you know that Rats Henderson boy Turkey Sterns. That
might be the best. That might be my new hotel
student them cool, Papa Joe. Yeah, but no one would
(52:03):
buy that at a hotel registry. Oh yeah, if you
go up and Sterns, they definitely go for Those are
great nicknames. All right? Oh yeah, okay, So now that
we said Turkey Sterns, it's time for listener mail. This
one I'm gonna call short and sweet. Um. What do
(52:23):
you call it when you remember something with a pneumatic device? Uh? No,
mnemonic when you remember it while you're pumping air up?
And was it nomadic? You remember it while you're wandering around? Pneumonic?
Of course? I feel like a dummy. How did you?
Josh and Chuck? A friend recommended your show to me recently,
(52:45):
and I love it. You satisfy all my nerdy entertainment requirements.
While in at orc Um you seem to have a
bit of trouble recalling the order of taxonomic taxonomic categories. Well,
I'm gonna have trouble in this nextes. During Wooly Mammoth
Uh not wooly mammoths, as our typo originally said, it
(53:09):
was my fault. That's all right, you just forgot to
know Wally. Uh. Here's an easy memory trick we learned
in high school biology. Kings play chess on fine green silk.
Kingdom Philum class order, family, genus species. I love that
stuff because I will never forget it. Now, that's not
a pnemonic device, is it. It's pneumatic. I have no
(53:32):
idea why this is still in my head over ten
years later. Well that's exactly why. Sure, Katie, So I
hope that helps. And that is Katie from West Texas.
Thanks a lot, Katie from West Texas. We appreciate that. Um.
Kings play chess on green silk, fine green silk. I'll
never remember the fine part. Yeah. Uh. If you want
(53:54):
to get in touch with us, you can tweet to
us at s Y s K podcast. You can also
hang out with me at Josh Underscore UM Underscore Clark
on Twitter. Uh. You can hang out with us on
Facebook dot com slash stuff you know, and check out
Chuck at Charles W. Bryant Charles W. Chuck Bryant appropriate
on Facebook as well. You can send us an email
(54:16):
to Stuff podcast at how stuff Works dot com and
has always joined us at our home on the web,
Stuff You Should Know dot com. For more on this
and thousands of other topics, is it how stuff Works
dot com.
Welcome to you Stuff you Should Know from House Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Josh Clark with Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry
and there's this Stuff you Should Know Sports the edition Sports.
(00:21):
I think really we should air on just the side
of history. Well I even put a note in here
if you don't like sports, listen to this one anyway. Yeah,
because this is about much more than baseball. Yeah, this
is about a history and about overcoming adversity. Yeah, like,
it's very interesting story because and we'll get into this,
(00:45):
but I think people tend to think of the negro leagues,
and that's what this is about, the baseball negro leagues,
which is what they were called. We don't use that
word anymore, but you called this that because that's what
it was. Um ethan to think of it in a
certain way, which is only Yeah, well, baseball was segregated
(01:05):
and they couldn't play in the white leagues, and that's awful,
which it is and was, but there's another side to it. Yeah, Yeah,
that's a good point where these men and these business
owners were empowered and uh and the players and yeah,
and it's yeah, that's just a tease. I just wanted
to whet their appetite, my appetite. I'm sitting here, like,
(01:25):
keep going. So I think we should start with a
little bit of history, right, So just a brief primer
of American history. We'll start with slavery. It's a good
place to start. The transit Atlantic slave trade built this country.
And frankly, I'm just gonna come out and say, I
think some of the major issues that the United States
(01:47):
faces today comes from a lack of accountability for slavery.
Um Really, it's contributing to a lot of the inn
a quality and a lot of the strife that we
still face today and have faced over the decades. So
you've got slavery, and then you had the end of slavery.
(02:08):
You had the Emancipation Proclamation, which a lot of people say, oh,
well that was great. Abraham Lincoln spoke some magic words
and freed the slaves and everything was great. Yeah, it
was just perfectly equal after that, right. No, So it
took the the Union to win the Civil War UM two,
begin to enforce the Emancipation Proclamation in the South and
(02:30):
in Texas. Apparently Texas were among the last holdouts, and
there was slavery going on in Texas like years after
the Civil War was over. Yeah, they were just like,
he's not going to pay attention to that. So um.
The Civil Wars fought. The the part of the the
Union victory of the Civil War was coming into the
South and saying like, all you Confederate you guys are
(02:54):
out of power. And as a matter of fact, this
power vacuum is perfectly willing to be filled by um,
freed blacks. Uh, so go ahead, run for office, UM,
become judges, like, become part of the reconstruction power. UM.
And that lasted for a very very short time. The
white Southern former power base who were leading the Confederacy
(03:17):
and even once who weren't necessarily part of like the
actual Confederate government or even the Confederate Army, which just
the people like in your town who used to own
the sawmill or whatever. That guy came back in power
within a couple of years. And the white Southerners who
have been supplanted, when they came back into power, they
remembered the black people who had tried to take their positions,
(03:40):
and so it got ugly. And so rather than having
actual legal slavery. It came in other different horrible, pernicious
forms which came to be called post reconstruction, the Jim
Crow South. Yeah, and boy, we need to do one.
I've had it on my list for a while on
Jim Crow period. Um about this. First of all, where'd
(04:01):
you get this other good, really good article? It's on
the Major League Baseball website. Um, in the prehistory section
of that one. And this is just to show you
the tone of things. In eight fifty seven, there was
a Supreme Court Chief Justice, uh Roger Tanney, who, Um,
(04:21):
it's funny that the way this writer put it, he
said he's campaigning hard for a spot in the American
Scum Hall of Fame. Like that's pretty funny. In his
official writing, this is the Chief Justice of the Supreme
Court said, uh, Negroes were so far inferior to whites
that they had no rights which a white man was
bound to respect. This is the chief Justice of the
(04:43):
Supreme Court. I think I need to say that like
four more times before it sinks in. That was two
or three. This is what was going on despite the
Emancipation Proclamation, despite the Fourteenth Amendment. Well that was actually
before it that was before that was during the slave
the time of slavery. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, just to
excuse that guy. But after after that, despite the amendments
(05:05):
to the Constitution, despite all of that, it's it took
to the nineteen sixties to even begin the slightest bit
of real progress. That's true, not quite true, because the
history is littered with people who made advancements. They I
don't want to knock that, but in a systemic manner,
you're you're right, it wasn't until the sixties. But part
(05:27):
of the problem too was and this is a valid point. Uh.
Other courts had said, like those is justice. Henry Billings
Brown said legislation is powerless to eradicate racial uh instincts
or to abolish distinctions based upon physical differences. Basically, what
he's saying is like, we can create laws, but you're
(05:48):
not going to change public's mind by creating laws. You
can't like abolish present prejudice. And so if white people
think that black people are inferior to him, who are
we the ever meant to say otherwise to try maybe
and legislate our way out of it. Even so, and
I think eighteen ninety six there was a court case
(06:09):
called plus e versus Ferguson, and in plus e versus Ferguson,
the Supreme Court upheld and legitimized and actually made UM
real the segregation that had already been going on UM
ever since reconstruction, or ever since the end of reconstruction,
the beginning of Jim Crow laws. Right, So, the United
(06:32):
States was officially segregated in eight but baseball had actually
segregated years before that, but not as far back as
people think, And a lot of people think that baseball
had always been segregated up until nineteen forty six. I
think Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier. I think people
(06:53):
think that Jackie Robinson was the first black American to
play baseball, including me until yesterday when we started. Yeah, oh,
did you know this already? Yeah? I mean I'm a
big baseball fan and a bit of a student of
its history, so I knew. Okay, So tell him, Chuck Well, uh,
who the guys were specifically? Well? Yeah, so in eighteen
(07:14):
sixty seven, I think, two years after the Civil War,
there was already baseball. Remember Avner double Day created baseball
eighteen thirty nine, and that's but that's a legitimate story, right,
that's not like he really did. He was the inventor
of baseball and it did happen in Cooperstown, New York
and all that, right, Yeah, Okay, I don't know, but
it was he in Cooperstown. Well that makes sense. So
(07:36):
within uh, just a couple of decades there was the
National Association of Baseball Players. They were the league, right, yeah,
I mean not within a couple of decades. A couple
of years. Yeah, like literally two years after the end
of the Civil War. That was an African American team
called I actually don't know what their name was, but
(07:57):
they were out of Philadelphia and they we want to
join your league, which was the National Association of Baseball
Players at the time, and they were rejected as a
team of course at the time. And uh, but that
didn't mean that there were not players individually. That's a
huge caveat. Yeah, it was a little bit later in
(08:17):
six finally and not for too long. We had two brothers,
h Moses Fleetwood Walker and well day Walker and uh
mostly they played for the Toledo Blue Stuff. That's right, baby,
my hometown integrated baseball team in the eighties. You were
totally right, Uh, Moses was he was older. He played
(08:42):
forty two games for the team. Well, they only came
along and played in six games. Moses hit two sixty
three that season. Uh. And they were the son of
a physician, like the first black physician in Toledo, and
um went to college played baseball at ober Only and
then Michigan. So I know the Wolverines. I didn't know
(09:05):
Oberlin even had sports. Well, this is the nineteenth century.
I think they phased the mount fased the Mountain favor
of debate, acoustic guitars and debate. I know a lot
of people that went to Oberlin weirdly really well, my
good friend Robert Shahadi from Boston that you met, that
came to our show, Uh, Lucy waynewright to Oberlin. David
(09:26):
Reese really went to Oberlin. And I feel like a
couple of other people. Yeah, it's got a nice reputation. Yeah,
great name too. It sounds ivy league, Yeah, Oberlin the
sound of quality. Oberlin sounds ivy league ish. That's on
their t shirts. Although we do need to give a
(09:48):
shout out. There was one guy in eighteen seventy nine,
William Edward White, who substituted and played one game. Who
was officially and this is a little murky history wise,
because we don't know much about him him or how
it happened. But supposedly he played one game as a
professional baseball player as a black man. Is that right?
And this is when? Okay, So the Walker brothers are
(10:11):
playing for Toledo in eighteen eighty six, right, And actually
this article on how stuff works gets it wrong. Says that, um,
they just played for the team for one year before
the team went under. Um, that's not the case. As
a matter of fact, the Moses Walker they may have
only played together on the team for that one year.
Moses Walker had played for years before them. And actually
(10:34):
Moses Walker and um, there were several other players at
the time in eight and eighties seven, there at least
four black players in the Miners. But the Walker brothers
were playing for Toledo, which was a major league team. Right, Um,
But the presence of Moses Walker actually brought to the
four this kind of simmering resentment, Um, and kind of
(10:56):
the big elephant in the room. There's a black guy
in your team. What are you guys doing? And so
Toledo actually went to go play the White Sox in Chicago,
and the White Sox had this like they're great player
of of that season I think in eight four cap
Anson great nicknames back then. So cap Anson said he
(11:19):
said some horrible things and ultimately was like, I'm not
playing if Batman's on the field, and um, Moses Walker
was actually injured and still was like, oh, well, I'm
definitely going on the field today anyway, So he dressed
out and um, I'm not sure if he actually played
in the game, but he was like part of the
team and cap Anson was not indulged. Toledo was like,
(11:42):
we're not taking our guy out. He's one of our players.
So cap Anson can go suck an egg. And cap
Anson went and sucked an egg. He was really mad.
But um, the the issue that day, that dispute at
Comiskey Field, UM brought to the four that the the
concept of integrade and ultimately segregation among Major League Baseball teams,
(12:04):
and it actually increased the pressure among owners and managers
to to get rid of the black players, not just
in the majors, but in the minors. There was another
player too, I read another story about and we'll we'll
get to Roy Campanella. He was a he was better
than Jackie Robinson at the time, a catcher who was
(12:24):
just amazing Hall of Famer, and he had ah there
was a white picture. It was like, you know, he
was a great catcher, but I didn't want to play
with him, so I would when I pitched to him,
I would just ignore his signs and through whatever I want, like,
to his own detriment and to the team's detriment. He uh,
he just wouldn't take the signs. Career sabotage essentially. I
(12:49):
don't think he lasted long either. And Campanella's in the
Hall of Fame, So write the other guy who knows.
I want to give these names all out though. The
four black men in the Miners in eighteen sixty six,
besides Moses Walker, we had Bud Fowler, Frank Grant, and
George Stovey. And as far as I'm concerned, all these
dudes are American heroes. So um, all of a sudden,
(13:15):
they succumbed to pressure in eighteen ninety after hate mail
and death threats to the coaches and managers and umpires
and uh, you know, basically everybody, the players themselves, and
they said, you know what, we're going to shut it
down as officially in eighteen ninety, we can no longer
have any black men in our league. So here's the thing.
(13:36):
They never officially did that. They had the minor league
band black players way into the major well, and it
was never on the rule books either. It was it
was an unofficial, non gentleman's agreement because which actually when
it was broken, it wasn't like a rule was broken.
It was just an unwritten rule, right exactly, which paved
(13:59):
the way for answer Ricky to break that unbroken rule
without actually breaking a rule. Yes, yeah, good point, Chuck,
you want to take a break. Uh yeah, let's do
it all right, man. So eighteen ninety, it's now there
(14:37):
are there are no black players resegregated in Major league
baseball or minor league baseball in America, right, that's right.
That actually paved the way for one of the great
unsung chapters in baseball history, which was the creation of
the Negro leagues. Yeah, in a in a true show
of American spirit and determination, and I just love the
(15:00):
the game. Uh. These uh, these men got together, they
formed their own teams, and they did what's called barnstorming,
which is pretty awesome. They would load up in cars
on a bus and they would go from town to
town and take their show on the road and they
would get a game up wherever they could and wherever
people would pay a couple of pennies to come watch
a baseball game. Um, they were playing white players and
(15:23):
these barn storming games or black players or Latino players.
Uh yeah, because that's a definite overlook segment of the
early baseball history, or Latino players. And one of the
cool things about the Negro leagues is they were integrated.
They had they had Latino teams like the Cuban Kings
out of New York, I believe, and one white guy.
All right, so barn storming is going on. Like I said,
(15:44):
they would roll into town, they would play whatever teams
they could play, and uh, it started to gain some momentum,
Like people started to follow these players. They actually got fans.
And there was a former player named Andrew Rube Foster
who owned to those teams, and he said, you know what,
I think we need our own league. They won't let
(16:05):
us in their league. Let's start around because besides the
fact that people want it, there's money to be made here. Yeah.
And as a matter of fact, So this barn storming thing,
I want to talk a little more about that, right, Um,
one of the reasons barnes storming came about was to
make ends meet, but it was also because these teams
had to figure out a way to put on games
(16:27):
as cheaply as possible. All of the stadiums at the
time were owned by whites, and the whites apparently were
not very friendly to the idea of black black teams
playing in their their fields. So if it were just
like black teams playing one another, the white owners of
the fields are just charged and exorbitant amounts. These guys
(16:47):
were going basically anywhere they could find a place that
would stand still long enough for them to play a
baseball game on. That's what they would play. And they
play like three games a day every day. And they
all traveled together and like um, hung out with one
another and spent a lot of time together. So like that,
the Negro leagues came out of this um kind of
(17:10):
camaraderie of barn storming together, which is pretty awesome. So yeah,
this guy, Rube Foster, he owned the UM Chicago American Giants,
And confusingly, there was also another Negro team called the
Chicago Giants into St. Louis Giants. Yeah, yeah, but like
versus Chicago. But if it was Chicago versus Chicago, well
(17:32):
which one the Giants? Well, which one the American Giants? Okay,
now I understand not just the Giants, but Rube Foster
was like this, this booster of boundless enthusiasm. This guy
literally put together the first real Negro league, and when
he was basically removed from it, the whole the whole
(17:54):
thing fell apart. That's how how much of a driver
this guy was. Yeah, he's in the Hall of Fame too.
Yeah he was a catcher, I think. Uh. Oh, I
don't even think he was in as a player, but
he was. Yeah, I think just for his achievement. Um,
although it may have been both, I don't know. But
in nineteen he said, all right, here's what we'll do.
Let me get these seven team owners of the Midwestern
(18:15):
League that are doing these you know, barnstorming traveling shows. Basically,
let's get together in Kansas City, seven all black teams. Uh.
In addition to those two Chicago Giants, we have the
Cuban Stars, the Dayton Marco's, the Indianapolis abc S, and
the very famous Kansas City Monarchs and St. Louis Giants
(18:36):
all and this is the really like great thing about
the story. All of these teams except for the Monarchs
were black owned teams. Right. So, so not only do
you have black players careers developing, yeah, you have like
black enterprise developing in a in a time when there
were very few avenues of opportunity for black people to
(18:58):
advance in business. Yeah, and in a sense where they
own the business. This is a really good way to
do it. Yeah. And not only that, like the Major
League Baseball site points out, like this was like it
should be embraced in some ways because this at a
time was the only one of the only ways that
minorities could fully like excel to their fullest potential. And yeah,
(19:23):
and that was a point of that article that I
thought was pretty cool, is that one of the one
of the things they lamented about the segregation of baseball
during this time, um, is that we'll never know how
Babe Ruth would have stood up against Sachel Page pitching
to them because they never got to play each other.
So the truly great players are truly great during this
(19:46):
time within their own skin color. You know, you can't
say they were the greatest in baseball because they were
too legitimate, um parallel leagues going on at the time.
And yeah, they played each other sometimes, but if you
wanted to sit down and put stats against stats, you'd
be very hard pressed to do that. Uh sure, Thy Cobb,
(20:07):
Babe Ruth Christie Mathison, Like, we know they were good,
Like we're not knocking their talent, but who knows what
it would have been like in a truly integrated league. Yeah,
And actually it's funny to bring up thy Cobb because
I was like, oh, yeah, Ty Cobb was a huge racist.
I wonder what he thought about the Negro leagues. And
I looked it up and I found an article from
a guy who argues that Ty Cobb was not the um,
(20:30):
the horrible racist that he's made out to be these days,
written by Jimmy Cobb. There he found, well, he actually
did cite his son, and I think his son's name
might be jim Really. Yeah. Um, But the guy found
an article from maybe the fifties or something, nineteen fifty
two where Ty Cobb is quoted at length coming out
(20:50):
in favor of UM integration in baseball, Yeah, saying, like
of course these guys should play as long as you
know they conduct themselves like, uh, professor and old baseball players, like,
why would they not be able to play? I'm totally
in favor of it. Interesting, like, did Ty Cobbs say this?
I think that bears more research. Yeah, you know, because
(21:11):
he was supposedly very racist. Yeah, that's not what this
guy says. All right, well I'm gonna look at that.
That's not what his son says. I'm not doubting you,
of course, I just wanted to know I'm with you.
I understand. Uh. So we talked about the integration of
the Negro leagues, which was awesome. Pretty soon other leagues
for him, not just teams. There was one right here
(21:32):
in the South, the Negro Southern League, with teams from
right here in Atlanta. Dude, do you know the Atlanta
team played directly across the street constantly on Park. Yeah,
where there's now a Staples and a home depot in
a pet Smart and a Whole Foods. How Like funny
is that? Yeah? Um, if you walk into Whole Foods
and listen, you can hear the ghost of a backing
(21:53):
a ball. Yeah. This I don't think this was the
first team in Atlanta that played in the Negro Southern
League because they folded that same year. But the Atlantic
Black Crackers. We also had the Atlantic Crackers, which was
the white team. Um, we had the Atlantic Black Crackers.
And it sounds funny that we say Ponce de Leon,
uh not Ponton, but that's how we say it here.
(22:13):
It's the street that fronts our office building. Puts Daileon
himself would have punch you in the stomach if he
heard you say his name like that. But that's the
street in Atlanta that fronts our office And if you
go and look on the internet, you can see these
awesome pictures of this cool little baseball stadium. Right they're
hundreds of feet from where we sit. Really neat um.
(22:38):
But now you have Whole Foods. You just have to listen.
Seven dollars for artisan mayonnaise if you're lucky, seven dollars.
Oh that's just for the the just for one s. Yeah,
just once, is you her? Whole Foods got caught like
(22:58):
with uncalibrated scales for their hot bar stuff, like it's
not already expensive and yeah that's not I expect a
lot more from them. Yeah, you know, never get anything
with bones at one of those oh never or liquid
what a waste? You throw half of that chicken leg away? Yeah,
you paid for it, or just you know, grind that
(23:21):
chicken bone up and eat it and get your money,
like peel off with your teeth, spit the meat into
your into your little basket, and throw the bone back
into the hot bar. Yeah. Oh I didn't think about that.
That's great idea. And then you can say I'm no chump. Yeah,
I just go around screaming and not paying for that bone. Um,
all right, So where are we where? The Negro Southern
(23:42):
League folded, the Eastern Colored League open in nine, and
then finally in nine the American Negue Grow League formed,
and that was that was when things like they called
eventually the American Negro League in the American I'm sorry,
the National Negro League. The mad years of the Negro League,
like that was where the crime della crime and um,
(24:05):
the everything's going pretty smoothly except two things happen, right, Um,
there's even like a Negro League World Series is the
best of nine the Kansas City Yeah, the Kansas City
Monarchs narrowly beat uh, the hill Dale team they're from Darby, Pennsylvania,
which I guess is near Philadelphia. UM in the first
(24:27):
one in ninety four, So there's like there's a there's
these leagues have established themselves by they have their own
world series going right, UM. But just within a few
years there are a couple of hits to the league
that ultimately led to the the Negro Majors disbanding. UM.
One is that Rube Foster suffered gas poisoning in a
(24:49):
hotel room. In a hotel room in Indianapolis, he was
found unconscious. And there's some theory that UM, like everyone
believed in oasts and spirits and mediums in the nineteenth
century because they were all being poisoned by the natural
gas that was like leaking into their kitchens and homes
all the time. Right, Well, this guy had like an
(25:10):
acute poisoning and was found unconscious. And after that, when
he regained consciousness and his nurse back to health, he
lost his mind and he just kept getting worse and worse,
and by nine I think it's happened in nineteen twenty
four five he was institutionalized in By nineteen thirty he
died of a heart attack at age fifty one. UM
(25:32):
and again his guidance was so integral uh in this
first incarnation of the Negro leagues that you know, when
he was institutionalized, obviously they weren't like, what was the
league do next? He was in an institution, Um, and
the league started to falter and fall apart. And eventually
that coupled with the depression, and the onset of the
(25:54):
depression really kind of led to the unraveling of the
first Negro League. Yeah, and this the Major leag baseball site. Um,
you know, these were they profited on certain days of
the week. Sundays were big days because they were played
double headers. But the fact is, um, Black Americans didn't
have a lot of expendable money to throw it going
(26:17):
to baseball games, even though they're you know, pretty cheap.
That was commiserate with what people made at the time,
unless you were one of the Walker brothers whose dad
was a physician. Yeah, they probably a little money. Um,
they were playing, so I'm sure their parents got in
for free. So it's all just a moot point. I
wonder if they did get free family tickets back then,
I would hope, So, I that's gotta be as old
as tickets, right, Probably we gotta do an episode on tickets, guest.
(26:41):
Let's uh. So they were making a little money on Sundays,
they weren't hugely profitable overall, even though they were known
as somewhat successful. Like, no, a lot of these guys
were still barn storming on their off days. Yeah. And
these are the players, you know, trying to make ends meet,
like the owners themselves were struggling here and there. Um.
(27:02):
White people came to see games sometimes, especially when they
were exhibition games against white teams, because they love to
go out there and see the see something they had
never seen before, which many times was the black team
mopping the floor with the white team. Um, although it
seemed pretty evenly matched, like from what I gathered, it
wasn't like lopside in one way or the other. Like
(27:24):
they were good competitive games. Yeah. There are plenty of um,
white players who are better than the black players, and
there are plenty of black players who are better than
white players. Yeah. Yeah, I would say evenly match is
a good way to put so if you had an
integrade league, you would get the best of both, which
is eventually what we got. Plus also in some of
these cities, Chuck, these there they were not just baseball
(27:44):
was segregated, but just within the city you had a
white team and you had a black team. And that's
that's evidence to the names of some of the black teams,
like the Black Crackers, the Black Yankees. Um, there were
the Yankees and then there were the Crackers. Right, So
if you were a white player or a white person,
you're probably a fan of the white team and you
weren't going and watching the black teams play, right. Um,
(28:07):
so they list out four things here on the site.
They said the two leagues, uh, the American and National
Negro Leagues were northern and basically city dwelling teams. A
couple that with, um, there weren't a lot of black
people living in northern cities at the time. Uh. The
South was, you know, was way more Uh well, I
(28:28):
want to say integrated, but it wasn't integrated. Uh, way
more black people living in the South at the time. Yeah,
which is I wonder why the Southern Negro League didn't
take off like a rocket then. Yeah. I mean probably
for the other reasons, like you couldn't afford to go
to the games and all that stuffy Uh black people
that were in the North, Uh, didn't have a whole
lot of money, and so basically all that adds up
(28:50):
to not a lot of audience buying tickets. And the
only way to keep a league afloat is to sell
tickets and to sell concessions, same as it is today.
So all those things coupled with Rube Foster the depression.
There the greatest champion and probably sharpest mind. Uh, sadly
succumbing to mental illness and then the depression. And that
(29:11):
was the end of the beginning of the Negro leagues, right, yeah,
that was the end of the first one. Yes, and
there were more to come, and we'll talk about it
right after this. I ski all right, So uh, it
(29:47):
didn't take long. Uh, the old saying you can't keep
a good man down. People wanted to play baseball, they
were good at it. Um. They thought there was more
money to be made in leagues. And so what happens
is these numbers guys get involved, and a numbers man
is the numbers game was basically like an illegal, unsanctioned
(30:10):
street lottery. Right, So numbers guys have a lot of money,
and some of them said, you know what, let's put
money into starting baseball teams. In leagues, and one guy
in particular in Pittsburgh, Gus Greenley, great name. He was
a bar owner in Pittsburgh. He bought the Pittsburgh Crawford's
in nineteen thirty one. He said, well, I've got a team,
but I don't have a league. So two years later
(30:32):
he formed the second Negro National League, and other numbers
guys bought in, and all of a sudden they had
another league going. UM and this basically kicked off what's
known as the Golden Age of the Negro leagues. UM
starting about nineteen thirty one thirty three, when when these
other teams came about, and um, Greenley's team himself, was
(30:56):
it his? No, I'm sorry, it would have been right
across the river, the Homestead Grays. Yeah, they eventually migrated
back to Pittsburgh over to Pittsburgh, so they were the
same team that went from one town to another. They
weren't rivals. Now, I think there was still the other
Pittsburgh team, but from what I understand, the Homestead Grades
(31:17):
eventually became part of Pittsburgh, or maybe there was another
team on that shirt, but I do know they eventually
get went to Pittsburgh because you know, Homestead. We've been there.
We did a show there. Ye yeah, okay um, and
I was like, are we going to the right place?
And the car was taking me. So Homestead used to
have not just a team, they used to have the
best Negro League team possibly ever. Oh yeah, wait easy.
(31:41):
For nine consecutive years they won the Pennant all right, yeah,
nine years in a row. Josh Gibson, cool, Papa Bell
and Buck Leonard some of their stars, yeah, just some
of them. In they had no less than five future
Hall of famers on on the team. Five. That's amazing.
Point to a team that has five future Hall of
Famers on it now or ever did well? So some
(32:05):
of the Yankees teams did over the years. But like,
I don't think anything right now now, Like even the
best team right now doesn't have five future Hall of Famers.
It's certainly not the Braves. We don't have one. I
don't know. I could see Freddie Freeman hit in the
Hall of Fame one day. M hm, oh really, I
haven't been watching the last couple of seasons. I mean,
(32:26):
he's our best player. But because the best player on
the worst team in baseball not very good at the bat, alright,
So we did mention that, um, there were exhibition games
going on, and things really picked up with the exhibition
games now because they were a little well funded. And
this is when UM, white players would come and see
(32:47):
the teams playing and mean it was basically more popular
than ever. Uh in both communities. Yes, and UM we
said that they had the UM the Negro League World
Series going on, right, UM, there was actually another game
that came out of this. I think it was UM,
it might have been Gus Greenley, I think it was
(33:09):
who came up with this is the East versus West
All Stars game, and that became bigger than the World
Series and whatever was in the Negro Leagues. It was huge. Yeah,
So UM that became kind of like the de facto
big game of the year rather than the World Series
for UM, and they played it every year I think
in Comiskey Field. Yeah, in Chicago, because you know East
(33:31):
and East West in Chicago. That's what it says on
the T shirts. At least, so players are starting to
make some like the top players are starting to make
some pretty good money at the time. You can't go
any further without talking about uh Satchel Page Leroy satchel page. Dude.
He was, um a picture very interesting dude, maybe the
(33:55):
greatest picture of all time in the sport of baseball.
Maybe he was eccentric, He was an entertainer. He was
like the US same Bolt of his day. People loved him, Okay,
except he didn't like to run. That would make a
little different. Even said he didn't like to run. What
was his quote? He said that, um, training for me
(34:16):
is rising gently from the bench, back onto the bench.
So he had have you ever seen video or I
guess you know film of him pitching, Yeah, with those
old timey baggy baseball pants, and yeah that was the style.
But his um, he had a weird wind up. He
had this sort of double windmill that he would do
with his pitching arm. And then um, when he was younger,
(34:39):
he had a great fastball, and he had he was
noted for his control like Greg Maddox, like in his
pinpoint control like supposed he could just put a baseball
within a half inch of where he wanted it to be,
which is a big big deal for a picture. Um,
As he lost his fastball over the years, he learned
basically every pitch under the sun. Like he pitched until
(35:02):
he was fifty nine years old. He first he first
signed in the Major's White majors at forty two. Forty two,
forty two year old rookie. He's the he's the oldest
rookie ever in the Major League Baseball and I think
the oldest picture ever. Well yeah, um, he was even
older than Gaylord Perry. How old was he? He was
(35:25):
in his forties, like Nolan Ryan, Gaylord Perry. Nolan Ryan
made it to fifty, not fifty, but he came close.
Like pictures notably have been a little older, which is
crazy because like their arms and yeah, but they're not
you know, they're not like running around and batting like
(35:46):
other players. Yeah, but you're right, like Freddie Freeman, like
the stress on the stress on the arm is amazing.
So one thing that that was problematic or is problematic
when you're going back in looking at the negro leagues
is that, um, a lot of teams were allowed to,
depending on the league, were allowed to set their own schedules. Um,
(36:07):
stats weren't kept quite as um well as they were
in the white leagues. Yeah, we don't know Satil pagees
real lifetime stats. No, but in full there are some
estimates and they are high. So the one that I
saw is that Sachiel page Head. I think it was
in this um this article on MLB dot com, which
(36:29):
eventually will say the author's name. Right. Um, they said
that he had three hundred career shutouts. Three career shutouts,
and this guy says in italics, not wins, shutouts. Right, Yeah,
if you don't know baseball, shutout means you have pitched
a game where no one scored a run. And back
then they were probably complete game shutouts, meaning he never
(36:52):
came out and was relieved by another picture. Right, he
would have pitched like all nine innings back in the
in the day. They should do that way more than
they do now. Okay, so he had three hundred career shutouts.
Fift hundred wins is the estimate that that's on MLB
dot com. Yeah, to put that into perspective for non
baseball fans again, if you have three hundred wins wins,
(37:15):
not shutouts, win, then you're a Hall of Famer. And
in fact, they don't think there will ever be another
three hundred game winner again because of they are more
pictures in the rotation now they usually have five guys
instead of four. They don't pitches deep into games. They
rest them a lot more. So it's just we may
not ever see that happen again, just because of the
(37:35):
way it's built. It To also put in perspective, cy
Young is um regarded as one of the best pictures
ever in in Major League Baseball, named the Top Award
after him exactly. He had seventies six shutouts, which is amazing.
He had the most wins ever still in Major League
Baseball at five eleven, so Satchel page Head conceivably three
(37:59):
times more. Yeah, then the the highest win count ever
in Major league and that's counting his entire career assume,
which again was very very long. It was a very
long career. But that just makes it all the more amazing,
especially as he gets older. Yeah, Like, let's let's say
that people don't say, don't count the negro leagues as
being in the top league at the time. I cut
(38:21):
it in half, and he's still way ahead of everybody
else if you subtract fifty of everything he did and
the fact that he sat in a rocking chair and
the dugout and had like a huge personality. Yeah, so
he learned all sorts of pitches. By the end of
his career, he was pitching knuckleballs and he was famous
for the hesitation pitch, which he invented, which was when
(38:44):
he got to the White major leagues, they were like,
that's illegal. He can't do that. It's called the bulk
and uh. He was like, all right, well know, He's like, no,
it's called the hesitation pitch. It was very sneaky. Um.
You know, it's like you you act like you're pitching,
then you stop. And because his theory, he was like,
you know, I got guys up there that are starting
to swing because I'm so fast, Like when they see
(39:06):
me winding up, they're starting to swing. So if I
just put a little slight pause there, then they're swinging
and then the ball comes. So it's very very tricky
little pitch. Um. And he was making between thirty and
forty grand a year and the Negro and this is
also with appearances and stuff like that, but in the
Negro leagues, which is about half a million dollars today. Yeah,
(39:30):
amazing amount of money at the time, you know, and
those appearances, um uh uh. If you were a team
owner that had Satual Page on your team, uh, you
might let him go make some scratch and probably take
a cut yourself by lending him to another team whose
attendance was struggling. And all you had to do was
(39:50):
advertised for a week that Satual Page is gonna be
pitching one day, and you would sell out, so he
would help other Negro League teams that were that that
we're struggling. Yeah, to be a draw. And here's one
little cool thing about our in Atlanta Braves and hight Satchel.
Page was lacking one more season to get his major
(40:12):
league baseball pension and was out of the league and retired,
and the Atlanta Braves signed him as a player coach
like Terry Pendleton. Yeah, he was never a player coach,
was he? No, But here's a player and then a coach.
Oh yeah, Pete Rose was a player coach. Was he really? Like?
He managed the Reds and played for them. I didn't
(40:32):
know and bet on them. Yeah, but they signed him
to a one year deal so he could get his
major league baseball penchion. That is awesome, which is really cool? Year?
Was that? That's really cool? Yeah, go brave. So if
you see a picture when I saw a picture of
him in the Braves uniform. I was like, wait a minute,
he never played for the Braves, and he really didn't.
(40:53):
It was it was sort of, you know, just a
little sneaky way to get him in there, which is great. Um,
all right, so Satchel Page is killing it, other players
are killing it. It would not be long before somebody
in the White League's somebody said the talent is too good.
(41:14):
Somebody has to be the first to make this move
and break the color barrier. Yeah, right, you know that
was the thing Like this. The Negro leagues were ultimately,
as we'll find out, victims of their own success. The
players that they supported and brought into the game, we're
of obvious major league caliber in any major league. They
(41:37):
were the best in the world. They were just playing
on segregated teams. And so finally a group of people,
but especially it usually comes in the form of one
guy named branch Rickey. Yeah. Did Tom Hanks play him? No?
Harrison Ford? No? Maybe? Well I didn't see them recent
(42:00):
jacket was Harrison Ford? Maybe I've seen him portrayed in
other movies. I can't tell if it was him or not,
because the actor didn't have a diamond studded earring in
but Harrison Ford could have taken it out for the role. Uh.
This guy named branch Rickey, he was he an executive
or a manager for the Dodgers. He was he was
(42:21):
with he was an executive. And he said, and this
was when they were in Brooklyn, right, He said, this
is ridiculous there that we need to break this color barrier.
There's plenty of great players out there that I want
to sign. I'm going to break this unspoken rule. And
he looked around to find a player who was not
only good, but who he felt could withstand this horrendous
(42:46):
reception that whoever the first black player would be would
definitely receive. And who did receive and he found it
in the in the person of Jackie Robinson. Yeah, that's
a that's a huge point, um, because like I said,
jet Roy Empanella was probably better player at the time
than Jackie Robinson. But if you see the Jackie Robinson story, Uh,
(43:06):
I didn't see the recent one, like I said, but
I just know a lot about his story. He was
the right guy. He had the temperament, he had the leadership. Um,
Roy Campanella, take your head off, Well, yeah he did.
He was a tough guy, but Jackie Robinson was was
the man in every way. And we should also shout
out to the road being paved by people like Joe
(43:29):
Lewis and Jesse Owens before Jackie Robinson, as far as
just white America accepting mainstream black athletes into their lives. Yeah.
And I don't know if it was on this or
on there's a site called negro League Baseball dot com
UM that has a really good article called Negro League
Baseball one oh one or something like that. This is
the basics. There's a definite story to the whole thing, right, UM.
(43:51):
But they point out that UM, probably more than anything
that helped break the color barrier was UM blacks serving
in World War Two, serving alongside UM white soldiers and
and stories coming back from the fronts of like, hey,
these guys are killing Germans just as fast as any
any white guy. UM. And at the time America was like, well,
(44:17):
we love that about people. So when they returned, UM,
the black soldiers came home to a different America that
they helped change by fighting in World War two. And
I mean that the timing of this apparently is not
coincidental that Jackie Robinson was signing the six a year
after World War Two. One. Uh So branch Ricky was. Um,
(44:40):
he was a very puritanical guy. He would often lecture
players on sex and drinking and stuff, and he was
he wasn't just some benevolent, benevolent champion of the black man. Yeah,
that's that's a good point, man, because a lot of
times stories like this end up being about the guy
who took the change and paved the way for the
(45:01):
black players. But he did, he did. But emphasis it's
just too easy sometimes for the emphasis to go onto
that where it's like, well, the black player like he came.
He was one of the greatest baseball players of all time. Exactly.
Let's let's put it this way. If branch Rickey hadn't
wanted to sell tickets by fielding a good team, he
(45:23):
would have never signed Jackie Robinson. He was a businessman.
The Dodgers sucked at the time, and um, but he
was an idealist. I mean he was very much like, no,
like this is wrong and they should be allowed to play,
so okay. So he was a complex human being like
all other human beings. He can't just be shoehorned into
an easy caricature. That's great. So branch Ricky complicated human being.
(45:46):
He selected Jackie Robinson and it was a great selection. Yeah,
Jackie Robinson played one year in the miners, which was ridiculous. Um,
they should have just like he spent his entire life
playing in the miners. Uh, they should have just promoted
him right away. But I think they just wanted to
ease that transition. He won the batting title in the
minors his only year there, and then uh, one Rookie
(46:07):
of the Year in his very first year with the
Brooklyn Dodgers, and uh that was April fifteenth, ninety seven
was when uh he made his debut, which was very
very historic day, an amazing day that Major League Baseball
is really like honored Jackie Robinson to the fullest. Now, yeah,
(46:28):
they should great. Jackie Robinson definitely threw up in the floodgates.
Within four months of Jackie Robinson being signed or no,
I guess actually being called up to the majors, two
other guys um were signed, both in July, and I
think that year there were a number of other um
black players suddenly playing for white Major League Baseball, which
(46:51):
is suddenly not now just Major League Baseball not white
major League baseball. That's uh. Larry Dobie Clea and Indians
Willard Brown, the St. Louis Brown's Henry Hank Thompson, the St.
Louis Brown's Dan Bankhead Leroy Satchel Page made it finally, uh,
and of course Roy Campanella, among others. These were the
first African Americans in Major League Baseball and UM by
(47:16):
nineteen fifty two, just a few years later, there were
a hundred and fifty black players, and by all but
four major league teams had black players. There were a
few holdouts. Yeah. The Boston Red Sox notably were the last.
They waited until nineteen fifty nine, thirteen years after Jackie
Robinson's debut season. Yeah, in the in the minors. So
(47:40):
with the signing of Jackie Robinson and all the players
to follow, like you hinted at earlier, UM, and like
this article UH plainly says it was, it was a
very bitter sweet end um. And one way it was great,
the color barrier was smashed, the league was being integrated,
and they were getting their due. Um, although it was
(48:00):
a struggle. But in another way, it was also sad
that this league that had so much gumption and such
a great like we'll do it ourselves then attitude, uh,
and empower these men to play, and these people to
own these teams and start their own leagues. So it
was definitely like a weird time in history. It is,
(48:21):
like I think nowadays there's much more of a reverence
and a bit of mourning for the disappearance of that league. Um.
But you know, in another way, like I said, it
was smashing the color barrier was way more sure, way
more better. We just went into hulk speak. So yeah,
(48:43):
it would have been a much more satisfying end of
the whole thing if the Negro leagues had poached the
best players in the um white Major League Baseball. Oh. Actually,
you know what the best possible thing could have been
was if the white major leagues absorbed those teams and
owners and ownership. It's part of one big league. But
(49:03):
they were like, no, we're just gonna take your players
give them to us. So, um, that is Negro League Baseball,
the history of it. YEP officially disbanded in and this
article says into the nineteen fifties, there were still a
few teams playing here and there, and in the early
nineteen sixties even that was like one final team or
(49:28):
I guess one final pair of teams. I guess they
had to play somebody still playing, right, or they could
scrimmage themselves. Yeah, it says the Negro American League was
the last to throw in the town early sixties. Yeah.
So yeah, more than one team. And this article makes
a point today, or at least in two thousand twelve, UM,
major League baseball was non white, which I was like,
(49:50):
what I would have guessed it was the opposite of
that that I would not have gues of Major League
baseball players are white. Yeah, and you know, there's a
big push I think, like the one of the least
represented demographics now in pro baseball or African Americans. Yeah,
(50:10):
partially because of the rise of Latino players, um, and
then partially because they there's not a big a push
to play baseball these days as kids in America, and
so they're there. There's a lot of concerted efforts to
try and get baseball going again in black communities, UM,
which is awesome. You know. Yeah, I know I was pushed.
(50:33):
My dad was like, get out there and get hit
in the head with the ball. Let's see. I wouldn't allowed,
I would I had to play church softball, so lame.
Uh So, then the color bears broken, and now the
last vestige of any sort of color issue is the
Native American slurs that are rampant in in all sports
(50:55):
as far as teams go. Yeah, if you want to
know more about the negro Leagues, you can type those
words in the search bar at how Stuff works dot com.
You can also go check out this amazing article uh
called negro Leagues a Kaleidoscopic Review. It's on MLB dot
com by Stephen Goldman. Yeah, he's a great author. And
check out negro League Baseball dot com. They have like
(51:18):
all sorts of great profiles on the players and all
that stuff. We never said the nicknames? Oh yeah, should
we rattle off a few of those? Alright, boy, these
are some good nicknames. How about Jelly Gardner or Spooney Palm,
Turkey Sterns. Turkey Sterns he's the Hall of Famer, Copperney
Thompson or steel Arm Davis. I think you mentioned um
(51:39):
cool Papa Bell. Yeah, cool Papa Bell. That is the
greatest name ever. Uh, Possum Poles, Ace Adams, King Tuck,
Smokey Joe, Williams bullet Joe Rogan Not yeah, Joe Rogan.
Did you know that Rats Henderson boy Turkey Sterns. That
might be the best. That might be my new hotel
student them cool, Papa Joe. Yeah, but no one would
(52:03):
buy that at a hotel registry. Oh yeah, if you
go up and Sterns, they definitely go for Those are
great nicknames. All right? Oh yeah, okay, So now that
we said Turkey Sterns, it's time for listener mail. This
one I'm gonna call short and sweet. Um. What do
(52:23):
you call it when you remember something with a pneumatic device? Uh? No,
mnemonic when you remember it while you're pumping air up?
And was it nomadic? You remember it while you're wandering around? Pneumonic?
Of course? I feel like a dummy. How did you?
Josh and Chuck? A friend recommended your show to me recently,
(52:45):
and I love it. You satisfy all my nerdy entertainment requirements.
While in at orc Um you seem to have a
bit of trouble recalling the order of taxonomic taxonomic categories. Well,
I'm gonna have trouble in this nextes. During Wooly Mammoth
Uh not wooly mammoths, as our typo originally said, it
(53:09):
was my fault. That's all right, you just forgot to
know Wally. Uh. Here's an easy memory trick we learned
in high school biology. Kings play chess on fine green silk.
Kingdom Philum class order, family, genus species. I love that
stuff because I will never forget it. Now, that's not
a pnemonic device, is it. It's pneumatic. I have no
(53:32):
idea why this is still in my head over ten
years later. Well that's exactly why. Sure, Katie, So I
hope that helps. And that is Katie from West Texas.
Thanks a lot, Katie from West Texas. We appreciate that. Um.
Kings play chess on green silk, fine green silk. I'll
never remember the fine part. Yeah. Uh. If you want
(53:54):
to get in touch with us, you can tweet to
us at s Y s K podcast. You can also
hang out with me at Josh Underscore UM Underscore Clark
on Twitter. Uh. You can hang out with us on
Facebook dot com slash stuff you know, and check out
Chuck at Charles W. Bryant Charles W. Chuck Bryant appropriate
on Facebook as well. You can send us an email
(54:16):
to Stuff podcast at how stuff Works dot com and
has always joined us at our home on the web,
Stuff You Should Know dot com. For more on this
and thousands of other topics, is it how stuff Works
dot com.
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