Baseball

African Americans have been involved in baseball, or "base ball" as it was first known, since its earliest days. Some enslaved blacks on southern plantations played baseball during their time off from work, and there were scattered African-American amateur baseball players in the Northeast before the Civil War. Games were played in Brooklyn between the Colored Union Club and the Unknown Club in 1860 and also between the Unknown Club and the Monitors in 1862. African Americans also played for the Philadelphia Pythians, founded in 1867 by civil rights activist Octavius Catto and businessman and educator Jacob C. White, Jr. The Pythians sought admission to the National Association of Base Ball Players, but the nominating committee unanimously voted to exclude "any club which may be composed of one or more colored persons."

In the nineteenth century, black teams, which mainly had middle class members, competed with black and sometimes white teams. In 1869, the Pythians played and defeated the white Philadelphia City Items in a series of games, while the Brooklyn Uniques and the Philadelphia Excelsiors were matched for the "Championship of Colored Clubs." There were even interracial contests in New Orleans, where thirteen black clubs played in a tournament in 1875. By the late 1870s, a number of blacks played for white college nines, including Oberlin's Fleet and Weldy Walker, Marietta College's John L. Harrison, and Dartmouth's Julius P. Haynes. In the 1890s, James Francis Gregory served as captain for Amherst's nine, while his brother Eugene pitched for Harvard.

Early Professional Baseball

The National Association of Professional Baseball Players, established in 1871, never formally banned black teams and players, but it and its successor, the National League, formed in 1876, adhered to a tacit prohibition. Seventy-three African Americans competed at various levels of minor-league play during the nineteenth century. John "Bud" Fowler was probably the first black professional ballplayer, pitching for Lynn, Massachusetts in the International Association in 1878. Six years later he played for Stillwater, Minnesota, of the Northwestern League. In 1885 Fowler played for Keokuk, Iowa, in the Western League, and for Topeka of the same league one year later. He was released after pressure from white players led to the exclusion of blacks from that league. Writing of Fowler's predicament, Sporting Life commented: "He is one of the best general players in the country, and if he had a white face would be playing with the best of them … the poor fellow's color is against him. With his splendid abilities he would long ago have been on some good club had his color been white instead of black. Those who know say there is no better second baseman in the country."

In 1883, the Toledo, Ohio, team of the Northwestern League hired catcher Moses Fleetwood "Fleet" Walker. Walker, a minister's son from Steubenville, Ohio, had attended college at Oberlin and Michigan. That season, Adrian "Cap" Anson, player-manager of the National League's Chicago White Stockings, threatened to cancel an exhibition game with Toledo if Walker played, but owner Albert G. Spalding wanted the guaranteed money, so the game was played. The next year, Toledo joined the American Association, a rival of the National League, and Fleet Walker became the first black major leaguer.

Walker faced enormous obstacles. Pitcher Tony Mullane later admitted that Walker "was the best catcher I ever worked with, but I disliked a Negro and whenever I had to pitch to him I used anything I wanted without looking at his signals." In Richmond, Virginia, six fans (using pseudonyms) wrote a letter threatening him with a beating by a mob of seventy-five men if he played. Walker was no longer on the team by then, and the threat went unchallenged. In fifty-one games, Walker batted .263, and he was praised for his catching. At the end of the season, brother Weldy Walker joined Toledo for five games. The two Walkers were the only African-Americans known to have played in the majors before Jackie Robinson.

In 1885 Fleet Walker played for Cleveland in the Western League and then Waterbury in the Eastern League. Two years later he joined Newark of the International League (IL), then just one step below the majors. There were seven African Americans in the IL, playing on six of the league's ten teams. The most notable of these players were pitcher George Stovey of Newark, who set an all-time IL record with 34 wins, and second baseman Frank Grant of Buffalo, considered the best black player of the nineteenth century. Grant batted .366 in 1887, leading the league in doubles, triples, and home runs.

However, black players in the IL faced widespread abuse from racist white players, management, and fans. Ballplayers feared that the presence of blacks would lower the status of their occupation and lower salary levels. They threw balls at African American players, and often spiked them on the base paths. Frank Grant allegedly developed wooden shin guards to protect his legs from injury by white base runners. White teammates gave wrong advice to blacks and shunned them off the field. Some white players even refused to pose with black teammates for pictures. The media reinforced the derogatory public image of black players. Pictures in Harper's Weekly depicted them as lazy and stupid, and The Official Baseball Record referred to them as "coons." In July 1887, the IL league's team owners bowed to pressure from white players, agreeing not to sign additional black players and limiting the active black players to two per team. There were no African Americans in the IL after 1889.

Several all-black professional teams were formed in the early 1880s, including the Philadelphia Orions and the St. Louis Black Stockings. The best of these clubs was the Cuban Giants, founded in 1885 by Frank Thompson, headwaiter at Babylon, N.Y.'s Argyle Hotel and his partner and team manager, S. K. McGovern, a headwaiter and journalist. The club, composed originally of hotel staff, called itself "Cuban" to alleviate prejudice (which was often less pronounced in the case of dark-skinned foreigners) and "Giants" after New York's National League team. The nickname became a common one among black teams, with ball clubs such as the Philadelphia Giants, the (New York) Lincoln Giants, and the Chicago Giants. In 1886 white businessmen Walter Cook and J. M. Bright owned the Cuban Giants. Players earned wages of $48 to $72 per month depending on their position (pitchers and catchers made the most, outfielders the least), good wages in comparison to what other black workers earned. The Cuban Giants played black teams, college squads, and even major league clubs, although the American Association champion St. Louis Browns backed out of a scheduled contest in 1887. In 1889, the Cuban Giants and another black team, the New York Gothams, were members of the otherwise all-white Middle States League. The creation of the six-team Southern League of Colored Baseballists in 1886 marked the first effort to form a black baseball league, but the arrangement lasted only a few games. The nine-team League of Colored Baseball Clubs was organized one year later, but disbanded after only one week.

In 1887, the same year the International League restricted blacks, "Cap" Anson refused to schedule a game with the Newark team of the International League if Stovey played. Newark complied, benching Stovey. At the time, conventional wisdom held that Anson was primarily responsible for pushing blacks out of organized baseball. However, it seems clear that Anson's actions merely reflected widespread white opinion. As Sporting News commented in 1889, "Race prejudice exists in professional baseball to a marked degree, and the unfortunate son of Africa who makes his living as a member of a team of white professionals has a rocky road to travel." That season the Cuban Giants and the Gothams of New York played in the otherwise all white-Middle States League. The last all-black team to play in a white League was the Acme Colored Giants of Celeron, N.Y. in the white Iron and Coal League in 1898. Overall seventy African Americans played in the white leagues in the nineteenth century. The last was Bill Galloway, who played five games in the Canadian League in 1899.

Black Baseball in the Early Twentieth Century

African Americans were big baseball fans and countless black youths played baseball at the turn of the century.

Prominent blacks ranging from activist Ida B. Wells to poet James Weldon Johnson were players or fans. It is not known if any African Americans passed for white and played in organized baseball. In 1901 Baltimore Orioles manager John McGraw tried to pass Charlie Grant as white during spring training, but his ruse was discovered, and Grant was released. Ten years later the Cincinnati Reds signed two Cubans, allegedly "Castilian," though one was dark skinned; and a few years later, the Reds hired another Cuban whose brother played on a Negro team. In 1916 pitcher Jimmy Claxton, of mixed black and Indian ancestry, played two games for the Oakland Oaks of the Pacific Coast League before being released.

Chicago established itself as a leading center of black ball with several fine semipro teams, most notably the Leland Giants, the best team in the otherwise all-white City League in the late 1800s. There were several black army teams, including a squad from the all-black 25th Infantry (later famous for its involvement in the Brownsville, Texas incident of 1906), which beat all comers in the Philippines. Collegiate ball clubs existed at Howard University and elsewhere since the era of Reconstruction. In the 1890s, Atlanta became a center of college baseball, with competing teams from local black colleges, including Atlanta Baptist Seminary (now Morehouse College), Atlanta University, Clark University, and Morris Brown College.

Players on the semipro black teams played well over 100 games, and earned up to $100 a month. They played on Sundays in their home city, and on other days "barnstormed," touring out of town, playing other black teams, college squads, town nines, and semipros. They played occasional post-season games against major leaguers and wintered in California. The top clubs included the Cuban Giants, Philadelphia's Cuban X Giants, and the Leland Giants, who went 110–10 in 1907 and vied for "The Colored Championship of the World." In 1911 star pitcher Andrew "Rube" Foster, nicknamed for outpitching New York Giants star Rube Marquard in an exhibition game, founded the outstanding Chicago American Giants with his white partner John Schorling. Three years later, J. K. Wilkinson, a white man, put together the powerful All-Nations team, which included African Americans, whites, Latinos, and Native Americans. In 1920, Wilkinson combined players from the All-Nations team with members of the black 25th Infantry Squad Army team to form the famous Kansas City Monarchs. Top players then included John Henry Lloyd, a shortstop for the Indianapolis ABC's who was dubbed "the Black Honus Wagner," and "Rube" Foster, who one year went 54–1 pitching for the Cuban X-Giants. Another star of that era was "Smokey Joe" Williams of the Lincoln Giants, who compiled a 6–4–2 record against white major leaguers in exhibition games, including a three-hit shutout against the National League champion Philadelphia Phillies in 1915.

The Negro Leagues

There were a couple of unsuccessful efforts to form a black league in the early 1900s. Then in 1920, Rube Foster, who had built the Chicago American Giants into a financially successful enterprise, formed the National Association of Professional Baseball Clubs (popularly known as the Negro National League). Foster's organizational genius and astute understanding of the promotional possibilities inherent in league play, plus his desire to wrest economic power and leadership over black baseball from white booking agents, led him to put together the first lasting Negro league. The league was composed of six teams located in midwestern cities with significant black populations. The association was intended to be entirely black-owned, but the popular appeal of Wilkinson's Kansas City Monarchs led Foster to include that club also. The new league was an almost immediate success, with outfielders like Oscar Charleston of Indianapolis ("the Black Babe Ruth") and John Lloyd, and pitchers like "Smokey Joe" Williams and Wilbur "Bullet" Rogan of the Kansas City Monarchs.

The Negro National League (NNL) was challenged in 1923 by white booking agent Nat Strong, who created the Eastern Colored League with six teams, four white-owned, in eastern cities. After a period of mutual bad feeling and raids on each other's players, the two leagues observed a truce and organized a structure similar to that of white leagues, with champions of the two leagues competing in a black World Series. However, since ball clubs sometimes preferred lucrative barnstorming exhibitions to scheduled league games, teams played uneven numbers of games, so league standings were hard to determine. There was also a third league for black players in the 1920s, the short-lived Southern Negro League, which could not compete financially with the others. A few independent teams, notably Pittsburgh's Homestead Grays, refused to join the Negro Leagues but played exhibition games with league teams. The Eastern Colored League folded in 1928, and some teams were absorbed into the NNL.

The Great Depression took a heavy toll on black baseball. The NNL, already weakened by Rube Foster's 1926 breakdown and his subsequent death in 1930, was unable to meet its debts and folded in 1931. During the following two years, teams disbanded or survived precariously as local semipro or touring barnstorming teams depended on white bookers for survival. Some players went to play in the Caribbean or Mexico.

In 1933, a new Negro National League, containing six teams (later eight), was reformed under the guidance of Gus Greenlee, a prosperous "numbers" (an illegal lottery) king in Pittsburgh who sought a legitimate investment for his money. Greenlee owned the Pittsburgh Crawfords and most of the other teams in the league were also owned by black numbers operators. Starting in 1934 the NNL played two half-seasons, and the winners of each half-season met in the Negro World Series. The Crawfords dominated at first, as the free-spending Greenlee recruited LeRoy "Satchel" Paige, Josh Gibson, Oscar Charleston, James "Cool Papa" Bell, and Judy Johnson, all future Hall-of-Famers, to play on his team, but other clubs eventually evened the balance of power within the leagues. In 1937, the six-team Negro American League (NAL) was organized. The NAL was mainly white-owned and included the Kansas City Monarchs, who had previously declined to join the revamped NNL. The NNL concentrated on eastern teams, with the NAL operating in the west. The respective league champions met each other in the Colored World Series. However, the biggest event in black baseball in the 1930s was not the Colored World Series but the East–West All-Star game, first played in Chicago in 1933, shortly after Major League Baseball held its first All-Star Game, also in Chicago at Comiskey Park. The annual event routinely attracted crowds of 30,000 to 40,000. This showcase event was covered nationally in the black press, especially the Chicago Defender and the Pittsburgh Courier, which featured extensive coverage of black baseball. The East–West game became a national social event for black Americans.

In the 1930s, the NNL season began in the south with a brief spring training, followed by barnstorming tours as clubs traveled north. The exhibition games furthered team development and strategy, were a necessary source of revenue, and helped cement the relationship between players and the local black populations. In April or May the teams arrived in their home cities and commenced league play. Black urban populations were not large enough to sustain more than a 70 game season, and the high unemployment rate during the Depression further hurt the gate. Black teams had to be innovative, and around 1932, the Kansas City Monarchs became one of the first teams to use portable lights for night baseball. Night games encouraged a larger black working class audience, appealing to many laborers who could attend games in the evening after work. League games were usually on the weekends, but teams traveled extensively during the week to bolster incomes with exhibitions throughout the season, sometimes playing three or four games per day. Clubs usually traveled by bus or in a caravan of cars, often over bad rural roads. Few black nines owned their own field, which created scheduling problems (although when business picked up in the 1940s, several teams were able to rent major or minor league ballparks.) When the season ended in September, or after the Colored World Series, the better Negro Leagues players went on to play in winter leagues in Mexico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and California.

The Negro Leagues had a hard time surviving the poverty created by the Depression, and problems were exacerbated by mismanagement and poor planning. During the late 1930s the average player made $100 to $150 a month. Since they commonly played without formal contracts, players often jumped teams in search of better pay. In 1937 Gibson, Paige and Bell all left their teams to play in the Dominican Republic for the team sponsored by dictator Rafael Trujillo.

The Negro Leagues games were exciting to watch. While there were power hitters, most notably Josh Gibson of the Pittsburgh Crawfords and Homestead Grays, runs

were often hard to come by. Games depended, more than in white leagues, on pitching, defense, and speed. Pitchers like "Satchel" Paige of the Kansas City Monarchs worked frequently and were reliant not only on speed but also on trick pitches to beat opposing teams. There was little money for equipment, so scuffed and loaded balls remained in play. The spitball and similar pitches, banned in the major leagues in 1920, remained legal in the Negro Leagues. Speed was also emphasized in Negro League play, and bunts, stolen bases, and hit-and-run plays were common strategies.

Another difference between white and black baseball was showmanship. Black players were conscious of their role as entertainers. Batters might begin their at-bat with their back to home plate, and then turn around to hit the ball. Satchel Paige was known to occasionally call in the outfielders, and then proceed to strike out the side. Paige was so popular that the Kansas City Monarchs raised revenue by loaning out Paige, who earned $37,000 in 1941, to other teams. The Indianapolis Clowns (previously the Ethiopian Clowns), an independent black team whose players clowned and pulled trick plays in the manner of basketball's Harlem Globetrotters, were such a financial attraction that despite their unserious reputation, they were invited to join the Negro American League in 1938.

By the 1940s, Negro League baseball was one of the most successful black businesses of the Jim Crow era. Good players could earn $300 a month, while superstar Josh Gibson got $1,000. The teams were profitable, earning about $5,000–$15,000 each in 1943, and boosted the business of related black-owned enterprises. As a cultural institution, Negro League baseball was ubiquitous throughout black America. The games provided an important source of recreation and local pride, and were choice social events. The barnstorming tradition meant that teams played wherever there was a sizeable black population, and indeed in many places, such as in the Dakotas or the Canadian prairie provinces, the local populace's only contact with blacks was via the black teams that came to town every summer.

Despite the hard life and the rigorous travel and playing schedules that ballplayers had to endure, the leagues had a certain glamour. The players were popular heroes of the first magnitude in northern black communities. Black fans especially idolized them because of their victories over white players in exhibition games. They were also a particularly cosmopolitan group, akin to other black entertainers of the period. These celebrities were equally at home in the small-town rural world of the Deep South, staying in homes of local community members when they visited southern towns, and in the big cities of the North with their vibrant social and cultural life. Also, the many darker-skinned Latinos, such as Martin Dihigo and Luis Tiant, Sr., who played in the leagues gave them an international flavor, buttressed by the sojourns of Negro League stars in Latin America, where they mingled freely with the political and economic leadership of those countries like other celebrities.

The integration of professional baseball, beginning with Jackie Robinson in 1946, plus the coming of televised games, spelled the end of the Negro Leagues. Black fans made it clear that they preferred seeing their heroes compete in the newly integrated major leagues rather than in all-black leagues. As early as 1947, the Negro League teams on the eastern seaboard ("Jackie Robinson country") suffered severe financial losses as black fans deserted the Negro National League. The last East–West classic was played in 1950, and the NNL folded after the following season. The Negro American League, whose franchises tended to be in midwestern states, further from major league ball clubs, continued to play on a reduced schedule. In a move to increase attention in 1953, the NAL's Indianapolis Clowns signed a woman, Toni Stone, who played 50 games at second base and hit .253. During the 1950s, major league teams moved west and NAL teams could not compete financially for talented players. The NAL folded in 1960, and the Indianapolis Clowns returned to their independent status, touring small towns and playing semi-pro teams through the 1980s.

During the 1970s, African American and white interest in the Negro Leagues was awakened, partly by the book and documentary film Only the Ball Was White (1969). The Baseball Hall of Fame created a Negro League Committee, and 24 players out of an estimated 2,600 who played in the Negro Leagues have been inducted, including: Rube Foster, Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, Cool Papa Bell, Judy Johnson, Buck Leonard, Oscar Charleston, Monte Irvin, Martin Dihigo, Ray Dandridge, and John Henry Lloyd. In 1990, the Negro League Baseball Museum was created in Kansas City, Missouri, and the Negro Leagues Players Association was established in New York.

Integration

By the 1930s, major leaguers and baseball experts recognized the skill of Negro Leaguers, especially in exhibition contests against major league baseball players. A movement began in that decade to secure integration, promoted particularly by baseball writers. White journalists West-brook Pegler, Jimmy Powers, and Shirley Povich recognized black prowess in baseball and the accomplishments of other black sportsmen such as Joe Louis and Jesse Owens, and called for integration. Black colleagues, including Wendell Smith of the Pittsburgh Courier, Sam Lacy of the Baltimore Afro-American, and Joe Bostic of the People's Voice (Harlem) were ardent advocates for integration. Communist writers, notably Lester Rodney, the white sports editor of the Daily Worker, also played a role in publicizing the issue. Civil rights activists demanded tryouts for Negro Leaguers, collected petitions, and picketed ballparks.

The Lords of Baseball did not support integration. Commissioner Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, a Midwesterner who served from 1920 to 1944, disingenuously maintained that there was no rule against blacks in organized baseball. He was long criticized as an ardent foe of integration, but recent scholarship has suggested that he was not a major factor in blocking integration, which was prevented primarily because of team owners. The baseball magnates worried that fans would lose interest in organized baseball if there was integration, that black players would be opposed by their white colleagues (while some players were racist, a poll of major leaguers in the late 1930s indicated that 80 percent did not object to integration), and that severe social problems would emerge, especially during spring training in the South. Furthermore, in 1943, Larry MacPhail, president of the Brooklyn Dodgers, claimed that integration would kill off the Negro Leagues, a valuable source of ballpark rental fees for many major league teams. This assertion was challenged by white Newark Eagles owner Effa Manley, the only female owner in the Negro Leagues, but many other Negro League owners opposed integration, fearing rightly that it would destroy their business.

In 1943, at the annual baseball meetings, African Americans led by Paul Robeson were granted the opportunity to speak to owners about integration, but made no headway. That year, entrepreneur Bill Veeck tried unsuccessfully to purchase the Philadelphia Phillies, and later claimed he would have stocked the team with black players but that Landis had blocked the sale. However, recent scholarship disputes Veeck's assertion.

Ultimately, World War II tipped the balance, causing Americans to reevaluate the meaning of democracy. It was difficult to fight for freedom overseas while neglecting the same principles at home. Furthermore, when the major leagues, faced with a shortage of players, contracted players who would not normally be given a chance to compete, such as teenagers and handicapped players like one-armed Pete Gray, the exclusion of blacks seemed more glaring. Judge Landis's death in December 1944 removed an important obstacle to integration. The new commissioner, former Kentucky governor and senator Albert "Happy" Chandler, was subjected to pressure for integration from labor unions, civil rights leaders, and politicians. On opening day in 1945, one banner outside Yankee Stadium read, "If We Can Stop Bullets, Why Not Balls?" The demonstrations led to several tryouts for black players but no jobs. In Boston, Alderman Isadore Muchnick threatened to block the Red Sox's Sunday baseball license unless they held tryouts for black players. The tryouts were held, but were a sham.

In the summer of 1945, the crucial first step toward integration was taken by President Branch Rickey of the Brooklyn Dodgers. He secretly investigated Negro League talent under the guise of scouting for a new Brooklyn Brown Dodgers Negro League team. Rickey knew that the first African American in the majors had to be an excellent all-around athlete who could maintain a high level of performance despite certain abuse and pressure, and decided that the best candidate was Jackie Robinson of the Kansas City Monarchs, a good player though hardly a star. Robinson grew up in an interracial community in California, where he had been an outstanding all-around athlete and an All-American football player at UCLA. Furthermore, he had been an officer in the Army, and was married. After a stressful interview with Rickey, in which he promised not to challenge racist attacks, Robinson was signed on October 33, 1945. Rickey's action was unanimously opposed by other club owners.

In 1946, Robinson played professional baseball for the Montreal Royals, the Dodgers' top farm team. Spring training in Florida proved a trying experience, as Robinson had difficulty finding meals and accommodation and was once even ordered off the field by a local sheriff, but when the club moved north conditions eased. For a time, he was joined by John Wright and Roy Partlow, Negro League veterans, but they were eventually demoted to Trois Rivières, Quebec (Class C). Robinson was enormously successful, leading the Class AAA International League with a .349 batting average and in runs scored with 119. The Dodgers also had two other African-American minor leaguers, catcher Roy Campanella and pitcher Don Newcombe, who played for Nashua, N.H. (Class B).

In 1947, Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers following spring training in Cuba, where race relations were less hostile than in Florida. He encountered discrimination from teammates, who originally petitioned to keep him out. Rickey offered to trade any player who did not wish to play alongside Robinson. Opponents, particularly members of the Philadelphia Phillies and St. Louis Cardinals, threatened to strike, but were warned by Commissioner Chandler that any player who protested in that manner would be suspended. Robinson turned out to be a great gate attraction, and had a superb first year, despite being moved to an unfamiliar position, first base. He led the Dodgers to the National League pennant and won the first Rookie of the Year Award. A handful of other blacks also played that year, including pitcher Dan Bank-head for the Dodgers. Larry Doby, one of the Negro Leagues' top prospects, became the first African American in the American League when Cleveland Indians' owner Bill Veeck purchased his contract for $10,000 from the Newark Eagles in the summer of 1947. This purchase was an exception to the general pattern of uncompensated raids that major league clubs were beginning to make on Negro League teams, whose players had no reserve clause binding them to their teams. Later in the season, Henry Thompson and Willard Brown were briefly brought up by the St. Louis Browns to increase attendance, but neither did well and they were demoted after a month.

In 1948, the Dodgers called up Roy Campanella, and late in the season, the Cleveland Indians added forty-two year old pitcher Satchel Paige, a twenty-two year veteran of the Negro Leagues. Paige, like most other black players, took a substantial salary cut to compete in the major leagues. His contribution, however, was less significant than that of Doby, who batted .301 and helped lead the Indians to the World Championship.

The following year, Don Newcombe of the Dodgers was named Rookie of the Year, Jackie Robinson was named National League Most Valuable Player, and he, Doby, and Campanella made the All-Star teams. However, the major leagues had room only for stars and were not

interested in older players, with the exception of Paige. There were blacks in every Class AAA and A league that year. However, many, including Ray Dandridge, an all-time Negro League star who hit .364 for Minneapolis (of the Class AAA American Association), started in leagues beneath their ability.

Within the next few years, lower minor leagues and other areas of organized baseball outside the South also integrated. Even the All-American Girls Baseball League discussed integrating its teams in the years before its demise in 1954. The integration of southern teams in the minors (there were no major league teams in the deep South until 1965) began in 1952 in Florida, the Upper South, and the Southwest, because of blacks' superior play and their ability to attract crowds. A major breakthrough occurred in 1953 when the Class A South Atlantic (Sally) League, which had teams in Florida, Georgia, and Alabama, integrated with three blacks, including Henry "Hank" Aaron with Jacksonville. The Cotton States League integrated in 1954, with blacks playing for Hot Springs, Arkansas, and Meridian, Mississippi. After the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas decision in 1954, race relations became more hostile in the South, and integrated baseball became a threat to white supremacy. Integration continued, however, though at a slower pace. By 1955, the only high-level minor league without blacks was the Southern Association (AA). Nat Peeples, who appeared in two games for Atlanta, was the only African American to play in the league, which disbanded in 1961. In 1957 Texas League nines were barred by Louisiana law from playing their black players in Shreveport. African-American fans responded by boycotting the league, with the result that the league dropped the Louisiana franchise.

The pace of integration in the major leagues was slow, and as late as September 1953, only six teams had black players. Many whites undoubtedly agreed with St. Louis Cardinals owner Sam Breadon, who in the late 1940s expressed his belief that only a handful of black players could be talented enough to make the major leagues. Teams avoided hiring veteran black ballplayers, and sought only young men with star potential and a clean image. Players considered too proud or "uppity," like Yankee minor leaguer Vic Power, faced great difficulties. Between September 1953 and early 1954, six more teams integrated, but the champion New York Yankees refused to integrate until 1955, when catcher Elston Howard joined the team, and it was not until July 21, 1959, that the last holdout, the Boston Red Sox, brought Elijah "Pumpsie" Green to the majors. Once teams were integrated, they did not go out of their way to assure their black players service at restaurants and hotels. Players of different races were rarely roommates, and teams with more than one African-American player always roomed blacks together.

African Americans in Major League Baseball after 1960

In the years since integration, African Americans have starred in major league baseball. In the National League, the first of the two major leagues to integrate, African Americans soon won five straight Rookie of the Year Awards (1949–1953) and seven straight Most Valuable Player (MVP) Awards (1953–1959). Blacks and Latinos, most of whom had been too dark-skinned for the major leagues before integration, soon revolutionized the game, introducing an emphasis on speed and base running in addition to power hitting. Between 1949 and 2004, white players led the NL in stolen bases just four times, and in the AL only three from 1951–2004. Maury Wills broke Ty Cobb's record by stealing 104 bases in 1962, before his total was exceeded by Lou Brock, who stole 118 in 1974 and a record 938 during his career, which included 3,023 hits. Brock's records were exceeded in turn by Rickey Henderson, who set the single-season mark with 130 steals in 1982 and 1,406 total for his career.

Black African Americans and Black Latinos have won scores of batting titles, home run championships, and MVP awards. They have included four of the top five lifetime home run leaders: Henry Aaron, the all-time leader in home runs (755), runs batted in (2,297), and extra-base hits (1,477); Barry Bonds, seven time MVP, Willie Mays, and Frank Robinson, a Triple Crown Winner (1966) and the first player to win the Most Valuable Player award in both leagues. Among pitchers, in 1968 Bob Gibson attained a 1.12 ERA, by far the lowest since World War I, and is second all-time in World Series wins and strikeouts (holding the single-game World Series strikeout record of 17). Ferguson Jenkins won 284 games and amassed 3,192 strikeouts. By 2005, more than forty players of color had been inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Among North American blacks, representation in the major leagues reached its proportionate share of the national population in the late 1950s (12 percent). The first all-black starting team played for the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1967. The percentage of black Americans in the major leagues peaked at 27 percent in 1975. By 1995, blacks were down to 19 percent, and in 2002 were just 10 percent of all major leaguers. The waning African-American presence in baseball reflects reduced black interest in the sport.

Baseball, like other sports, has been an avenue of African-American social mobility. A study made during the late 1980s of major leaguers born since 1940 found that five-sixths of blacks (83.3 percent) had blue-collar backgrounds while three-fourths of white players came from white-collar backgrounds. Until the 1970s, black players generally earned less than white players of equal ability. By the mid-1980s, African-American players made more money per capita than white players, and race was no longer considered a factor in their compensation.

However, discrimination has continued in many areas. Blacks have long complained of informal team quotas and the fact that mediocre black players were removed from teams, while white nonstarters were retained. Blacks have also been slotted by position. Black pitchers and catchers (positions which are often considered centers of leadership and intellectual challenge) have been disproportionately rare.

Many blacks still consider racism prevalent in the baseball world. In the early 1970s, when Henry Aaron was challenging Babe Ruth's home run record, he received hate mail and racial threats. In the 1980s, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission found that Boston Red Sox coach Tommy Harper was fired after he complained that the Florida country club, which served as the team's spring training headquarters, excluded blacks. In 1993 Cincinnati Reds owner Marge Schott was suspended for racial slurs. During the summer of 1998, when new season home run records were set, many blacks questioned whether the achievements of Chicago Cubs slugger Sammy Sosa, a dark-skinned Dominican, were being ignored by Americans due to racial factors.

Off-the-field opportunities in baseball have slowly improved. In 1966, Emmett Ashford became the first black umpire in the major leagues. The issue of blacks in management positions got considerable attention in 1987 from an interview with Al Campanis, Los Angeles Dodgers vice president for player personnel, on the ABC-TV show Nightline. Campanis questioned whether blacks had the "necessities" to be managers. The first black manager was Frank Robinson of Cleveland in 1975, who later managed in Baltimore, San Francisco, Montreal, and Washington, D.C. There have been a number of African American managers since, including Cito Gaston, who won the World Series with Toronto in 1992. In 2005 there were four black managers, Willie Randolph of the Mets, Dusty Baker of the Cubs, Robinson of the Expos, and Lloyd McClendon of the Pirates, and one black Latino manager, Felipe Alou of the San Francisco Giants, out of thirty major league baseball teams.

Regarding front office positions, 10 percent of all senior administrators in 2005 were black, including 5 percent of vice presidents. In 1990, Ellen Weddington of the Boston Red Sox became the first black female assistant general manager, and five years later, Bob Watson of the New York Yankees became the first black general manager. Blacks in administration are mainly in community relations (33 percent). The highest ranking black in MLB history was Bill White, president of the National League from 1989 through 1994.

Barry Bonds

Perhaps best known as the holder of Major League Baseball's single season home run record (seventy-three in 2001), Barry Bonds has crafted one of the finest careers baseball has ever seen. A thirteen-time all star with seven Most Valuable Player awards—four more than any other National League player ever—and two batting titles, Bonds also holds the major league record for most consecutive seasons (thirteen) with thirty or more home runs, bested his own single-season records for on-base percentage (.582 in 2002, .609 in 2004) and walks, and surpassed Rickey Henderson as the all-time most-walked player.

In 2004 alone, Bonds drew 232 walks (120 intentional) while still managing to hit forty-five home runs in fewer than 400 at bats. That he hit with such little protection around him in the line up throughout much of his career made it unlikely that he would see many good pitches. Babe Ruth had Lou Gehrig hitting behind him and Mickey Mantle had Roger Maris. To some, this assessment combined with his numbers make Bonds a clear choice as most dominant offensive force in the game.

Some pundits argue that his offensive stats cannot be compared fairly with those of great players past—such as Babe Ruth—because of the allegations of Bonds using steroids in addition to claims of his playing during "the age of the home run." Like Babe Ruth, Bonds's success does not rest solely on one-dimensional talent, however. Bonds's arm and range in the outfield are excellent and he has frequently stolen extra-base hits from opposing teams because of his athleticism and speed. These talents earned him eight Gold Glove awards. Additionally, Bonds surpassed thirty stolen bases nine times in his career, stealing as many as fifty-two in 1990, though the frequency of thefts has declined. His speed on the basepath made him the charter member of the 500-homer/500-steals club. Manufacturing runs (2,070; seventh most all-time) with walks and steals helped his team to victory just as much as the long ball did.

In 1993 Bonds, along with family members, founded the Barry Bonds Family Foundation. Its mission is to promote and fund programs for African-American youth within San Francisco Bay Area communities. Bonds has been a supporter of several charities including, Homepage for the Holidays, which provides toys and gifts to low-income children on Christmas Day. He has also been involved in the Barry Bonds Bone Marrow Campaign to Celebrate Life and The Field O' Dreams Project.

Black interest in baseball has been declining over the last generation. A 1986 survey found that blacks made up just 6.8 percent of baseball spectators, less than either football (7.5 percent) or basketball (17.0 percent), both of which are professional sports with higher average ticket prices, but sports whose players are predominantly African American. Ironically, as African Americans have become dominant in other major sports, their level of participation in the sport that broke most social barriers has fallen dramatically.

See also Aaron, Hank; Great Depression and the New Deal; Howard University; Mays, Willie; Morehouse College; Paige, Satchel; Pittsburgh Courier ; Robeson, Paul; Robinson, Jackie; Related Maps, Graphs, or Tables in Appendix: African-American Members of the National Baseball Hall of Fame, Cooperstown, N.Y.; Negro League Teams; Negro League Batting Champions; and First African-Americans Players on Major League Baseball Teams

Bibliography

Adelson, Bruce. Brushing Back Jim Crow: The Integration of Minor-League Baseball in the South. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999.

Ashe, Arthur R., Jr. A Hard Road to Glory: A History of the African-American Athlete since 1946. New York, N.Y.: Warner Books, 1988.

Bankes, James. The Pittsburgh Crawfords: The Lives and Times of Black Baseball's Most Exciting Team. Dubuque, Iowa: William C. Brown, 1991.

Bruce, Janet. The Kansas City Monarchs: Champions of Black Baseball. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1985.

Dixon, Phil. The Negro Baseball Leagues, 1867–1955: A Photographic History. Mattituck, N.Y.: Amereon House, 1992.

Holway, John. Voices from the Great Black Baseball Leagues. New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead, 1975.

Holway, John. Black Diamonds: Life in the Negro Leagues from the Men Who Lived It. Westport, Conn.: Meckler, 1989.

Lanctot, Neil. Fair Dealing and Clean Playing: The Hilldale Club and the Development of Black Professional Baseball, 1910–1932. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1994.

Lanctot, Neil. Negro League Baseball: The Rise and Ruin of a Black Institution. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.

Lapchick, Richard. "2003 Race and Gender Report Card." Available from http://www.bus.ucf.edu/sport/public/downloads/media/ides/release_05.pdf.

Lester, Larry. Black Baseball's National Showcase: The East–West All-Star Game, 1933–1953. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001.

Lomax, Michael. Black Baseball Entrepreneurs, 1860–1901: Operating by Any Means Necessary. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2003.

Overmyer, James. Effa Manley and the Newark Eagles. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1993.

Peterson, Robert. Only the Ball Was White. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970.

Riess, Steven A. Touching Base: Professional Baseball and American Culture in the Progressive Era. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999.

Riley, James A. The Biographical Encyclopedia of the Negro Baseball Leagues. New York, N.Y.: Carroll & Graf, 1994.

Rampersad, Arnold. Jackie Robinson: A Biography. New York, N.Y.: Knopf, 1997.

Ruck, Rob. Sandlot Seasons: Sport in Black Pittsburgh. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987.

Rogosin, Donn. Invisible Men: Life in Baseball's Negro Leagues. New York, N.Y.: Atheneum, 1983.

Seymour, Harold. Baseball: The People's Game. New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 1990.

Snyder, Brad. Beyond the Shadow of the Senators: The Untold Story of the Homestead Grays and the Integration of Baseball. New York, N.Y.: McGraw-Hill, 2003.

Tygiel, Jules. Baseball's Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy. New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 1983.

Voigt, David Q. American Baseball. 3 vols. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1983.

White, Solomon. Sol White's Official Base Ball Guide. Philadelphia, Pa., 1907. Reprint. Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1984.

donn rogosin (1996)

steven a. riess (1996)
Updated by Riess 2005

Baseball

EARLY BASEBALL

EARLY BLACK PROFESSIONAL PLAYERS

THE NEGRO LEAGUES

SOME GREAT NEGRO LEAGUE TEAMS

TWO GREAT NEGRO LEAGUE PLAYERS

JACKIE ROBINSON AND THE INTEGRATION OF BASEBALL

THE HALL OF FAME

LATIN AMERICAN BASEBALL

JAPANESE BASEBALL

BASEBALL AND RACE

BIBLIOGRAPHY

As “America’s pastime,” baseball is inextricably bound to the history of U.S. race relations and racism. At its 1867 convention, baseball’s first national organization, the National Association of Base Ball Players (NABBP), called for the banning “of any club which be comprised of one or more colored persons” (Peterson 1970, pp. 16–17). It did so based on the patronizing rationale that “if colored clubs were admitted there would in all probability be some division of feeling, whereas excluding them no injury would result to anyone.” (Tygiel, quoted in Hogan 2006, p. vii).

The development of professional major league baseball through the 1880s, however, saw the signing of about twenty black players. Segregation was reintroduced in the late 1880s, and by 1890 no integrated teams remained. This was consistent with the 1896 Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, which affirmed separation of white and black social institutions. As a result, the number of African-American teams grew, and in 1920 the Negro Leagues were formed. The segregation of professional baseball lasted until 1947.

Baseball was central to the civil rights movement of the mid-twentieth century. Martin Luther King Jr. called the breaking of the color line by Jackie Robinson and his fellow black ballplayers fundamental to the desegregation of American society (Aaron and Wheeler 1992). At the same time, the abuse Robinson endured reflected the resistance of white Americans to racial integration.

Whereas the primary story line of baseball and racism pertains to African Americans, Latin Americans and Native Americans have played important roles in the history and evolution of baseball. Baseball’s globalization, beginning in the late twentieth century, continued to intertwine issues of race and ethnicity, especially with regard to players from Latin America and Japan.

EARLY BASEBALL

American baseball, which was probably derived from a form of English baseball, has been documented since colonial times. George Washington played “base ball” with his troops, while the earliest black baseball was played by slaves. The game became increasingly popular during the Civil War, when it was played in army camps and military prisons. By the late 1860s, baseball was becoming organized through the formation of more than 100 professional teams. African-American players were on the rosters of many of these minor league teams, although racist attitudes and Jim Crow laws made it difficult for black ballplayers to play and travel with their teams. Black players often had to eat and sleep on their team busses or stay in the private homes of black families in towns where they played.

One response to this discrimination was the formation of Negro teams and leagues. The Philadelphia Pythians, formed in 1869, was one the first Negro teams. When they were not allowed to join the NABBP, they joined the National Colored Base Ball League, which was the first professional Negro league. Unfortunately, the league ran out of money after two weeks and disbanded.

During the 1860s, black baseball teams formed in northern cities. The first intercity games were played in 1866 between Albany and Philadelphia teams. The Washington Mutuals’ third baseman was Charles Douglass, the son of Frederick Douglass. The first baseball game between black and white teams occurred on September 3, 1869, when the Pythians played the Olympics. The final score favored the Olympics 44-23, but as Hogan notes, “the Pythians were … the real winners of the day, having had recognition from the white sporting community finally bestowed upon them” (Hogan 2006, p. 16).

The first nationally recognized black team was the Cuban Giants. This team evolved from the Keystone Athletics, formed in 1885 as a team of barnstorming all-stars comprising the best players from the Philadelphia Orions and Washington, D.C., Manhattans. They won many games against white teams, but perhaps their greatest accomplishment was playing (although losing to) two major league teams, the Philadelphia Athletics and the New York Metropolitans. The team was renamed the “Cuban Giants” to attract white fans. Team members also pretended to speak Spanish in order to pass as Latino.

EARLY BLACK PROFESSIONAL PLAYERS

John W. Jackson, who subsequently took the name Bud Fowler, was the first African-American professional baseball player. Born in Fort Plain, New York, in 1858, Fowler grew up in Cooperstown, New York, the subsequent home of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and the mythological place of origin of baseball. He joined a white team from New Castle, Pennsylvania, around 1872. He was a gifted second baseman and played for nearly twenty-five years. He was the first of about sixty black players to play on white teams before 1890.

Moses Fleetwood Walker is considered the first black major league ballplayer. Born in 1857—the year of the Dred Scott decision and the formation of the NABBP— “Fleet” Walker’s career and life reflect the history of baseball and race in the late nineteenth century. The son of a medical doctor, he played baseball at Oberlin College, one of the first integrated colleges in the United States, and at the University of Michigan. In 1883, he played for the Toledo Blue Stockings in the Northwestern League (part of the NABBP) and became the first black major league ballplayer when his team joined the American Association in 1884. He was an accomplished bare-handed catcher (catchers did not start wearing gloves until the 1890s). He played only on integrated teams, and his experiences of racial abuse led him to become a part of the Back-to-Africa movement, on which he wrote a major treatise, Our Home Colony (1908). In 1883, Cap Anson, the manager and star of the Chicago White Stockings, threatened to cancel his game against Toledo if Walker played. The Toledo team called Anson’s bluff, however, and the game was played. Unfortunately, this event was the start of Anson’s campaign to get the team owners to ban black ballplayers.

George Stovey, the first great African-American pitcher, played for several white clubs. In 1886 he was the top pitcher for the Jersey City team. He played for the Newark Eagles in 1887, the year the team set an International League record for wins. Frank Grant was probably the most accomplished black baseball player of the nineteenth century. Grant joined the Buffalo Bisons team in 1886 and became the first black to play on the same team in organized baseball for three consecutive seasons. By 1887, approximately twenty black ballplayers were on the rosters of major league teams. Even more significantly, the League of Colored Ball Players, formed in 1887 and sometimes referred to as the National Colored Baseball League Clubs, was considered a legitimate minor league.

In 1887, the baseball owners resumed discussing a “color line” in baseball. Some players were refusing to sit beside black ballplayers, and others balked at playing integrated teams. The owners ultimately bent to these racist attitudes by assenting to a “gentleman’s agreement” not to sign any black ballplayers. Cap Anson again announced that his team would not play any team that had black players on its roster. Because his team drew the league’s largest attendance, the other owners yielded to his economic blackmail. By 1890 there were no longer any black players on major league or minor league teams.

The story of the great Penobscot ballplayer Louis Sockalexis is another episode in nineteenth-century American race relations. Sockalexis, the first Native American to play major league baseball, was signed by the Cleveland Spiders in 1897. Although he played only parts of three years, his prowess as a ballplayer is legendary. Indeed, his accomplishments led to the team being renamed the Cleveland Indians. At the time, team nicknames were sometimes given to celebrate great players. This use of laudatory nicknames contrasts sharply with the practice of using racial caricatures as mascots—such as Chief Wahoo of the Cleveland Indians—who was adopted in 1933. The tension between celebrating ethnicity and dehumanizing ethnic groups through the use of sports mascots came to the fore in 2005 when the National Collegiate Association banned the use of Native American mascots for all schools. Subsequently, Florida State University’s use of Seminoles as its nickname was exempted because the Seminole tribe agreed to this sponsorship.

THE NEGRO LEAGUES

The Negro National League was established on February 13, 1920, at a YMCA in Kansas City, Missouri. It was founded by Andrew “Rube” Foster, a star pitcher who served as the league’s first president. He undertook the challenge to create a league that would ultimately merge with the white major leagues. The Negro Leagues had great success, with the teams playing before big crowds in major league parks. Negro League teams also played against white teams in barnstorming tours and developed some of the greatest players in baseball history.

The Negro League World Series and All Star “East-West” Game were national events that attracted tens of thousands of fans and national press coverage. In 1924 the first Negro League World Series was played between the Kansas City Monarchs (Negro National League Champions) and the Hilldale Club (Eastern Colored League Champions). Kansas City won the series championship, five games to four. The first East-West Colored All-Star Game was played at Chicago’s Comiskey Park before more than 20,000 fans.

SOME GREAT NEGRO LEAGUE TEAMS

Most major cities east of the Mississippi River had great Negro League teams. The Newark Dodgers merged with the Brooklyn Eagles to form the Newark Eagles in 1936. The Eagles were owned by Abe and Effa Manley. Effa Manley, who was raised by a white mother and an African-American father, was the first woman to operate a professional baseball team. Though her biological father was white, she portrayed herself as black and was an important member of the black community. The Eagles rented Ruppert Stadium from the Newark Bears (a New York Yankees affiliate) for 20 percent of the gate receipts, providing an economic incentive to maintain the segregation of the leagues. The team also produced four Hall of Famers: Larry Doby, Leon Day, Monte Irvin, and Roy Dandridge. Both Doby and Irvin eventually played in the major leagues.

In the 1930s and 1940s, Pittsburgh was the home of two of the Negro League’s most talented teams. In 1935, Gus Greenlee’s Pittsburgh Crawfords’ lineup showcased five future Hall-of-Famers: Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, Cool Papa Bell, Judy Johnson, and Oscar Charleston. Cumberland Posey’s Homestead Grays won nine consecutive Negro National League titles from the late 1930s through the mid-1940s. They featured former Crawfords stars Gibson and Bell and Hall-of-Fame first baseman Buck Leonard.

From 1936 to 1948, the New York Black Yankees heralded such great players as Clint Thomas, Fats Jenkins, DeWitt “Woody” Smallwood, Barney Brown, “Crush” Holloway, and the powerful George “Mule” Suttles. In 1937, the Negro American League was formed from the best western and southern teams. The league featured some of the greatest players in baseball history, including Jackie Robinson, Willie Mays, and Hank Aaron.

TWO GREAT NEGRO LEAGUE PLAYERS

Leroy “Satchel” Paige (1906–1982) is considered by some to be the greatest right-handed pitcher in baseball history. He was certainly the most durable, winning most of more than 2,000 games. He pitched almost daily, and claimed to have won 104 or 105 games in 1934. That same year, he refused a salary offer from Gus Greenlee and the Pittsburgh Crawfords and was banned from the Negro National League. He subsequently joined several Negro League stars to play in the Dominican Republic for the team owned by the country’s president, Rafael Trujillo. Determined to have his professional team win the Dominican championship, Trujillo recruited Paige, Josh Gibson, and Cool Papa Bell. The Negro Leaguers played for one year and then returned to the United States. When Paige was sold to the Newark Eagles in 1938, he left again, this time to play in Mexico. He was again banned from Negro League Baseball, this time for life. In 1948, Paige was signed by the Cleveland Indians and became major league baseball’s all-time oldest rookie at the age of forty-two. Joe DiMaggio called Satchel Paige “the best and fastest pitcher I’ve ever faced.”

Josh Gibson (1911–1947), is considered by some to be baseball’s greatest hitting catcher. He is often referred to as “the black Babe Ruth,” though some baseball historians have commented that Ruth should be considered the white Josh Gibson. Gibson, who is reputed to have hit more than 800 home runs, desperately wanted to be the first black ballplayer in Major League Baseball. Tragically, he died at the age of thirty-five in 1947, the

year baseball was integrated. He was elected to the Hall of Fame by the Negro Leagues Committee in 1972.

JACKIE ROBINSON AND THE INTEGRATION OF BASEBALL

The signing of Jackie Robinson in 1945 by Branch Rickey of the Brooklyn Dodgers marked a new era of integration in baseball, as well as the beginning of the demise of the Negro Leagues. Significantly, Robinson’s signing occurred one year after the death of baseball commissioner Kennesaw Mountain Landis. A staunch segregationist, Landis had presided over the 1913 trial that convicted Jack Johnson, the black heavyweight boxing champion of violating the Mann Act. He asserted that the integration of baseball was not necessary, because “colored” ballplayers had their own league (Burns 1994).

Jackie Robinson, a stellar college athlete, lettered in baseball, football, basketball, and track and field at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Just as important as his athletic talent, however, was Robinson’s strength of character. While serving in the U.S. Army, Robinson was court-martialed for not going to the back of a public bus while in uniform. He stood his ground and was acquitted.

Robinson first played professional baseball in 1945 with the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro American League. When he signed with the Brooklyn Dodgers on October 23, 1945, he became the first African American to join a major league organization in almost fifty years. Knowing that this was going to provoke racist reactions by many fans and players, the Dodgers assigned Robinson to their Canadian farm club, the Montreal Royals, and they moved the Dodgers’ spring training to Havana, Cuba. Robinson made his major league debut on April 15, 1947. He excelled immediately, stealing two bases in his first game. He won the 1947 National League Rookie of the Year Award, despite the verbal and physical abuse he took all year from fans, players, and managers. Robinson retired in 1957 and was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1962.

Jackie Robinson’s debut was followed shortly by the Cleveland Indians’ signing of Larry Doby, who integrated the American League and won that league’s Rookie of the Year Award. But the breaking of the color line in Major League Baseball also meant the end of the Negro Leagues. The last Negro League World Series was played in 1949 between the Birmingham Black Barons and the Homestead Grays. The Negro National League folded in 1950 after the last East West All-Star game was played, although some Negro League teams played into the 1950s.

The integration of baseball continued very slowly. The final two teams to integrate were the New York Yankees in 1955 and the Boston Red Sox in 1959. Spring training facilities in Florida were not fully integrated until 1962. Wendell Smith, a journalist for the African-American newspaper The Pittsburgh Courier, was a leader in the fight to integrate baseball. His stories on spring training facilities in Florida, where African-American ballplayers had to stay in private residences and could not bring their families with them, brought the story of segregation to the public.

Many African-American ballplayers followed Robinson into the major leagues, some of whom became the game’s greatest stars. Hank Aaron started his professional play with the Negro League’s Indianapolis Clowns at the age of nineteen. He signed with the Milwaukee Braves in 1950 and eventually became Major League Baseball’s all-time home run leader. As Aaron approached Babe Ruth’s record of 714 home runs, he received numerous death threats from racist white fans who feared a black ballplayer bypassing their white hero. When he retired in 1976, Aaron was the last Negro Leaguer playing in the integrated major leagues.

Because his high school had no baseball team, Willie Mays began playing semi-pro ball on his father’s team at age fourteen. He joined the Birmingham Black Barons at sixteen. He was paid the significant sum of $250 per month for just playing home games during the school year. He began his professional career by hitting a double against Satchel Paige in his first at bat. Mays was signed by the New York Giants organization in 1950 and was sent to play for their Trenton, New Jersey, team when one of their southern minor league teams would not accept a Negro ballplayer. He soon joined the Giants, leading them to the 1951 World Series. His total career statistics are among baseball’s best, despite giving up two of his prime athletic years to the U.S. Army.

THE HALL OF FAME

The movement to induct black ballplayers who played before racial integration into the Hall of Fame began seriously in the 1960s. Baseball researchers began compiling information and statistics on early black baseball in the 1960s, and Robert Peterson’s seminal book Only the Ball Was White (1970) spurred additional research. John Holway’s Voices from the Great Black Baseball Leagues (1975) included interviews with ballplayers and Effa Manley. When the great Boston Red Sox player Ted Williams was inducted into the Hall of fame in 1966, he called for Negro Leaguers to be included in the Hall of Fame balloting process. The Society for American Baseball Research formed a Negro League research group in 1971 (Hogan 2006).

Beginning in 1971, Negro League ballplayers began being admitted to the Hall of Fame. The first group to be inducted included Satchel Paige, Rube Foster, Josh Gibson, Ray Dandridge, Buck Leonard, Leon Day, Monte Irvin, Willie Foster, Cool Papa Bell, Willie Wells, Judy Johnson, Bullet Rogan, Oscar Charleston, Smokey Joe Williams, John Henry “Pop” Lloyd, Turkey Stearnes, Martin Dihigo, and Hilton Smith.

From 1995 through 2001, Hall of Fame electors were given supplemental lists of Jim Crow era players, and several of them were elected. In 2003, Major League Baseball funded a project to research the statistics of preintegration black ballplayers. This has resulted in a comprehensive compilation of baseball statistics, as well as Larry Hogan’s Shades of Glory (2006) companion narrative. In 2005 the National Baseball Hall of Fame determined that there was sufficient knowledge to nominate more than seventy players and administrators from the Negro League and pre-Negro League eras for a special Hall of Fame election. In February 2006, seventeen players and administrators were elected to the Hall of Fame from this list. Among these were Effa Manley, the first woman voted into the hall of fame, and J. L. Wilkinson, the white owner of the Kansas City Monarchs.

LATIN AMERICAN BASEBALL

The first organized baseball game in Cuba occurred in 1868, only twenty-two years after the invention of the modern game of baseball on the diamond at Elysian Fields in Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1846. In 1878 the first Cuban baseball league was formed. By 1871 Esteban Enrique Bellán, a Cuban who had studied at Fordham University, was playing for the Troy Haymakers, part of the National Association of Professional Baseball Players. Between 1890 and 1911, U.S. teams regularly visited the Caribbean. Racism intervened in 1911, when Ban Johnson, the president of the American League, banned these visits. Several white Cuban players were signed by U.S. teams around the turn of the twentieth century.

The corporate expansion of the Boston-based United Fruit Company into the Caribbean in the early twentieth century and the 1916 U.S. military occupation of the Dominican Republic helped spread the game throughout the Caribbean. Cuba built baseball into a national game, especially after the Revolution of 1959.

Prior to the integration of U.S. baseball, only light-skinned Latinos, primarily Cubans, could play professional baseball in the United States. Players who could not pass as white played in the Negro Leagues. Three Negro League Latino players from this time were

eventually elected to the Hall of Fame: José Méndez (The Black Diamond), Cristóbal Torrienti, and Martin Dihigo. After integration, Latino players increasingly succeeded in U.S. professional baseball. In 1947, only three Latin Americans were playing in Major League Baseball. By 1854, this number had increased to fifty-four, and by 2006, almost 30 percent of the 750 major league players were Latino. The 2005 All-Star game had representatives from eight Latin American countries.

The proper recognition of Latin American ballplayers has been called into question by the omission of Roberto Clemente, a Hall of Fame Player for the Pittsburgh Pirates, from Major League Baseball’s All-Century Team. Clemente, who was of Puerto Rican descent, died in an airline crash while delivering supplies to Nicaragua after the 1972 earthquake in that country. In 2005, partly in response to this controversy, Major League Baseball launched a campaign to recognize great Latin American ballplayers, including those who played in the Negro Leagues. The result was the Latino Legends Team.

JAPANESE BASEBALL

The history of baseball in Japan goes back to the late 1800s, when Japanese plantation workers formed company teams. In 1903 a Japanese baseball team came to the United States for the first time, and this was followed by the formation of many Japanese teams in the United States. Kenso Nushida played in the Pacific Coast league as the first Japanese minor league player. Babe Ruth’s tours of Japan with other major league all-stars in the 1930s also spurred an increased interest in baseball.

The popularity of the game among the Japanese is illustrated by the fact that baseball was played in all of the World War II Japanese internment camps. After this unfortunate episode in U.S. history, Japanese Americans played widely on college teams and in Japan. The first Japanese player to play in the major leagues was Masonori Murakami, a pitcher who played for the San Francisco Giants from 1963 to 1965. It took thirty years for the next Japanese player, the pitcher Hideo Nomo of the Los Angeles Dodgers, to play Major League Baseball. Despite notions that Japanese players were not good enough to play positions other than pitcher, the first Japanese position players, signed in the 1990s, had great success. Ichiro Suzuki and Hideki Matsui, have indeed become all stars, while Kenji Johjima was signed in 2006 as the first Japanese catcher. There have only been a few Japanese-American players, however. Ryan Kurosaki signed in 1975, while in 1977 Lenn Sakata became the first Japanese-American position player in the major leagues.

BASEBALL AND RACE

Baseball has always reflected U.S. race relations. At times it has reinforced racial division, as in the “gentleman’s agreement” that kept owners from signing black baseball players to professional contracts. At other times, it has led the way toward social justice, as the signing of Jackie Robinson demonstrates. The biographies of black ballplayers reveal the injustices of racism. Henry Aaron’s recounting of his Negro League team eating in a restaurant in Washington D.C., and hearing the wait staff break the plates that the players had used reveals the virulent, personal nature of racism (Aaron and Wheeler 1992). Throughout the history of the sport, baseball and American culture have remained intertwined.

SEE ALSO Basketball; Boxing; Football (U.S.); Genetics and Athletic Performance; Track and Field.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aaron, Henry, with Lonnie Wheeler. 1992. I Had a Hammer: The Hank Aaron Story. New York: HarperCollins.

Bjarkman, Peter C. 1994. Baseball with a Latin Beat: A History of the Latin American Game. Jefferson, NC: McFarland Press.

Block, David. 2005. Baseball before We Knew It: A Search for the Roots of the Game. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Burns, Ken. 2005. Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson. DVD. Florentine Films and WETA, Washington, D.C.

Einstein, Charles. 1979, Willie’s Time: A Memoir. New York: Lippincott.

Erskine, Carl, with Burton Rocks. 2005. What I Learned from Jackie Robinson: A Teammate’s Reflection on and off the Field. New York: McGraw Hill.

Gould, Stephen Jay. 2004. “The Creation Myths of Cooperstown.” In Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville: Lifelong Passion for Baseball, 190–204. London: Jonathan Cape.

Hogan, Lawrence. 2006. Shades of Glory: The Negro Leagues and the Story of African-American Baseball. Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Press.

Lanctot, Neil. 2004. Negro League Baseball: The Rise and Ruin of a Black Institution. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

McKissack, Patricia C., and Fred McKissack, Jr. 1994. Black Diamond: The Story of the Negro Baseball Leagues. New York: Scholastic.

Naakagawa, Kerry Jo. 2001. Through a Diamond: 100 years of Japanese Baseball. Iowa City, IA: Rudi Publishing.

Nisei Baseball Research Project. Available from http://www.niseibaseball.com.

Peterson, Robert. 1970. Only the Ball Was White: A History of Legendary Black Players and All-Black Professional Teams. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Regaldo, Samuel. 1998. Viva Baseball: Latin Major Leaguers and their Special Hunger. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Ruck, Rob. 1999. Tropic of Baseball: Baseball in the Dominican Republic. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Simon, Scott. 2002. Jackie Robinson and the Integration of Baseball. New York: John Wiley.

Vignola, Patricia. 2005. “The Enemies at the Gate: An Economic Debate about the Denouement of Negro League Baseball.” NINE: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture 13 (2): 71–81.

Villegas, Jose Luis, and Marcos Bretón. 2003. Home Is Everything: The Latino Baseball Story: From Barrio to the Major Leagues. El Paso, TX: Cinco Punto Press.

Ward, Geoffrey C., and Ken Burns. 1994. Baseball: A Film by Ken Burns. Produced by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. DVD. Florentine Films and WETA, Washington, D.C.

White, Sol. 1995. Sol White’s History of Colored Baseball, with Other Documents on the Early Black Game, 1886–1936. Compiled and introduced by Jerry Malloy. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Stanton W. Green

BASEBALL

BASEBALL. Contrary to the myth that Abner Doubleday originated the sport in 1839 in Cooperstown, New York, a form of baseball was played in the 1820s, if not before. The sport probably originated in England from games like cricket and rounders, in which players struck a ball with a stick and ran to a base. In 1748, an English woman recorded that the family of the Prince of Wales played baseball. George Washington's army at Valley Forge played a game of "base." By the 1840s, different types of baseball had developed in Pennsylvania, New York, and New England. In 1845, Alexander Cartwright, a New York bank teller, proposed rules borrowed from these various forms to organize the sport for middle-class gentlemen. Unlike today, pitchers threw underhand, the winning team had to score twenty-one runs, and batters were out if hit by a thrown ball or when a hit was caught on one bounce. But Cartwright's rules did require play on a diamond-shaped field with bases ninety feet apart, nine players on the field, and three outs to an inning.

By the Civil War, baseball was a popular sport with men from both the middle and working classes and had spread to the Midwest and California. Newspapers already reported on it regularly. In fact, one newspaper in 1856 described baseball as "the national pastime," a claim that soon became true and remained so at the beginning of the twenty-first century, no matter how clichéd the phrase itself has become. Henry Chadwick, an English immigrant and sportswriter, did much to popularize baseball by creating the box score in 1860, by calculating batting averages, and by promoting the game as an enjoyable sport to play and to watch. From the start, as Chadwick discerned and generations since have discovered, base-ball's statistics have proved to be a subject of debate and fascination, more so than in any other sport.

After the Civil War, baseball's popularity spread to the South, and growing numbers of fans throughout the country encouraged more intense competition and brought money into the sport. The first professional team was the Cincinnati Red Stockings, founded in 1869. While the quality of play steadily increased and amateurs rarely won against professionals, disputes over salaries, gambling, alcohol abuse, and rowdy fans also began to plague professional baseball by the early 1870s.

Players organized the first professional league in 1871 but it collapsed in 1875. A year later, William Hulbert, owner of the Chicago White Stockings, helped create the National League with teams from other cities in the Midwest and East. While this league also saw many franchises fail over the years, it did survive. The rival American Association was formed late in 1881. By 1887, at a time when the country accepted the practice of Jim

Crow segregation, players and owners agreed not to employ African Americans in baseball. The owners also agreed to the reserve clause, which at first limited the number of players eligible to switch teams. By 1889, the reserve clause blacklisted any player who broke his contract, thus keeping players' salaries low and ensuring the owners' survival. It also prevented players from marketing their talents freely. A century later, the reserve clause would be broken and players' salaries would explode.

By the late 1880s, baseball resembled the modern game. Baseball parks began to be built, and the two leagues played a series to determine the world champion. The distance between the mound and home plate lengthened to fifty feet; overhand pitching became the norm; four balls, not seven, made a walk; a strike zone was de-fined; and most players wore gloves, thus reducing errors. Players like Cap Anson and King Kelly had become stars, popular culture celebrated the sport in poems such as "Casey at the Bat," and periodicals devoted exclusively to baseball, such as The Sporting News, appeared. In 1890, players rebelled against the salaries imposed by the owners and formed a union and a new league. However, the players' league lasted only one year and helped kill the American Association.

Lack of competition in the twelve-team league, the dominance of pitching, and the poor reputation of players like John McGraw hurt baseball in the 1890s and attendance declined. But in 1893 the distance between home plate and the pitcher was increased to its present sixty feet six inches and as a result hitting improved. In 1899, Ban Johnson, a former sports editor who influenced baseball until the 1920s, transformed a minor league into the American League. It won acceptance as an equal from the National League in 1902, creating a rivalry that has endured. The first modern World Series was held in 1903. Major stars, such as shortstop Honus Wagner of the Pirates, and superlative teams—like those managed by McGraw in New York and Connie Mack in Philadelphia—arose. After 1909, ten ballparks were either built or remodeled, replacing wooden structures prone to fire with steel, and were located near public transit stations to attract the growing urban middle class. Wrigley Field and Fenway Park, for example, were built during this period. In 1910, in a reflection of the importance of baseball, President William Howard Taft threw out the first ball of the season, establishing a tradition that has continued ever since.

Despite the play of stars like Ty Cobb, Christy Mathewson, Grover Alexander, and Walter Johnson, attendance began to decline in 1909, for no clear reason. Even so, baseball continued to attract wealthy investors, and in 1914 the Federal League was founded. Although the new league lasted only two years, it lured away many players from the other two leagues, doubled many players' salaries, and hurt most owners. Attendance revived in 1916, but World War I reduced baseball's appeal and more than two hundred players went into the service. The 1919 season might have been cancelled had the war continued. Baseball rebounded well from the war and doubled the attendance of the previous year as the nation embraced a return to normalcy. In addition to enjoying fine pennant races, baseball audiences were thrilled by Babe Ruth, a superb pitcher for the Red Sox, who, after being moved to the outfield, hit twenty-nine homers, a record that had stood since 1884.

Yet in retrospect, 1919 proved to be a disastrous year for baseball when in 1920 it was found that eight White Sox players had conspired with gamblers to lose the 1919 World Series to the underdog Cincinnati Reds. Rumors of a fix appeared even before the series began, but White Sox owner Charles Comiskey, who underpaid his talented players, ignored them. Five of the eight players were clearly guilty of throwing the series. The newly appointed baseball commissioner, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, banned all eight for life. The ban included Shoeless Joe Jackson, a marvelous hitter, who was probably not involved. Landis's autocratic rule, which lasted into World War II, helped save baseball, as did the outlawing of trick pitches like the spitball.

Another factor that restored popularity to the game was Babe Ruth's superlative performance as a New York Yankee during the 1920s. The slugger, from a Baltimore home for wayward boys, hit fifty-four home runs in 1920 and transformed the game. While he also hit .376, it was Ruth's power and personality that attracted millions of fans. His personal home run total was greater than the team totals of all but one of the fifteen other teams and his slugging percentage was the best ever until Barry Bonds broke his record in 2001. The next year, he hit fifty-nine homers. It was not until the 1970s that Henry "Hank" Aaron broke his home run total record. The Yankees became the first team ever to draw one million fans in a season and did so six more times in the 1920s, allowing them to build Yankee Stadium in 1922. More generally, baseball's new emphasis on the home run, as opposed to a dependency on pitching and defense, changed the game dramatically. Pitchers won thirty or more games seventeen times between 1900 and 1920, but not once in the 1920s. In addition to homers, eight players hit over .400 between 1920 and 1930. Only Ted Williams, in 1941, has done so since.

The era from 1920 through 1930 was a great one for baseball. The Yankees began one of their many dynasties, the Philadelphia Athletics under Connie Mack may have been the best team ever, and Branch Rickey, through his invention of the farm system, made the Cardinals a strong franchise despite not having much money. There were also many stars besides Ruth, including Lou Gehrig, Al Simmons, George Sisler, Hack Wilson, and Rogers Hornsby, probably the greatest right-handed hitter ever.

Not surprisingly, the Great Depression and World War II hurt baseball severely. Attendance declined so much that many teams faced collapse, often selling off good players just to survive, while many stars had to serve in the war. Hard times, however, bred innovation to maintain fan interest. The All-Star game, the Hall of Fame, and the Most Valuable Player award were invented in the 1930s. Night baseball, pushed by Larry MacPhail, and radio broadcasts, especially with Red Barber in Cincinnati, became popular. Among the great players of the 1930s, Hank Greenberg, a Jew, and Joe DiMaggio, an Italian American, illustrate the important role minorities have played in baseball. African Americans, however, were conspicuous by their absence.

Blacks, of course, had continued to play baseball at all levels after whites barred them from organized baseball in the 1880s. But none of the black leagues lasted very long until the 1920s, when Andrew "Rube" Foster, formerly a great pitcher, helped establish the Negro National League with teams in the Midwest and East. A rival league survived for only five years. As with the majors, black teams did well in the 1920s but only a few prospered in the 1930s. By World War II, the idea of integration had surfaced, largely from a desire to exploit black talent and interest in baseball. While most African Americans wanted baseball to integrate, many realized it would kill the Negro leagues, an integral part of their society. In 1945, Branch Rickey, now of the Brooklyn Dodgers, signed the twenty-six-year-old Jackie Robinson to a contract with the minor-league Montreal Royals, thus breaking the color barrier. In 1947, Robinson played for the Dodgers and won the Rookie of the Year award. Later in the same year, Larry Doby of the Indians integrated the American League, but it lagged behind the senior circuit in signing black players until the 1960s.

The end of World War II, the return of baseball's stars, and good pennant races increased attendance dramatically up through 1949. To exploit this success, the Mexican League tried to lure players away with large salaries in 1946 but the effort failed. Prompted by talk of a players' union, the owners established a minimum salary and a pension plan in 1946, halting unionization for another twenty years. Baseball faced other problems by the late 1940s, however. The Dodgers, Giants, and Yankees, with stars like Robinson, Mickey Mantle, and Willie Mays, proved too dominant up through 1956 for the sport's health. Television hurt attendance, particularly in the minor leagues, and owners feared using it to broadcast games. And baseball had not followed the population flow into the South, West, and the suburbs; franchises had not moved out of the East and Midwest for almost a century.

In 1952, the Boston Braves decided to move to Milwaukee, thus beginning a shift of franchises that has consistently annoyed the cities, such as Boston and then Milwaukee, which were abandoned, enthralled those that got teams, and led to a dilution of talent. Soon the St. Louis Browns became the Baltimore Orioles, the Athletics moved to Kansas City and then to Oakland, and the Dodgers went to Los Angeles and the Giants to San Francisco. In the early 1960s, expansion occurred in Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, New York, and Houston, followed in 1969 by the first international team, the Montreal Expos, then eight years later by the Toronto Blue Jays. Having more teams prompted baseball to divide the league into divisions in 1969, with playoffs to determine World Series opponents.

Sports became a phenomenal business in the 1960s. Baseball's attendance increased by more than 60 percent during the decade, even as basketball and football grew tremendously, competing for both athletes and customers. The influx of great black athletes into baseball began to slow in the 1960s, partly replaced by an expansion in the number of Hispanic players, such as Roberto Clemente, Orlando Cepeda, Juan Marichal, and Tony Oliva. Baseball itself also changed after the pitcher's mound was raised in 1962; defense, pitching, and speed came to dominate, with players like Maury Wills, Sandy Koufax, Bob Gibson, Denny McLain, and Lou Brock replacing the sluggers as heroes. In addition, relief pitching became more important, further weakening the offense. In 1973, to increase run production and attendance, the American League introduced the controversial designated hitter, who could replace the pitcher as a batter.

Money proved the most significant problem for baseball, however. After World War II, the owners controlled both baseball and the commissioner. In 1966, the players' association hired Marvin Miller, formerly of the United Steel Workers of America, to help them bargain. Often helped by weak commissioners and inept owners, Miller and the players changed labor relations dramatically. After a brief strike in 1972, their pension plan greatly improved and they won the right to arbitration in disputes with the owners. In 1975, five years after the Cardinals' Curt Flood unsuccessfully challenged the reserve clause, two players, with Miller's counsel, successfully evaded the clause by letting their contracts lapse. Thereafter, players could become free agents and bargain for higher salaries, which they quickly did. In 1981, another strike occurred as owners tried but failed to regain their control of baseball.

Regardless of labor difficulties, baseball enjoyed great success from the late 1970s into the 1990s, with competitive races and great players like Reggie Jackson, Mike Schmidt, Tom Seaver, George Brett, Nolan Ryan, Tony Gwynn, Wade Boggs, and Cal Ripken Jr., who broke Gehrig's consecutive game record. Until later in the decade, when the Yankees prevailed, no team dominated. As attendance rose, with increased leisure time, expansion continued even as franchises became incredibly expensive. Strikeouts increased dramatically as more players tried for home runs and the importance of relief pitching increased. In 1955, only three players struck out 100 times; in 1998, seventy-three players matched that total. But home runs also increased and spectacularly so in 1998 and 1999, when Mark McGuire hit 70 and 65 and Sammy Sosa 66 and 63 to shatter Roger Maris's mark of 61 in 1961. In 2001, Barry Bonds surpassed McGuire's record by hitting 73. For his part, Sosa hit over 60 for the third time, becoming the first player ever to achieve such a feat.

Labor troubles also remained part of baseball with another strike in August of the 1994 season. It was a bitter struggle that wiped out the World Series and only ended at the start of the 1995 season, with both sides far apart and the public angry. Attendance dropped by 20 million from 1993 and was regained only by 2000. The appeal of baseball remained, however, as enthusiasm for minor league teams revived and new parks in Baltimore, Seattle, Chicago, San Francisco, and Cleveland renewed interest. But baseball faced serious problems, such as increased competition for the entertainment dollar, high ticket prices, excessively long games, declining television audiences, the weakness of small market teams with poor finances, and the need to import more and more talent, now from Japan, to play the national pastime.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Rogosin, Donn. Invisible Men: Life in Baseball's Negro Leagues. New York: Atheneum, 1983.

Rossi, John P. The National Game: Baseball and American Culture. Chicago: Ivan Dee, 2000.

Seymour, Harold. Baseball: The Early Years. New York: Oxford University Press, 1960.

———. Baseball: The Golden Age. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971.

Solomon, Burt. The Baseball Timeline. Rev. and updated ed. London and New York: Dorling Kindersley, 2001.

Thorn, John, Pete Palmer, and Michael Gershman, eds. Total Baseball. 7th ed. Kingston, N.Y.: Total Sports Publishing, 2001.

Tygiel, Jules. Past Time: Baseball as History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Voigt, David. American Baseball. 3 vols. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1983.

White, G. Edward. Creating the National Pastime: Baseball Transforms Itself, 1903–1953. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996.

Zimbalist, Andrew. Baseball and Billions: A Probing Look Inside the Big Business of Our National Pastime. New York: Basic Books, 1992.

JohnSyrett

See alsoBlack Sox Scandal ; College Athletics ; Sports .

Baseball

Sources

Early Professionalism. Since its beginnings in the 1830s, baseball had been played by loosely organized amateur clubs in the Northeast. In 1858 these teams organized the National Association of Base Ball Players (NABBP). In 1869 Harry Wright, a transplanted Englishman and former cricket player, organized the Cincinnati Red Stockings, the first publicly proclaimed professional baseball team. Wright, who earned $1,200 as a player and team captain, recruited many of the best amateur players, paying them salaries of $600 to $1,400. After completing the 1869 season with a record of 58 wins and 1 tie, in 1870 the Red Stockings lost several games and experienced great financial strain from the salaries of their top players. The team disbanded after 1870, and Wright took his best players to Boston and organized a new team. In 1871 professional teams formed the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players (NAPBBP). The formation of the NAPBBP, following the demise of the NABBP in 1870, signaled the end of the influence of amateurism on baseball in the United States, as the NAPBBP set the rules of the game and established a selection process for a national champion. In 1871 the Philadelphia Athletics defeated the Chicago White Stockings for the NAPBBP pennant. The most dominant NAPBBP team was Harry Wright’s Bostonians, who posted a record of 227 wins and 60 losses and won four consecutive pennants from 1872 to 1875.

The Rise of the National League. In 1876 William A. Hulbert, president of the Chicago White Stockings, founded the National League of Professional Base Ball Clubs. With the National League (NL) Hulbert established a profitable organization and pioneered the business and bureaucratic structures that would characterize professional team sports into the twentieth century. The NL, which consisted of teams from Boston, Chicago, Cincinnati, Hartford, Louisville, Philadelphia, Saint Louis, and Indianapolis, maximized owner profits by restricting each city to only one team and limiting the owners’ ability to trade players freely through the “reserve clause.” Originally a “gentlemen’s agreement,” the reserve clause became a set rule in 1879. The reserve clause permitted team owners to reserve their five best players from trade negotiations with other teams. By the 1880s the owners applied the reserve clause to their entire rosters. Hulbert, who served as president of the NL until his death in 1882, ruled the league with an iron hand, throwing out teams that threatened the integrity of the league and the moral image of professional baseball. He expelled Philadelphia and New York from the league for refusing to complete their final road tours in 1876, and Saint Louis and Cincinnati in 1880 for selling beer and playing games on Sunday. The top team in the NL was Hulbert’s Chicago White Stockings, led by Albert Spalding and baseball’s first superstar player, Adrian “Cap” Anson.

NATIONAL LEAGUE PENNANT WINNERS

The Challenge of the American Association. Hulbert’s NL had such a monopoly on baseball by the early 1880s that the only way new teams could emerge was through the formation of rival leagues. In 1881 sportswriters Alfred H. Spink from Saint Louis and Oliver P. Caylor from Cincinnati organized the American Association of Base Ball Clubs (AA) to challenge the National League for the baseball dollar. The American Association, with teams in Baltimore, Cincinnati, Louisville, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Saint Louis, catered to the working class by charging a low admission price of twenty-five cents, playing games on Sunday (the only day off for most workers), and selling beer. In 1882, after the first year of play by the American Association, the National League recognized the threat to its baseball monopoly and quickly reestablished teams in New York and Philadelphia. More important, the National League worked out a truce, the National Agreement, with the American Association and the Northwestern League, a minor league that operated in Michigan, Ohio, and Illinois, to mutually recognize the reserve clause and territorial rights of each team. Internal problems, however, undermined the stability of the American Association. Brooklyn and Saint Louis not only battled for the American Association pennant but for administrative control of the league. After a Saint Louis representative became president of the American Association in 1890, Brooklyn and Cincinnati resigned from the Association and joined the National League. After a poorly attended 1891 season, the American Association disbanded, and four teams joined the National League.

Players Revolt. In the 1880s baseball players organized for increased salaries and reform of the reserve clause. Although the 1880s were a prosperous decade for major league baseball, team owners held salaries at the levels of the previous decade and, to further maximize their profits, imposed a salary cap. The salaries of baseball players averaged $1,750 annually, nearly three times the wages of typical industrial workers. However, unlike the industrial worker who could (in theory at least) freely market his skills, baseball players were bound to specific teams by the reserve clause, and were unable to freely sell their skills to the highest bidder. In response to the players’ demands for higher salaries and reserve-clause reform, John Montgomery Ward, a star player with the New York Giants and a law graduate of Columbia University, founded the Brotherhood of Professional Base Ball Players, the first baseball players’ union, in 1885. Within two years Ward presented the National League with a player contract, which the National League accepted, but without abandoning its salary structure. In 1889 the National League imposed a salary cap of $2,500, and angry players called for a strike, but Ward advised against it, presenting the league with the ultimatum that it abandon its salary cap or face competition from a brotherhood league in 1890. That year he formed the Players’ League (PL), with teams in seven of the cities with National League teams. Players and owners shared the wealth in the Players’ League. Despite limited success in luring some players away from the National League, including the entire Washington team, the Players’ League collapsed after the 1890 season, with the National League buying back many of its former stars. Moreover, the National League assured the failure of the Players’ League through threats and bribes to its financial backers.

SEGREGATED BASEBALL

During the late nineteenth century major league baseball became racially segregated. In 1867 the National Association of Base Ball Players (NABBP), which governed amateur baseball, barred African Americans, maintaining that only whites could uphold baseball’s “gentlemanly character.” Owners of professional teams in pursuit of winning records, however, signed contracts with skilled African American players. While the first African American professional baseball player was John “Bud” Fowler in New Castle, Pennsylvania, in 1872, the first to play in the major league was Moses Fleetwood Walker, who joined Toledo of the International League in 1884. Unfortunately he and his brother Welday only played one season. Racial tensions hit baseball in 1887, when a white player for Syracuse (International League) refused to stand in the team picture with an African American teammate. Afterward International League owners decided to discontinue signing African Americans, but permitted existing players to remain on the teams. Also that year Adrian “Cap” Anson, manager of the Chicago White Stockings, refused to let his team play an exhibition game against Newark (International League) because its starting pitcher, George Stovey, was an African American. This event led major league owners to release their African American players and agree not to sign any more to contracts. African Americans formed their own professional baseball teams and leagues, with the first being the Cuban Giants in New York in 1885. The team chose the name Cuban Giants because they wanted the public to think they were Cuban rather than American. In 1887 the League of Colored Baseball Clubs organized, with teams in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Washington, Pittsburgh, Norfolk, Cincinnati, Baltimore, and Louisville, The Cuban Giants defeated the Pittsburgh Keystones in the first Colored Championships of America in 1888.

Sources: Arthur R. Ashe Jr., A Hard Road to Glory: A History of the African-American Athlete, 1619-1918 (New York: Amistad Press, I 1988);

Benjamin G. Rader, Baseball: A History of America’s Game (Urbana &. j I Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992);

David Quentin Voigt, American Baseball: From the Gentleman’s Sport to the Commissioner System (University Park London: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1983).

National League Troubles. Despite the demise of both the Players’ League in 1890 and the American Association in 1891, the 1890s brought more troubles to the National League. As a result of buying out many of the players and teams of the Players’ League and the American Association, the National League accumulated great debts, which the league could not settle because of a national economic depression, poor attendance, public disillusionment with the game, and increased competition from other forms of public entertainment. Fans refused to attend games at home or on the road involving teams with poor records, such as Louisville and Saint Louis, which consistently occupied last place in the final standings. Even the New York Giants, the mainstay of the National League, failed to field a strong team in the 1890s. To increase fan interest and profitability, the team owners wrestled with the decision to reduce the number of teams or form two six-team divisions. In 1899 the league returned to an eight-team circuit comprising of Boston, Brooklyn, Chicago, Cincinnati, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Saint Louis. Moreover, the NL navigated the troubled 1890s without a leader, as Albert Spalding, who led the league against the Players’ League in 1890, had retired as president of the Chicago White Stockings. Indeed the National League’s troubles would continue into the twentieth century, until a new agreement in 1903 created a stable league structure.

Sources

Benjamin G. Rader, Baseball: A History of America’s Game (Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992);

Harold Seymour, Baseball: The Early Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960);

David Quentin Voigt, American Baseball: From the Gentleman’s Sport to the Commissioner System (University Park & London: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1983).

Baseball

Originally an early nineteenth century variation of a venerable English game, baseball, by the late twentieth century, had developed into America's "national pastime," a game so indelibly entwined with American culture and society that diplomat Jacques Barzun once remarked, "Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball."

Baseball lore places the origins of baseball in Cooperstown, a small town in upstate New York, where Abner Doubleday, a West Point cadet and Civil War hero, allegedly invented the bat-and-ball game in 1839. In reality, the sport was neither new nor indigenous. The game that ultimately developed into modern baseball was in fact a modified version of rounders, an English sport imported to the colonies prior to the American Revolution. Early forms of baseball were remarkably similar to rounders. Both games involved contending teams equipped with a ball as well as a bat with which to hit the ball. In addition, both baseball and rounders required the use of a level playing field with stations or bases to which the players advanced in their attempts to score.

Baseball quickly evolved from the sandlot play of children to the organized sport of adults. In 1845, a group of clerks, storekeepers, brokers, and assorted gentlemen of New York City, under the direction of bank clerk Alexander Joy Cartwright, founded the first baseball club in the United States—the New York Knickerbockers, which played its games at Elysian Fields in Hoboken, New Jersey. The club was more a social association than an athletic one, providing opportunities to play baseball, as well as hosting suppers, formal balls, and other festivities. Individuals could become members only through election. By the 1850s, a number of clubs patterned on the Knickerbocker model appeared throughout the Northeast and in some areas of the Midwest and Far West.

The need for codified orderly play had prompted clubs such as the Knickerbockers to draft rules for the fledgling sport. In 1857, a National Association of Baseball Players formed to unite the disparate styles of play throughout the country into a universal code of rules. Initially, the National Association attracted only New York clubs, and so the popular "Knickerbocker" style of baseball predominated. This version of the sport represented a decided evolution from rounders and resembled modern baseball in form. While no umpire as yet called balls or strikes in the Knickerbocker game, a batter was retired when he swung at and missed three pitches. The Knickerbocker rules limited a team at-bat to only three outs, and replaced "plugging," a painful practice by which a fielder could retire a base runner by hitting him with a thrown ball, with "tagging," simply touching a base runner with the ball. Within four years of its founding, the National Association came to include clubs in New Haven, Detroit, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C. These clubs, for the most part, renounced their local variations on the sport and took up the "Knickerbocker" style of play.

After the Civil War, the "fraternal" club game took a decidedly commercial turn. Rather than relying exclusively on club membership to finance their teams, clubs began to earn money by charging admission to games. In order to maximize gate fees, clubs inclined away from friendly games played among club members, and turned more and more to external contests against clubs in other regions. At the same time, to guarantee fan interest, clubs felt increasing pressure to field the most highly skilled players. They began to recruit members based on talent, and, for the first time, offered financial remuneration to prospective players. In 1869, the Cincinnati Red Stockings fielded an entire team of salaried players—the first professional baseball squad in American history.

As more clubs turned professional, a league structure emerged to organize competition. In 1871, ten teams formed the National Association of Professional Baseball Players, a loose confederation designed to provide a system for naming a national championship team. The National League, formed five years later, superseded this alliance, offering a circuit comprised of premier clubs based in Boston, Hartford, Philadelphia, New York, St. Louis, Chicago, Cincinnati, and Louisville. A host of competing leagues arose, among them the International League and the Northwestern League, but it was not until 1903 that the National League recognized the eight-team American League as its equal. Beginning that year, the two leagues concluded their schedules with the World Series, a post-season playoff between the two leagues.

Despite the game's increased commercialization, baseball, in the early years of the twentieth century, developed into the American national game. Players such as Ty Cobb and Walter Johnson as well as managers like Connie Mack and John McGraw approached the game in a scientific manner, utilizing various strategies and tactics to win ball games; in the process, they brought to the game a maturity and complexity that increased the sport's drama. The construction of great ballparks of concrete and steel and the game's continuing power to bind communities and neighborhoods together behind their team further solidified the coming of age of professional baseball. Baseball had achieved a new institutional prominence in American life. Boys grew up reading baseball fiction and dreaming of becoming diamond heroes themselves one day. The World Series itself became a sort of national holiday, and United States chief executives, beginning with William Howard Taft in 1910, ritualized the commencement of each new season with the ceremonial throwing of the first ball.

The appeal of the game had much to do with what many considered its uniquely American origins. "It's our game—that's the chief fact in connection with it: America's game," exclaimed poet Walt Whitman. Baseball, he wrote, "has the snap, go, fling of the American atmosphere—belongs as much to our institutions, fits into them as significantly, as our constitutions, laws: is just as important in the sum total of our historic life." To preserve this patriotic image, baseball administrators such as Albert Spalding and A.G. Mills vehemently dismissed any claims that baseball had evolved from rounders. In 1905, Mills headed a commission to investigate the origins of baseball. The group found that baseball was uniquely American and bore no traceable connection with rounders, "or any other foreign sport." Mills traced the game's genesis to Abner Doubleday in Cooperstown—a sketchy claim, to be sure, as Mills' only evidence rested on the recollections of a boyhood friend of Doubleday who ended his days in an institution for the criminally insane. Still, Doubleday was a war hero and a man of impeccable character, and so the commission canonized the late New Yorker as the founder of baseball, later consecrating ground in his native Cooperstown for the purpose of establishing the sport's Hall of Fame.

Baseball's revered image took a severe hit in 1920, when eight Chicago White Sox were found to have conspired with gamblers in fixing the 1919 World Series. The incident horrified fans of the sport and created distrust and disappointment with the behavior of ballplayers idolized throughout the nation. A young boy, perched outside the courtroom where the players' case was heard, summed up the feelings of a nation when he approached "Shoeless" Joe Jackson, one of the accused players, and said tearfully, "Say it ain't so, Joe." The eight players were later banned from the sport by baseball commissioner Kenesaw "Mountain" Landis, but the damage to the sport's reputation had already been done.

Baseball successfully weathered the storm created by the "Black Sox" scandal, as it came to be known, thanks in large part to the emergence of a new hero who brought the public focus back to the playing field, capturing the American imagination and generating excitement of mythic proportions. In the 1920s, George Herman "Babe" Ruth—aptly nicknames the "Sultan of Swat"—established himself as the colossal demigod of sports. With his landmark home runs and charismatic personality, Ruth triggered a renewed interest in baseball. While playing for the New York Yankees, Ruth established single-season as well as career records for home runs. Ruth's extravagant lifestyle and Paul Bunyan-like appearance made him a national curiosity, while his flair for drama, which included promising and delivering home runs for sick children in hospitals, elevated him to heroic proportions in the public eye. In mythologizing the sport, Ruth restored and even escalated the sanctity of the "national pastime" that had been diminished by the "Black Sox" scandal. Along with Ty Cobb, Honus Wagner, Christy Mathewson, and Walter Johnson, Ruth gained immortality as a charter member of the Baseball Hall of Fame, opened in 1939.

By the 1940s, the heroes of the game came to represent an even more diverse body of the population. Substantial numbers of Italians, Poles, and Jews inhabited major league rosters, and a host of these Eastern Europeans became some of the game's biggest stars. Hank Greenberg and Joe DiMaggio, among many other children of immigrants, became national celebrities for their on-field exploits. In this respect, baseball served an important socializing function. As the Sporting News boasted, "The Mick, the Sheeney, the Wop, the Dutch and the Chink, the Cuban, the Indian, the Jap, or so the so-called Anglo-Saxon—his nationality is never a matter of moment if he can pitch, or hit, or field." During World War II, when teams were depleted by the war effort, even women became part of baseball history, as female leagues were established to satisfy the public's hunger for the sport. Still, the baseball-as-melting-pot image had one glaring omission. A "gentleman's agreement" dating back to the National Association excluded African Americans from playing alongside whites in professional baseball. Various so-called Negro Leagues had formed in the early twentieth century to satisfy the longings of African Americans to play the game, and a number of players such as Josh Gibson and Satchel Paige posted accomplishments that rivaled those of white major leaguers. Still, for all their talent, these players remained barred from major league baseball. In 1947, Brooklyn Dodgers general manager Brach Rickey signed Jackie Robinson to a major league contract, ostensibly to end segregation in baseball but also to capitalize on a burgeoning African American population newly migrated to the cities of the North. When Robinson played, blacks across the nation were glued to their radios, cheering him on as a symbol of their own hopes. Robinson was immensely unpopular with many white fans and players, but his performance on the field convinced other clubs of the correctness of Rickey's decision, and, by 1959, every team in baseball had been integrated.

The popularity of baseball reached an all-time high in the 1950s. A new generation of stars, among them Mickey Mantle, Ted Williams, and Willie Mays, joined Babe Ruth in the pantheon of American greats. Teams such as the Brooklyn Dodgers, affectionately known as "Dem Bums," won their way into the hearts of baseball fans with their play as well as with indelible personalities such as "Pee Wee" Reese, "Preacher" Roe, and Duke Snider. Baseball cards, small collectible photographs with player statistics on their flip sides, became a full-fledged industry, with companies such as Topps and Bowman capitalizing on boyhood idolatry of their favorite players. And Yogi Berra, catcher for the New York Yankees, single-handedly expanded baseball's already-sizable contribution to American speech with such head-scratching baseball idioms as "It ain't over 'til it's over." By the end of the twentieth century, Berra's witticisms had come to occupy an indelible place in the American lexicon.

The 1950s witnessed baseball at the height of its popularity and influence in American culture, but the decade also represented the end of an era in a sport relatively unchanged since its early days. Continuing financial success, buoyed especially by rising income from television and radio rights, led to club movement and league expansion. In 1953, the Boston Braves transferred its franchise to Milwaukee, and, five years, later, the New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers moved to California, becoming the San Francisco Giants and the Los Angeles Dodgers, respectively. Later, new franchises would emerge in Houston and Montreal. The location of the ballparks in areas geared toward suburban audiences destroyed many urban community ties to baseball forged over the course of a century.

Players also gained unprecedented power in the latter half of the twentieth century and, with it, astronomical salaries that did much to dampen public enthusiasm for their heroes. In 1976, pitchers Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally challenged the long-established reserve clause, which owners had, for more than a century, used to bind players to teams for the duration of their careers. Arbiter Peter Seitz effectively demolished the clause, ushering in the era of free agency. For the first time in baseball history, players could peddle their wares on the open market, and, as a result, salaries skyrocketed. In 1976, the Boston Red Sox made history by signing Bill Campbell, baseball's first free agent, to a four-year, $1 million dollar contract. The average annual salary rose from $41,000 in 1974 to $1,000,000 in 1992. In 1998, pitcher Kevin Brown signed the first $100 million contract in sport history, averaging over $13 million per annum. Free agency, by encouraging the constant movement of players from team to team, also did much to sever the long-term identification of players with particular teams and cities, thus further weakening community bonds with baseball.

Polls consistently revealed that fans resented the overpayment of players, but still they continued to attend big-league games en masse. Major league attendance records were broken six times in the 1985 through 1991 seasons. The players' strike of 1994 dramatically reversed this tide of goodwill. The players' rejection of a salary cap proposed by owners resulted in a 234-day labor stoppage during the 1994 season, with the cancellation of 921 regular-season games as well as the World Series. The strike, which ended early in the 1995 season, disrupted state and city economies and disappointed millions of fans. As a result, the 1995 season saw an unprecedented decline in attendance. The concurrent rise of basketball as a major spectator sport in the late 1990s also damaged the drawing power of baseball.

Stellar team performances as well as a number of stunning individual achievements in the latter half of the 1990s brought fans back to ballparks across the country in record numbers. The Atlanta Braves, with their remarkable seven divisional titles in the decade, reminded many of the glory days of baseball, when the New York Yankees and St. Louis Cardinals registered the word "dynasty" in the sport's lexicon. Similarly, the Yankees delivered one of the finest performances by a team in baseball history, logging 114 victories in 1998 and winning the World Series handily. On the players' end, Cal Ripken Jr., in eclipsing Lou Gehrig's mark of 2,130 consecutive games played, brought important positive press to baseball in the wake of its 1994 players' strike. Ripken's fortitude and passion for the game was a welcome relief to fans disillusioned by the image of selfish players concerned primarily with monetary returns. Similarly, Baltimore's Mark McGwire returned the focus of fans to the playing field with his assault on Roger Maris' single-season mark for home runs in 1998. McGwire's record-setting 70 round-trippers that season captured the nation's attention in a Ruth-ian fashion and did much to restore the mythos and romance of the sport, much as the Sultan of Swat's accomplishments had done in the 1920s.

Though professional baseball has had its moments of honor and of ignominy, perhaps the real legacy of the glory days of baseball is still to be found on community playing fields. Baseball is not only beloved as a spectator sport, but is still often the first team game played by both sexes in peewee and little leagues. While modern mothers may shudder to imagine their children imitating the tobacco-chewing ballplayers they see on television, there is an undeniable thrill at the little leaguer's first home run that harks back to the most truly electrifying quality of baseball—that moment when skill meets desire, enabling the ordinary person to perform magnificent feats.

—Scott Tribble

Further Reading:

Creamer, Robert. Babe: The Legend Comes to Life. New York, Simon and Schuster, 1974.

Goldstein, Warren. Playing for Keeps: The History of Early Baseball. Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1989.

Rader, Benjamin. Baseball: A History of America's Game. Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1992.

Seymour, Harold. Baseball: The Early Years. New York, Oxford University Press, 1960.

Voigt, David. American Baseball. Norman, University of Oklahoma Press, 1966.