African American Baseball Research Articles

Fielding Opportunity: The History of the Ogden Assembly Club and the Legacy of African American Baseball Teams in Utah

Fielding Opportunity: The History of the Ogden Assembly Club and the Legacy of African American Baseball Teams in Utah

The racial disparity in the Major League Baseball draft, 1965–2001

Racism has been a central element in the history of Major League Baseball. And yet, there is an incredibly rich history of African American baseball in the United States encompassing the Negro Leagues and the celebrated era when rigid racial exclusions from Major League Baseball finally fell giving way in quick succession to the transformative arrival of Jackie Robinson, Willie Mays and Henry Aaron. African American participation on Major League Baseball rosters grew steadily in the decades after Jackie Robinson’s debut, but African American representation in Major League Baseball has precipitously declined in recent years. Within that context, this study explores whether African Americans have been subject to disparate treatment in the Major League Baseball draft. An analysis of more than 9000 selections in the Major League Baseball draft from 1965 to 2001 reveals a significant disparity based on race. Relative to White players, African American players were undervalued in the draft. This disparity is not rooted in the drafts of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Instead, major league teams began significantly undervaluing African American prospects in the 1990s. The implications of this pattern are particularly notable given baseball’s recent decision to shrink the draft to 20 rounds.

Taylor Smith: Passage d’un joueur afro- descendant au Québec, 1899-1900

African-American baseball player Taylor Smith was long forgotten until an American sports collectoracquired a photo picturing him in his Saint-Jean, Quebec baseball club uniform. This discovery highlightedTaylor Smith’s exceptional career path, from Pennsylvania’s black teams to the famous Cuban Giants, ending upin Quebec at the end of his career with two Provincial League teams. An example of baseball racial integrationlong before Charlie Culver and Jackie Robinson.

Satchel Paige and the 1948 Pennant Race

Satchel Paige and the 1948 Pennant Race Douglas Jordan (bio) introduction Although not as well known as other famous pennant races (1951 and 1993 in the National League, for example), the 1948 American League pennant race stayed tense and exciting down to the last day of the season.1 On August 29, with five weeks left in the season, the Red Sox led the pack, but the Yankees, Indians, and Athletics (of Philadelphia at the time) were all within three games. The race continued tight down the stretch, with Boston and Cleveland ending the season having identical 96-58 records.2 This necessitated a one- game playoff in Boston. The Indians’ victory in that game sent them on to the World Series against Boston’s National League franchise, the Braves, and prevented a historic subway series in Boston. The Indians took the Series in six games to capture their first title since 1920. Unfortunately for Clevelanders, that 1948 championship was also the last time the Indians won the World Series. The Indians acquired Satchel Paige on July 7, 1948. He registered six wins against just one loss throughout the rest of the season. Is it correct to argue that Paige was vital to the Indians’ championship based on this impressive record? More broadly, since Paige was one of the early African Americans to play in the American League, what impact did his presence have on baseball in general? These questions are important because of who Paige was and the status of the integration of baseball at the time. In pure baseball terms, Bill Veeck (the owner of the Indians) wanted Satchel on the team because of his pitching ability. Veeck needed Paige’s arm to help the Indians win the pennant. But in addition, Veeck believed that Satchel’s status as an elder statesman of the African American baseball community and the Negro Leagues meant that Paige would put fans in seats and help his bottom line. This article explores Paige’s impact on the pennant race by closely examining his pitching statistics after he joined the Indians. Satchel’s impact from a broader perspective is considered by looking closely at the attendance figures [End Page 32] in the seven games that Paige started for the Indians during August and September. We will see that Paige boosted attendance, sometimes dramatically, every time he started. a brief biography Leroy Robert Paige was born on July 7, 1906, in Mobile, Alabama. He got the nickname Satchel as a boy, and it stuck for the rest of his life. In spite of the legend that nobody really knew how old he was at any point in his career— because he cited multiple birthdays when asked about his age—his birth certificate contains the date given here. Paige was a tall, lanky pitcher who threw the ball extremely hard, and he quickly became the star player on every team he played for. Paige started his career in 1924, playing for the local semipro team, and by 1927 he made his major league debut with the Birmingham Black Barons. Over the next twenty years he played on a series of Negro League clubs, including the Baltimore Black Sox, the Nashville Elite Giants, the Cleveland Cubs, the Pittsburgh Crawfords, and the renowned Kansas City Monarchs. Josh Gibson, one of the most feared sluggers in the Negro Leagues, was his teammate with the Crawfords. Paige was the main attraction on all these teams, and fans came out to see him pitch. In 1936 Chester Washington of the Pittsburgh Courier wrote, “He may prove to be the Moses who will help lead Negro baseball into the promised land of economic prosperity. At any rate, when Satchel comes to town, watch the turnstiles click.”3 Paige played for the Monarchs from 1939 to 1947. For most of his tenure with the team he played alongside another well-known Negro Leaguer, Buck O’Neil, who was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2022. During the 1945 season, a then-unknown rookie, Jackie Robinson, played shortstop behind Satchel. The Monarchs came in first in the Negro American League three times while Paige was on the team, winning the Negro League...

The Negro Leagues Were Major Leagues: Historians Reappraise Black Baseball

The Negro Leagues Were Major Leagues: Historians Reappraise Black Baseball

African American Sports Journalists and Athletes as Foreign Correspondents for the Black Press, 1930-1950

ABSTRACT Sports journalists and athletes acted as foreign correspondents for the U.S. black press in the early to mid-twentieth century. During this period, hundreds of African American baseball players left the United States to participate in Latin American leagues. Inspired by their journeys, sportswriters used the ballplayers’ transnational movement to explore sport and society in other parts of the Americas. From their correspondences with the athletes combined with their journeys abroad, sports journalists observed and documented the ballplayers’ international experiences for audiences at home. Additionally, some athletes, including Jackie Robinson, wrote featured stories for news publications, serving as de-facto correspondents in the process. This article suggests that by looking to the sports pages, scholars can locate alternative ways that black Americans learned about global conceptions of race and the color line in print media during the first half of the twentieth century.

Negro Leaguers and the Hall of Fame: The Case for Inducting 24 Overlooked Ballplayers by Steven Greenes

Reviewed by: Negro Leaguers and the Hall of Fame: The Case for Inducting 24 Overlooked Ballplayers by Steven Greenes Chad S. Wise Steven Greenes. Negro Leaguers and the Hall of Fame: The Case for Inducting 24 Overlooked Ballplayers. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2020. 270 pp. Paperback, $39.95. In 2016, David Price, an African American pitcher for the Los Angeles Dodgers, signed a seven-year contract worth $217 million. At the time, it was the largest total value ever given to a pitcher. Over a century prior to Price's contract, African American players played baseball to entertain guests in hotels (Greenes 4). Shortly after the Civil War, African American baseball [End Page 226] clubs emerged as social clubs (4). Baseball has changed dramatically since the mid-twentieth century, when African Americans couldn't even stay in hotels with their white teammates. Regretfully, racism in baseball reflected the society in which players lived and played. Nowhere was this more evident than in the hallowed halls of the Baseball Hall of Fame. In Negro Leaguers and the Hall of Fame, Steven Greenes dives into the numbers and statistics, looking for African American players who played over the last century and whose numbers should place them beside the likes of Babe Ruth, George Brett, and Sandy Koufax. The book opens with the history of the Hall of Fame voting for the Negro League players, and it oozes racism by any standard. In fact, Greenes describes one particular group that decided, "Admitting Negro Leaguers would lessen Hall of Fame standards" (10). Another way of keeping many African American players out of the Hall was to say they did not have the necessary ten years of play in the Negro Leagues. The lack of statistics available for the Negro Leagues made it nearly impossible for Black players to make it into Cooperstown. Greenes continues with the history of the Hall by sharing what Bowie Kuhn, baseball's commissioner from 1969 to 1984, came up with to appease the baseball world. In 1971, Kuhn shared his thoughts on "a display, a separate room or wing, but no individual plaques" for African Americans based on their ability, statistics, and baseball service before 1947, when the modern major leagues were integrated. African Americans must have played 10 years in the Negro Leagues, and received 75% of the committee's votes (10). Announced in 1971, the Negro League Wing was part of a new exhibit to honor African American players, but it was made clear these players were not being elected to the Hall. The criteria for determining eligibility to the Hall became a moving target. Ranging from what exactly constituted the Negro Leagues to emphasizing a player's character to asserting only the best players should be admitted, the standards were flexed and bent for many players, though not all for the better. Fortunately, as Greenes writes, wins above replacement (WAR) was determined to be a measure of the total contribution to a team. It is also commonly accepted as the most valuable objective indicator of whether or not a player belongs in the Hall. Greenes shares the players' WAR as he compares the statistics of Negro League players and those already in the Hall. In addition, he takes his comparisons further by including coaches, managers, executives, and pioneers of the game. As of 2020, 333 players have been selected to the Baseball Hall of Fame. Of those, 35 members played in the Negro Leagues. One of the issues with granting more African American players is that many of them played multiple positions. They would also "barnstorm" from city to city, playing against [End Page 227] independent teams where little or no statistics were kept. Interestingly, when played head-to-head, Black teams won 60 percent of the games against White teams. Black teams also won thirteen of the sixteen California Winter League pennants. Negro Leagues and the Hall of Fame is a great read for baseball fans, historians, and sociologists alike. The timing couldn't be more appropriate, either. 2020 has shown us just how far we have to go in terms of race relations, and nowhere is this more evident than in the Hall. Steven Greenes...

The African American Community and Professional Baseball: Examining Major League Baseball’s Corporate Social-Responsibility Efforts as a Relationship-Management Strategy

In 1989, former Major League Baseball (MLB) player John Young created the Reviving Baseball in Inner Cities (RBI) program as a way to increase the number of African Americans becoming involved with the game of baseball. Along with this program, MLB created the Urban Youth Academy (UYA) in 2006 as a way to not only teach the game but also provide life skills to youth and adults. However, MLB continues to struggle in developing relationships and increasing involvement of African Americans. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to understand why African Americans are not interested or involved in MLB. Corporate social responsibility and relationship management theory were used as the frameworks for this study. Eleven RBI and UYA program managers were interviewed to determine the challenges they face in getting African Americans involved in the game. Results from this study indicated four themes regarding MLB program managers’ challenges: inconsistency in measuring success, lack of parental involvement, and lack of trust. A discussion, implications, and future directions are addressed.

‘To Canada with Love’: Satchel Paige and Baseball Diplomacy

Satchel Paige's gala baseball performances in Canada had meaning at multiple levels when assessed within the context of US–Canadian relations, individual and national identity, race, the struggle for equality and the place of culture – sport and baseball in particular – in international relations and diplomacy. Paige was one of baseball's foremost globetrotters, and the premier African-American baseball ambassador without portfolio. His pitching talents and economic importance ignited passions across the borders, commencing in the 1920s and continuing over four decades. He rarely travelled less than 40,000 miles a year throughout the USA and to foreign shores wherever duty called, and there was the promise of a good payday. The great fireballer for hire and other star black ballplayers relished playing south of the border because of the freedom from Jim Crow. It is often overlooked that they loved playing north of the border as well, in Canada in particular. That play, as argued here, had symbolic and substantive international significance.

The Forgotten History of African American Baseball by Lawrence D. Hogan (review)

The Forgotten History of African American Baseball by Lawrence D. Hogan (review)

Bud Fowler

A DiscoveryI spent much of last spring researching the life of African American baseball player Bud Fowler, while preparing a paper about him for the annual Frederick Ivor-Campbell 19th Century Base Ball Conference, held in Cooperstown, N.Y., April 19-20, 2013. I was attracted to him for many reasons. He is credited with being the first African Amer- ican professional baseball player, whose career with otherwise mostly white baseball teams began in 1878 with a minor league in Massachusetts. He is the only baseball player of note to have grown up in Cooperstown. And his 30-year career in professional baseball was marked with unusual determination in the face of enormous racial discrimination. It was only after presenting my paper that I discovered that Bud Fowler had in 1912 also written, and copyrighted, a play entitled The Retired Black Planter, also published-for the first time-in this volume. This is the story of that discovery, and of that very amateur but sometimes fascinating play.Bud Fowler-A Black Barber Who Loved BaseballBud Fowler (1858-1913) was born as John W. Jackson in the Mohawk Valley town of Fort Plain, New York, and was brought as a baby to the almost exclusively white com- munity of Cooperstown, some fifty miles away on Lake Otsego, at the head of the Susquehanna River. His father, as well as his mother's father, were black barbers, members of a unique and almost forgotten group of African Americans that flourished during the 19th century. It was, indeed, as a black barber that Bud Fowler often earned his real livelihood in a day when even professional baseball rarely paid a living wage.Throughout most of the 1800s the craft of shaving and cutting the hair of white customers in America was dominated by African Americans-first often as slaves, and later as free men with a specialized trade that raised them into the tiny African American middle class. White men of means welcomed being shaved by polite and deferential blacks, the knights of the razor as they came to be called-despite the sharp, open razors with which they plied their trade. And the African Americans who shaved them learned to be polite-even when insulted; calm-even when angered; persistent-even when life grew difficult; and above all apparently subservient-even when they felt them- selves superior to those they served. These were lessons that Bud Fowler learned, and which served him well both as a baseball player and a barber.Black-owned and operated barber shops became scattered throughout American cities and large towns, where they served only white customers, often in surroundings of greater luxury than they could find at home. African Americans were either too poor to pay for barbering services, or were excluded by racial prejudice and segregation. And since each barber shop must serve a large number of customers, black barbers worked and often lived in otherwise white neighborhoods or communities. Their dominance in big cities gradually diminished after the Civil War, as Italian and German barbers brought their crafts with them from Europe, and as racial prejudice increased in America. They were forced to shift to serving the growing African American populations in big cities, or move for a time to smaller, white, interior communities like Cooperstown and towns in New York's Mohawk Valley. Between 1850 and 1900, the number of black barbers in New York's rural Otsego County rose from zero to 11, and then declined back to zero.Thus it was with Bud Fowler, who grew up and attended public school in the vir- tually all-white Village of Cooperstown, where his parents had moved about 1859, and where he learned the barbering trade from his father. He also learned to play, and to love, the baseball he played with his young white companions. Then in his late teens, under circumstances we still don't know, he left Cooperstown and made his way to Chelsea, Massachusetts, outside Boston, where by 1877 he was playing the baseball he loved with the amateur Chelsea Franklins team. …

Bud Fowler

The speech upon which this article is based was delivered at the 2013 Fred Ivor-Campbell 19th Century Baseball Conference in Cooperstown.This year, 2013, marks the centennial of the death of John W. Jackson, better known by his playing name of Bud Fowler, who is generally considered as the first profes- sional African American baseball player. He grew up here in Cooperstown, and as you know, our mayor will later today be formally designating a small and hitherto unnamed street leading from Chestnut Street to Doubleday Field as Way.Bud Fowler's 30-year career in baseball has been summarized in every recent book on early baseball, and in many recent articles. Some of them cover his whole career, like that of the Baseball Biography Project of the Society of American Baseball Research,1 others concentrating on specific periods in his long and complicated life.2 The first book- length biography, Jeffrey Laing's Bud Fowler: Baseball's First Black Professional, is scheduled to appear in July.3I shall not today try to go over Fowler's baseball career in detail. Much of it has already been told, mostly from contemporary newspaper stories. Rather, I want to consider Bud Fowler as the human being, whom we are honoring in Cooperstown today.ChildhoodBud Fowler was born on March 16, 1858, as John W. Jackson, in the Mohawk Valley town of Fort Plain. As an infant he was brought by his parents to the overwhelmingly white community of Cooperstown. In 1860 it had only 28 African Americans, and only six children under 18, out of a population of about 1,600. In 1870, 13-year-old Bud was one of only six black children attending the local public school.4 A schoolmate-James Fenimore Cooper, the grandson of the famous author-would later recall: There played with us a little black boy, Johnnie Jackson, who felt his color so much that he used to say that, if it would make him white, he would willingly be skinned alive. What became of Johnnie ... I don't know-[he] just faded out of life.5Ironically, perhaps, this James Fenimore Cooper would in 1936 become the first President of the National Baseball Museum.6 However accurate Cooper's recollection may have been, the anecdote reflects something important about Bud Fowler: He had grown up with white companions-and for the rest of his life he wanted to live as an equal among America's majority racial group.Bud Fowler said he learned to play baseball, undoubtedly with white companions, on the grounds of the Cooperstown Seminary on Chestnut Street,7 which in 1869 would become the Cooper House Hotel.8 A hotel poster, printed after 1879, shows young men playing a very informal game of baseball in a field to the left of the hotel.9A Knight of the RazorWhat lay behind this unusual man? Everything written about Bud Fowler notes, if only in passing, how he continued to practice the barber trade he had learned from his father. Many contemporary newspaper stories mention it.10 But what baseball writers have overlooked is that this made him a Knight of the Razor-a black barber who shaved white customers. Like his ancestors, Bud Fowler was a member of a unique fraternity- almost a medieval guild-in 19th century African American culture.His father-John Henry Jackson-was a barber who practiced his trade in Cooperstown and Oneonta for at least two decades. His mother was the daughter of a barber, and they had many barber cousins in towns like Fort Plain along the Mohawk Valley.What was this guild of barbers, who dominated the barbering trade during much of the 19th century, competing successfully against whites, and forming a great percentage of the small African American middle class? How did they succeed in a nation filled with racial discrimination? In the words of one modern scholar: Barbering was servile. White customers felt comfortable being shaved by a black barber. The proprieties were preserved. The black man was in deferential attendance on the white man. …

Cuban Star: How One Negro-League Owner Changed the Face of Baseball (review)

Reviewed by: Cuban Star: How One Negro-League Owner Changed the Face of Baseball Roberta Newman Adrian Burgos Jr. Cuban Star: How One Negro-League Owner Changed the Face of Baseball. New York: Hill and Wang, 2011. 302 pp. Cloth, $28.00. Once consigned to the background of baseball history, segregated black baseball has garnered a great deal of interest over the last two decades, producing a veritable flood of publications. The focus of much of this work has either been on presenting sweeping histories of the Negro leagues or on biographies of individual African American players and, less frequently, executives. Scant attention, however, has been paid to the considerable role played by Latinos in black baseball as well as in the organized, professional game. Adrian Burgos Jr.’s comprehensive study of the influence of Latin Americans on both sides of the segregated game as well as on the desegregated major leagues, Playing America’s Game: Baseball, Latinos, and the Color Line, is the notable exception. Burgos’s most recent work, a biography of Alejandro “Alex” Pompez (1890– 1974), adds to the body of literature. The child of Cuban immigrants, Pompez, once a power in Harlem’s numbers rackets, would become owner of the [End Page 108] Cuban Stars and later the New York Cubans, the “Latins from Manhattan.” Eventually, he would use his considerable knowledge of both Latin American and African American baseball talent to become an influential major-league scout. His story, as presented by Burgos, is a compelling one. Cuban Star is, first and foremost, a scholarly biography. Very well researched and annotated, the book provides ample socio-cultural analysis, while avoiding virtually all the clichés of popular baseball bios, most particularly the overly familiar tone. This is not to say that Cuban Star is dry, dense, or overly formal. Quite the contrary, its rich detail and clear writing make for entertaining reading. From the outset, Cuban Star tells a compelling story. In addition to recounting Pompez’s journey from Florida, through Havana, to New York, with several necessary forays to other locations, most notably time spent on the lam in Mexico City, the author pays close attention to the personal, social, and cultural influences on Pompez’s life and career. Particularly interesting is the story of Pompez’s father, Jose, a cigar factory owner and committed follower of Jose Marti, who was twice elected town clerk of West Tampa and left all his money to the cause of Cuban independence, leaving his family with little. The fact that Pompez financed the Cuban Stars with proceeds from the numbers rackets is not at all unusual. Numbers and policy kings often played the part of financiers in urban African American communities under the reign of Jim Crow, and more than a few Negro league owners made their money from the rackets. But Pompez’s connection to Dutch Schultz, however unwanted, and his prosecution by Thomas E. Dewey make up one of the central episodes in the baseball man’s life and one of the central episodes in Burgos’s book. Reading like something out of a crime novel, Burgos pays close attention to Pompez’s flight to Mexico City, where he was arrested. Extradited to the United States, Pompez eventually turned state’s evidence and helped to convict key figures in the organization Schultz left behind after his untimely, but not altogether unexpected, demise. Of course, Cuban Star is about a baseball man, and Pompez’s life in baseball makes up the lion’s share of this book. Just as his background and his legal history were unusual for a baseball executive, so was his background in the business. Unlike his fellow team owners, many of whom were at the financial mercy of white promoters for bookings, venue rental, and publicity, Pompez learned the ropes from Philadelphia’s Nat Strong, one of the most successful and least popular white booking agents. Prior to his legal troubles, Pompez acquired control over Dyckman Oval in upper Manhattan’s Inwood, allowing his team the luxury of its own ballpark, something few other black ball clubs could boast. Particularly interesting is Burgos’s discussion of the role played [End Page 109...

Raceball: How the Major Leagues Colonized the Black and Latin Game

A worthy successor to his impressive studies of the history of African American and Dominican baseball, Sandlot Seasons: Sport in Black Pittsburgh (1987) and The Tropic of Baseball: Baseball in the Dominican Republic (1991), Rob Ruck's new book beautifully blends the intertwined histories of African American and Latin baseball, and their usually ill-fated interactions with Major League Baseball (MLB). Ruck builds on the work of Roberto González Echevarría (The Pride of Havana: A History of Cuban Baseball, 1999) and Adrian Burgos (Playing America's Game: Baseball, Latinos, and the Color Line, 2007) to paint a fascinating picture of baseball in the early twentieth-century Caribbean. He recasts conventional notions of baseball history by showing how, in the decades before World War I, Havana became the hub of an international baseball culture, “the only place in the world where the best professional ballplayers of all nations and colors competed with and against each other” (p. 1). Players in the Negro leagues banned from the major leagues commonly played winter ball in the Caribbean—in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, and Mexico—until the early 1940s, along with many white big leaguers supplementing their incomes during the off-season. Cuban teams, many of them reinforced with stars from the Negro leagues, beat the white major leaguers so frequently that MLB banned teams from playing under their own names, to avoid embarrassment.

Death at the Ballpark: A Comprehensive Study of Game-Related Fatalities, 1862–2007 (review)

Reviewed by: Death at the Ballpark: A Comprehensive Study of Game-Related Fatalities, 1862–2007 Aaron W. Miller Robert M. Gorman and David Weeks. Death at the Ballpark: A Comprehensive Study of Game-Related Fatalities, 1862–2007. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2007. 256 pp. Cloth, $45.00. Even the most casual sports fan knows the inherent dangers of baseball. The confines of a ballpark cannot insulate players from the realities of life and death. Bean balls, broken bats, and wild throws can injure players, umpires, and spectators. The fans as well as athletes can also suffer from heat strokes, falls, and lightning strikes. Baseball is a dangerous game. Robert M. Gorman and David Weeks’s Death at the Ballpark is a litany of when these injuries, accidents, and other incidents lead to death. This necrology of baseball includes some macabre, yet fascinating anecdotes. Gorman and Weeks’s exhaustively researched book includes the familiar, such as the mysterious death of Jim Creighton, one of baseball’s early stars and one of the game’s earliest fatalities. During an October 14, 1862, game between the Brooklyn Excelsiors and Unions of Morrisania, Creighton, who probably suffered from an inguinal hernia, collapsed after an at-bat, dying on October 18. Death at the Ballpark also recounts less infamous deaths. These tales from the baseball crypt are often violent, grisly, and downright bizarre, which makes for a fascinating read. The book recounts the reckless act of Art Shires, a first baseman for the White Sox. On May 30, 1928, while playing for [End Page 198] the Waco Cubs of the Class A Texas League, Shires threw a ball into the grandstand, injuring spectator Walter Lawson, perhaps contributing to his death. Gorman and Weeks, librarians at Winthrop University’s Dacus Library, divide their book into sections. They examined players, field personnel, and fans. Each chapter is then dedicated to a particular cause of death. Within each chapter, fatalities are grouped into major leagues, African American baseball, minor leagues, and amateurs. Then each death is listed chronologically. Many entries are only snippets, often due to a lack of reliable information. The authors separate African American deaths into a unique category due to “the historical interest in the game as played in a segregated America.” But this separation is uncomfortable, as it risks perpetuating the divide between black and white baseball and devaluing the contributions and importance of black baseball. Death at the Ballpark is a fantastic resource for any baseball researcher wanting more information about a player or fan who met an untimely demise. It includes an array of interesting images and photographs as well as easy-to-use appendices listing every entry in chronological order, unconfirmed fatalities, and deaths that did not fit into their particular categories. Despite the exhaustively researched catalog of death, Gorman and Weeks draw very few conclusions. Their analysis features a thorough examination of equipment, particularly aluminum bats and batting helmets, but the authors miss opportunities to discuss the relationship between death and rule changes or cultural issues outside of baseball. While the book lacks a finale that could define the significance of the study, Death at the Ballpark examines an overlooked and grisly aspect of baseball history, and its inventory of mortality might provide a springboard for discussions about changing attitudes towards death, public health issues, violence outside the ballpark, and social reforms. Copyright © 2010 University of Nebraska Press

Spectacle, Distance, and Threat: Attendance and Integration of Major League Baseball, 1930–1961

We examine the effect of the visibility of African American, Latino, and Jewish baseball players on attendance at Major League Baseball games between 1930 and 1961. We invoke the sociological concepts of “social distance,” “spectacle,” and “group threat” and incorporate data focusing on the era of integration to expand on previous research in this arena. Notably, African American and Latino player visibility—but not that of other groups—is revealed to increase attendance at games. This effect weakens for losing teams and in cities with relatively larger minority populations. The findings suggest a synthesis of theories is possible.

"A Mirthful Spectacle": Race, Blackface Minstrelsy, and Base Ball, 1874-1888

To sum up [Blue Stocking vs. Pink Stocking] game in general, it need only be said that, saving single item of color it like other well-played games. One peculiarity, however, noticeable, whether accidental or usual we don't know. It consisted in irresistible propensity for tumbling head over heels when in act of running bases or going for fly catches. The life of stereotype resides in death of its model, and perceptual deadening of those who carry it in their heads as a schematic search template for identifying other Sambo has caught baseball fever, and two clubs from Alabama and Mississippi respectively, have recently had a match in Demopolis, Alabamians winning. Heah now, why didn't you frow dat ball to de fust base y'rascal you? Was blackness a metaphor for material excesses of postbellum Gilded Age--or for stereotypical notion of African American baseball? One answer examines how minstrel theater penetrated baseball sporting world and how business of minstrelsy paralleled rise of professional baseball--burnt cork artists played ball, literary and graphic artists portrayed games as blackface farce, and nines reputedly engaged in Negro comedy. Current baseball scholarship seldom mentions post-bellum ballplayer, who brought to game a peculiar style and became object of blackness and agency in baseball representations. Perhaps most dramatic case of ethnic stereotypes is found in melding of blackface performance and baseball representations. This image-repertoire circulated in print media: sports narratives, illustrations, and cartoons. While life of black baseball stereotypes has been incorporated into scholarship on subject of minstrelsy--most recently, in works by Michael Hatt, Mark Ribowsky, David Zang, Michael D. Harris, and Brian F. Le Beau--any analysis of relationship between performance and visual-verbal representations has yet to be undertaken.1 One reason for this lack of critical inquiry is controversy surrounding blackface performance and its integral relation to history of American black cultural production. Iconologist W. J. T. Mitchell declares blackface minstrelsy's image-repertoire to be despicable and worthy of destruction, but he warns that racial and ethnic stereotypes seem to have a life of their own. If life of black baseball stereotype resides in death of its models, as this blurring of line between blackface comedic mask and colored ballplayers suggests, then who does image-killing and image-resurrecting? The answer can be found by examining specific works that reflect on adaptability of baseball representations. (2) Recently, minstrelsy has been subject to intense scholarly study. Historian Eric Lott defines blackface minstrelsy as an established nineteenth-century theatrical practice, principally of urban North, in which white men caricatured blacks for sport and profit. For Lott, one of its functions was precisely to bring various class fractions into contact with one another, to mediate their relations, and finally to aid in construction of class identities over bodies of black people. The primary purpose of minstrel mask may have been as much to maintain control over a potentially subversive act as to ridicule, though blackface performers' attempts at regulation also appear to have been capable of producing aura of blackness. Lott calls this antebellum aura the seeming counterfeit. (3) For literary critic Saidiya Hartman, antebellum minstrelsy represents desire to don, occupy, or possess blackness or black body as a sentimental resource and locus of excess enjoyment. According to Hartman, fungibility of commodity--specifically its abstractness and immateriality--enabled black body or blackface mask to serve as a vehicle of self-exploration, renunciation, and enjoyment. …

Advancing African American Baseball: <i>The Philadelphia Pythians and Interracial Competition in 1869</i>

Advancing African American Baseball: <i>The Philadelphia Pythians and Interracial Competition in 1869</i>

Out of the Shadows: African American Baseball from the Cuban Giants to Jackie Robinson (review)

Out of the Shadows: African American Baseball from the Cuban Giants to Jackie Robinson (review)

Shades of glory: the Negro leagues and the story of African-American baseball

Celebrating African America's contribution to our great national pastime, this comprehensive, lively history combines vivid narrative, visual impact, and a unique statistical component, to recreate the excitement and passion of the Negro Leagues.