Negro Leagues Research Articles

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.

Marion Jackson’s Conflicted Sacrifice: The Atlanta Daily World’s Black Southern Sportswriter on the Tension between Integration and HBCU Sport

From 1947 to 1973, a Black Southern sportswriter named Marion Jackson grappled with the role of all-Black sporting organizations during the age of desegregation. As sports editor for the Atlanta Daily World, the United States’ largest Black daily newspaper, Jackson covered various parallel institutions that provided sporting opportunities for Black athletes, such as football at Historically Black Colleges and Universities and the Negro Baseball Leagues. Although Jackson initially ignored the potential for desegregation to undermine these institutions, by the 1960s he consistently argued that the benefits of integration would outweigh the loss of all-Black sport. Yet despite this decades-long struggle, Jackson and other Southern Black sportswriters remain understudied. Scholarship on the Black press has largely ignored this Southern contingent by focusing instead on the desegregation of major league baseball teams in the Northeast. Although these Northern sportswriters grappled with similar tensions as they debated the decline of the Negro Leagues, Southern journalists lived and wrote in the heart of Jim Crow segregation. For decades they covered all-Black sporting institutions and mourned their loss after desegregation. Marion Jackson, and his willingness to sacrifice all-Black sport for integration, provides a valuable starting point for the study of these significant journalists.

The 1949 Windsor Canadians

The 1949 edition of the semipro Michigan-Indiana League expanded into Canada in mid-season. TheWindsor Canadians inherited a poor won-lost record from a newly defunct team from South Bend, Indiana.From there, the season only got worse for Windsor. The Canadians failed miserably, despite encouraging perfor-mances against well-known Negro League clubs and the House of David. The Windsor roster included formerpros, a “home brew,” and a convicted criminal from Detroit. After the regular season, two of the Canadians wereloaned to Fort Wayne, a rival Michigan-Indiana League club that was also defending U.S. national semiprochampion. Fort Wayne retained the title, partly due to the play of their Windsor contingent.

The Negro Leagues Newly Incorporated into Major League Baseball: An Examination of Their Strength and an Evaluation of the Unification

The Negro Leagues Newly Incorporated into Major League BaseballAn Examination of Their Strength and an Evaluation of the Unification William Wise (bio) 1. introduction In December 2020 Major League Baseball (MLB) acknowledged that seven of the Negro Leagues were, indeed, major leagues. The seven specific leagues and their active years are as follows: 1. Negro National League I (NNLI) 1920– 31 2. Eastern Colored League (ECL) 1923– 28 3. American Negro League (ANL) 1929 4. Negro Southern League (NSL) 1932 season 5. Negro East- West League (NEWL) 1932 6. Negro National League II (NNLII) 1933– 48 7. Negro American League (NAL) 1937– 48 This study explores the strength of the Negro Leagues incorporated into MLB versus that of the National League (NL) and the American League (AL). To this end two methods are employed: (1) a statistical comparison of eleven seasons between the two sets of leagues and (2) an examination of one hundred and three specific games played between teams from the two sets of leagues. Though nonnumeric evidence is scrutinized the aforementioned points show that Negro Leagues were justifiably incorporated into MLB. 2. a multiyear statistical comparison of negro leagues versus the national league and the american league Based on the idea of Puerzer (2020)1 this section compares the overall records of the Negro Leagues that played between 1920 and 1948 to the National League [End Page 60] (NL) and the American League (AL).2,3 Statistics are pulled from eleven of the most significant seasons of Negro League Baseball between the years of 1920 and 1948. The years examined in the study are 1920, 1924, 1925, 1926, 1927, 1929, 1932, 1937, 1938, 1943, and 1947. The years 1920 and 1932 have significant data for them, so high- level “independent” teams are also included in the analyses. 2.1 Batting Statistics Nineteen twenty- four is the first season explored without considering independent teams. The Seamheads website has statistics for 967 games played by teams in the Negro National League I (NNLI) and the Eastern Colored League (ECL), which is 39.3 percent of the total number of the 2,462 NL and AL games played that season. Following Puerzer (2020) the batting averages (BAs) of the players with at least forty plate appearances are first inspected. In the NNLI and ECL in 1924 there were a total of 217 such players while in the NL and AL the total was 328 players.4 For the 217 NNLI/ECL players the average BA was .262875, and the equivalent average for the NL/AL was .263649. The standard deviations (SDs), a measure of the spread of the data, of the two sets of BAs are 0.058566 and 0.057854, respectively. The t-distribution is used to compare the two BA averages. See the appendix for a short description of statistical tests and those used in this paper. Welch’s t-test results conclude that there is no significant difference (at a 10 percent level) between the two averages of BAs. Another way of thinking of the outcome is that if one decides that there is a difference between the two BA averages there is a greater than 10 percent chance of being wrong.5 Thus the conclusion is that there is no such difference. See tables 1 and 2 for the results for all years and tests performed for batting statistics. To further compare the NNLI and ECL with the NL and AL the slugging percentages (SLGs) for the 217 and 328 players are investigated next. The averages of the two sets of SLGs are .353521 and .354217, respectively, whereas the two SDs are 0.108773 and 0.100458, respectively. As with the BAs, the outcome of Welch’s t-test shows there is no significant difference (at a 10 percent level) between the two averages of SLGs. The t-distribution is not the only statistical test that can be utilized. A two- tailed Z-test can be employed to compare BAs because they are proportions. For this test, rather than the average of the 217 and 328 BAs, the test considers the total overall BA of each set of players. For the 217 players in the...

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...

Baseball Rebels: The Players, People, and Social Movements That Shook Up the Game and Changed America by Peter Dreier and Robert Elias

Reviewed by: Baseball Rebels: The Players, People, and Social Movements That Shook Up the Game and Changed America by Peter Dreier and Robert Elias Paul Hensler Peter Dreier and Robert Elias. Baseball Rebels: The Players, People, and Social Movements That Shook Up the Game and Changed America. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2022. 408 pp. Cloth, $36.95. In an age where increasing amounts of attention continue to be devoted to diversity and inclusion, Peter Dreier and Robert Elias reinforce the notion that we’ve come a long way but still have a long way to go. Baseball Rebels serves as a well- rounded volume that examines various aspects of the national pastime vis-à- vis the tumultuous social issues of race relations, the battle of the sexes— in more ways than one— and progressive activism. The narrative is made up of short essays related to a common theme and as such makes for a handy reference for each topic or subtopic. Possibly the best of these is found in chapter 3, titled “Before Jackie Robinson,” which provides readers with overviews of the state of Blacks in the world of baseball up to 1947, the formation and subsequent plight of the Negro Leagues, and vignettes of, among others, Wendell Smith, Lester Rodney, and Bill Veeck, each of whom led efforts to point the segregated game toward a more even playing field. As is the case with other major sections of the text dealing with sexism and activism, the book chronicles the long odds faced in overcoming stereotypes and prejudice, and the broad spectrum of “rebels” featured herein are the [End Page 124] trailblazers who broke down barriers in order for baseball to become less of a white male- dominated domain and more representative of the face of America. The authors make no attempt to ameliorate the difficulties encountered by those brave enough to buck the current trends, whether the topic is gay athletes putting up a false front to look inconspicuous by pretending to be heterosexual, Black athletes trying to ignore racial taunts directed at them from the stands, or an activist player like pitcher Sean Doolittle, to whom over eight pages are devoted in describing his open-mindedness to accept people of all stripes and his willingness to be a hands- on participant in community affairs. The rebels also include the late Terry Cannon, the founding father of the Baseball Reliquary as an institution devoted to figures either not worthy of Cooperstown enshrinement or who somehow don’t fit the Hall of Fame’s prescribed categories of player, manager, umpire, or executive but whose impact on the game holds relevance. Dr. Frank Jobe, whose innovative “Tommy John surgery” saved more than a few careers, and Topps baseball card magnate Sy Berger are two such honorees in the Reliquary’s Shrine of the Eternals. Yet for all the personalities that Dreier and Elias incorporate in their book, two names are conspicuous by their absence. Not found in these pages are Janet Marie Smith, whose work in the development of Oriole Park at Camden Yards in the early 1990s became a springboard for retro- ballpark construction and renovation, and Sherry Davis, who broke the glass ceiling preventing women from becoming public address announcers when she took the microphone for the San Francisco Giants beginning in 1993. Also, while the text covers a lengthy time frame and the authors place events in proper historical context, references to the Cold War being at its height in 1949 and 1950 miss the mark— the era was in its infancy and had even yet to see the launch of Sputnik or the fearful episode of the Cuban Missile Crisis. However, readers should not be taken aback by passages that may appear to stray from the overarching theme of the book. Baseball and sports are a reflection of society, and vice versa; thus, Dreier and Elias do well in citing Tiger Woods, Michael Jordan, LeBron James, Billie Jean King, and Colin Kaepernick to demonstrate that rebellious leanings are not exclusive to the national pastime. “Whether they seek or acknowledge it, professional athletes are public figures and celebrities. Their celebrity status provides them with a public platform...

The Cheap Seats: A Note from the Editor

The Cheap SeatsA Note from the Editor Willie Steele Three years since my last visit to the Baseball Hall of Fame— with the annual Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball History and Culture being canceled in 2020 and shifted to online for 2021— I started writing this note from the deck of my hotel, overlooking Lake Otsego in June 2022. Twenty- four hours ago, I was sitting with my college roommate in the bleachers at Fenway Park, my first game at the iconic park, which opened in 1912. Red Sox fan and noted baseball writer Bill Nowlin gave us access to see the view from the top of the Green Monster in left field and took us to the press box where we listened to him and the Red Sox official scorekeeper reminisce about the games they’ve seen there, the most notable of which was Carlton Fisk’s home run in Game Six of the 1975 World Series. Five nights later, my niece and I were at Wrigley Field, where I finally got to watch my first game there. Sitting in a box above home plate, a friend turned to me and said, “Think of all the history here. Babe Ruth played on this field!” But when they played a video of Harry Caray singing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” during the seventh inning stretch, I was suddenly twelve years old watching a game on WGN during the few times a year when I could see my Pittsburgh Pirates play on television, singing along with the beloved announcer. It was fitting that my return to Cooperstown be bookended by trips to these iconic ballparks. The four days at the Hall of Fame reminded me of all that has changed in the world, and in baseball, since the spring of 2020. Several of the restaurants and businesses along Main Street have either permanently closed or are open for limited hours, I’m told having fallen victim to the limited visitors during the pandemic. But while the vibe in the village might be a bit different, the exhibits in the Hall of Fame both reassure me of baseball’s ability to survive difficult times and reflect some significant changes that continue taking place in the game. [End Page ix] While I might not be ready to embrace changes like the “ghost runner” rule or the universal designated hitter (that’s a reflection of me growing up a fan of the National League), seeing more women in front office and coaching roles is something that was long overdue. Now that I’ve returned from the trip and am organizing this issue of NINE, I’m reminded once again of how great the game’s history is, warts and all. In these pages you will read about baseball during World War I, various aspects of the Negro Leagues and Black players, the intersection of baseball and politics, and how former players turned visual artists provide a lens through which we can understand psychology. Alongside the traditional articles you are used to reading in this journal, we also include something new: “Loved It or Loathed It,” in which we allow two readers to provide their contrasting views of an iconic baseball book. The idea came from NINE board member and contributor Mitchell Nathanson and is meant to provide readers with a way of rethinking some of the more significant books in the game’s literary history. Our hope is that this new addition will be less like when the White Sox wore shorts as part of their uniform in 1976 and more like when the first major league game was broadcast on the radio in 1921. It will enhance something we think is already pretty solid. Back in Fenway, right about the time my friend and I started thinking the game had changed too much for our liking, a kid who was about eight years old and wearing a Xander Bogaerts jersey stained with chili from his hot dog looked down the row of seats at a random guy wearing a Yankees hat. The boy, leaning over a woman I assumed was his mom, yelled, “Hey! New York sucks!” Without missing a beat...

Satchel & the Yastrzemskis: A Long Island Narrative

Satchel & the YastrzemskisA Long Island Narrative Fabio Montella (bio) In his final major league game, Leroy Robert Paige—better known to the world as Satchel Paige—produced yet another impressive outing to add to the multitude he had collected over his long and illustrious career. It was September 25, 1965, and a then fifty-nine-year-old Paige had made his way back to a major league mound after an absence of twelve years. Paige was pitching for the Kansas City Athletics, a fitting tribute and reminder of his days as a star pitcher for the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro Leagues. However, what was meant to be a celebration of Paige’s past had suddenly turned into an admiration of his present career. Fans marveled as the former Negro Leagues’ star player—who had been kept out of the major leagues during its period of segregation—pitched three dominant innings, surrendering one hit and allowing no runs. The lone hit, a double, came off the bat of Boston Red Sox All-Star left fielder, Carl Yastrzemski Jr. Paige had created a moment that became ingrained in the annals of baseball history, and Yastrzemski’s name will forever be mentioned in its telling. Yet the story of Satchel Paige and Carl Yastrzemski Jr. began much earlier—and with less fanfare—in the suburbs of Suffolk County, Long Island. This paper presents the events leading to that first encounter between Satchel Paige and Carl Yastrzemski Jr., and it also addresses how three distinct histories converged on that day. The first of these histories is that of Satchel Paige and his association with the Yastrzemski family during his multigenerational career. The story of Paige pitching to two generations of Yastrzemskis on two very different stages is evidence of his amazing talent, unmatched longevity, and diverse baseball career. The second of these histories is that of the Yastrzemskis themselves, a well-respected and formidable Long Island baseball family known primarily for Carl Yastrzemski Jr. and his career with the Boston Red Sox. And the third of these histories looks at the Long Island baseball scene during the early to mid-twentieth century. During this period Long Island communities supported and sustained several [End Page 86] semiprofessional baseball leagues that produced talents like the Yastrzemskis and attracted established stars like Satchel Paige. Suffolk County, Long Island, maintains a long and distinct history. As the easternmost county in New York State, this area of suburban communities is located within a relatively short distance of New York City and maintains a population of close to 1.5 million people.1 Known today for its renowned wine vineyards, beautiful beaches, and ritzy Hampton lifestyles, Suffolk County at one time maintained a vastly different identity. Prior to the suburban housing boom of the 1960s and ’70s, Long Island was synonymous with commercial potato and duck farming. At the peak of these industries, Long Island potato farms totaled more than seventy thousand acres,2 and the duck farms were producing nearly eight million ducks at their peak in 1959.3 To many residents of Suffolk County, potato and duck farming became a large part of their identities. Yet to others, it was the coinciding and passionate local baseball scene with which they most identified. Suffolk County’s history includes a rich baseball narrative, but the mid-twentieth century included some of the most documented and passionate years the county has ever seen. An influx of semiprofessional baseball teams permeated throughout most of the region, and local fans flocked to watch their teams with a religious-like fervor. Teams like the Bridgehampton White Eagles, the Patchogue Athletics, and the Riverhead Falcons maintained a strong, local following. Furthermore, Suffolk County’s local baseball fandom was often rewarded with appearances by some of baseball’s most recognized faces. The House of David, Lou Gehrig, and Babe Ruth were some of the star attractions who made their way to Suffolk County to entertain fans and match up against the finest players that Suffolk County had to offer. Although Suffolk County did boast many great ballplayers during this period, perhaps none were as admired and respected as the Yastrzemskis. The Yastrzemskis...

Baseball Made ‘Whole’: Rhetorical Hierarchy and Post-racial Discourse in Major League Baseball’s Inclusion of the Negro Leagues

In December 2020, Major League Baseball announced a decision to formally include records of Negro League Baseball games as ‘official’ Major League status. Against the backdrop of widespread protests for social justice and discourses surrounding racial reckoning occurring during that same year, the decision garnered heightened importance given baseball’s symbolic resonance within US public culture. This essay asserts this decision, and the coverage it received among prominent sports outlets, reveal a rhetorical hierarchy wherein “Major League Baseball” status serves to legitimize the historical contributions of Negro League players via an act of statistical integration. In granting official “Major League” status to the Negro Leagues, Major League Baseball operates from a position of institutional legitimacy, statistically integrating the Negro Leagues via an act of mortification. Ultimately this serves to rhetorically construct a post-racial history of the game and reassert the legitimacy of baseball’s statistical record. The implications of this analysis for scholars of sport, rhetoric, and public memory are discussed.

The Baseball 100 by Joe Posnanski

Reviewed by: The Baseball 100 by Joe Posnanski Willie Steele Joe Posnanski. The Baseball 100. New York: Avid Reader Press, 2021. 869 pp. Cloth, $40.00. If there is anything baseball fans love more than the sound of a wood bat hitting a ball or the smell of hot dogs at the ballpark, it’s arguing. Fans will argue over whether a pitch was a ball or a strike. They’ll argue over which stadium is the best in the majors. They’ve been known to argue about which minor league team has the greatest mascot. And they have even argued over which suffered the most before finally winning a recent World Series, the Cubs or the Red Sox. In the introduction to The Baseball 100, commentator George F. Will begins by saying, “Baseball fans are an argumentative tribe” (1). And somewhere, probably in Cleveland, I can hear a fan respond, “No we aren’t!” If you are a reader who is looking for Joe Posnanski’s latest book, The Baseball 100, to solve any arguments, don’t get your hopes up. If you are looking for [End Page 142] a book to start a lot of arguments, more often than not between the reader and the author, you won’t be disappointed. And if you are looking for a book that reminds you why baseball has the greatest collection of characters in sports history, you’ve come to the right place. The book is, as its title indicates, Posnanski’s list of baseball’s top one hundred players. The chapters were originally written as individual articles over a hundred-day stretch when they were published on the Athletic website. Rather than simply relying on advanced statistics, and there are certainly plenty of those to go around, Posnanski incorporates the roles players played in the game’s rich (and often complicated) history, interesting sidebars about their lives, and elements of their lives and abilities that made them stand out from the thousands of players who did not make the list. In his introduction to the collection, the author recounts a story of when former Major League Baseball (MLB) commissioner Bud Selig called him to dispute the rankings that had appeared on the website. Rather than defending his choices, Posnanski readily admits to the reader, “You will have bones to pick, too” (6). He knows you’ll disagree with the list, and he’s okay with it. Unlike nearly every other book, The Baseball 100 is missing a table of contents, making it impossible for readers to jump ahead to the players they are most interested in or to see what players Posnanski has ranked and in what order. But instead of being put off by this tool, this reader enjoyed not knowing who was coming next in the book until he had finished the current chapter. (I will admit, however, that I skipped to the end to see who he’d ranked number one.) Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this book is the variety of players Posnanski chose for his list. The first chapter, or the hundredth best player, is (spoiler alert!) Ichiro Suzuki. And the last chapter, or the number one player to have ever played baseball, is (another alert!) Willie Mays. In between, there are players from MLB and players from the Negro Leagues, players from the Deadball Era and the modern era, players who are identifiable by a single name (“Babe”), and others whom you have most likely never heard of. Posnanski’s list is as much a tutorial of baseball’s history as it is a reminder of what makes its most iconic players so memorable. Throughout the book Posnanski gives readers glimpses into those players with whom he became acquainted in his career as a sportswriter, explains the memorable moments associated with many of the players, and debunks some long-standing myths associated with others in the game. The result is a compilation of players that is part biography, part statistical analysis, part mythology, and all baseball. Readers will find themselves appreciating the complexity in each chapter while arguing “Yes, but what about . . .” multiple times. [End Page 143] Some of the lengthier chapters are...

The Negro Leagues Were Major Leagues: Historians Reappraise Black Baseball

The Negro Leagues Were Major Leagues: Historians Reappraise Black Baseball

Index to Volume 106

Index to Volume 106

The Negro Leagues Were Major Leagues: Historians Reappraise Black Baseball

The Negro Leagues Were Major Leagues: Historians Reappraise Black Baseball

Queen of the Negro Leagues: Effa Manley and the Newark Eagles

Queen of the Negro Leagues: Effa Manley and the Newark Eagles

Rich Westcott, Biz Mackey, a Giant behind the Plate: The Story of the Negro League Star and Hall of Fame Catcher. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2018. Pp 208. $27.50 (cloth).

Rich Westcott, <i>Biz Mackey, a Giant behind the Plate: The Story of the Negro League Star and Hall of Fame Catcher</i>. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2018. Pp 208. $27.50 (cloth).

Effa Manley, the Woman in the Hall of Fame

Effa Manley, the Woman in the Hall of Fame James E. Overmyer (bio) Effa Manley was a baseball club owner who put her Negro League team squarely in the public eye. She was one of the few female executives in professional baseball in her day, and the most influential. As a public-spirited leader, she gave continuously to the African American communities in which she lived. All this made her a well-known businesswoman and a society figure. But this did not ensure the full measure of respect due her from her peers in Black baseball's male-dominated executive ranks. This was no less true for her, and true for her Negro League colleagues, as well, when it came to dealing with white baseball executives. For example, more than once she recounted her attempt to meet with Minor League President George M. Trautman in a quixotic attempt to save the Black leagues when professional baseball integration was coming on fast. Trautman's initial response when Effa showed up at the hotel where white magnates were meeting was to send his wife downstairs to meet with her, thus executing a gender and racial double brushoff.1 Sometimes it takes a long time for people to get their due. By the late 1970s Effa, one of the last surviving Negro League executives, had become an often-interviewed source for historians and writers rediscovering the dead Black leagues. She herself died in 1981. Eventually, posthumously, Effa gained arguably the highest level of recognition that baseball can provide, election to the National Baseball Hall of Fame. Ms. Manley is the only woman with a plaque in the Hall. As her niece, Connie Brooks, observed when accepting the honor for her late aunt at the 2006 induction ceremony, "This is a man's thing here."2 All major league players have been men. Management in the majors is still mostly male (although women have recently been hired as specialty and minor league coaches, and Kim Ng became the first Major League Baseball female general manager in late 2020). Effa Manley, having been voted in by a special Hall committee on Black players and executives, primarily won her place in the Hall's "Plaque Room" by succeeding in the face of segregation. In the process, though, her induction was an important, albeit rare, success story for women in the sport. But she was not chosen just because she represented [End Page 128] underrepresented classes in the Hall's membership. She easily meets the first and most important qualification for baseball executives—her team was good. There are twenty figures in the Hall from the white and Black majors whose primary qualification is as a team owner or top-level executive. All their teams won pennants, and most of them enjoyed at least one World Championship. The Eagles were the Negro National League pennant and Negro World Series winners in 1946. Effa was co-owner of the Eagles with her husband Abraham L. Manley from 1935 through the end of the 1948 season. Then they sold their franchise when integration channeled their fans' attention and admission dollars to the white majors. Abe came into baseball with capital raised primarily through his dominance of the then-illegal numbers lottery business (today's legitimized state lotteries) in Camden, New Jersey. The Manleys paid their players good salaries and paid regularly. By and large the couple were good businesspeople, as demonstrated by the decision, which was mostly Effa's, to pull out of Black baseball as it began its fatal decline after 1947, while their franchise still had some value.3 It must be said that Abe had most of the technical baseball knowledge for the pair. But in most Negro League seasons financial survival was a chancy thing. Teams were undercapitalized. The owners, like their counterparts in other Black endeavors, had a hard time getting business loans, supported as they were by fans from a minority group whose members, even those with college degrees, made significantly less than their white counterparts.4 Some teams did not have the financial cushion to get through a bad season, and few could afford to build their own ballparks. Abe liked baseball...

Sharing the Game

Sharing the Game Jean Ardell (bio) Thirty years ago this summer, Penny Marshall's A League of Their Own appeared in theaters. I did not know of the film earlier that year, when unbidden, one gray Southern California winter morning came the idea to examine the women's side of baseball. I figured I'd have to turn to fiction as there wouldn't be enough material for a non-fiction book. Little did I know. My office wall, lined with file drawers stuffed with interviews, photos, and newspaper clippings, would later demonstrate that non-fiction would suffice just fine. I found the stories I discovered compelling, inspiring this lifelong fan to get busy and spread the news that women have long been a part of every aspect of baseball, despite the constraints and mores that sought to keep it a man's game. It was downright thrilling to discover Ella Black, a Pittsburg (yes, it was spelled this way in the nineteenth century) woman whose regular column "A Woman's View" in The Sporting Life reported on the seminal 1890 season during which the upstart Players' League challenged the established National League. Then there was South Dakotan Amanda Clement's 1904 entrance into five years of paid semipro umpiring in the Upper Midwest. I was able to interview both Toni Stone and Mamie "Peanut" Johnson about their playing days in the Negro Leagues. Unfortunately, Connie Morgan, the third woman to play in that league, died before I could reach her. As for Marshall's film, I learned that she had run into difficulty raising money for the project—the concern being who would pay to see a movie about a bunch of women playing baseball during World War II? Plenty of people, it turned out. The movie went on to become the only baseball film in history to top $100 million in revenue and remains among the most beloved of the genre. You can read more about that here, in Kelly Candaele's reflections about his mother and aunt, Helen and Margaret Callaghan, whose story was central to Marshall's movie. [End Page xi] ________ In 1993, when I attended my first Society for American Baseball Research national conference in San Diego, I walked into a roomful of men. Barbara Gregorich, the author of Women at Play, and I were the only women presenters. Was I intimidated? Yes, until men like Andy McCue welcomed me into the brotherhood. And when I attended the NINE Spring Training Conference in Phoenix, Arizona, the following year, I experienced similar collegiality from Bill Kirwin, the founder of this journal and its accompanying NINE Spring Training conference, as well as Larry Gerlach, Steve Gietschier, and later David Block, Lee Lowenfish, John Thorn, and so many others. In Cooperstown, Tim Wiles's nineteen years as Director of Research at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum showed him to be another enthusiastic advocate of the women's side of the game. The same was true of Jim Gates and Bill Simons, the chairs of the Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American Culture, who welcomed the growing number of women scholars and authors who were discovering that the game they love offers a vast tableau for intellectual inquiry into America's labor relations, immigration issues, urban planning, foreign policy, segregation and race relations, gender and LGBTQ history. After MLB named former major leaguer Billy Bean its first ambassador for inclusion in 2014, it launched the Office of Diversity and Inclusion to good effect in the years since. The contents of this issue of the journal demonstrate just how much times have changed. Some may ask, why devote a special issue to the subject of women and baseball? Why not just leave us to take our place alongside our male colleagues without further ado? Several reasons: If ever there were a time in our divided country to celebrate the ability of diverse Americans to work together, it's now. Over the past thirty years, the men and women at the NINE Spring Training Conference have presented their work in a collegial environment, followed by time spent together that Bill Kirwin considered so essential: "field research"—attendance...

Achieving competitive balance in the face of resource uncertainty: a resource dependence perspective on the Negro Leagues

ABSTRACT Resource Dependence Theory suggests that organizations faced with high resource dependency on actors in their external environment will take action to manage or minimize the dependence. In the early twentieth century, the Negro Leagues were faced with such a resource dilemma. At the same time, the ability to achieve competitive balance is another important predictor of success for sports leagues. Five empirical tests of competitive balance were applied to data from the seasons were the Negro National League, Eastern Colored League, and Negro American League were in operation to ascertain its presence. The results support the presence of competitive balance in Negro Leagues, as measured by both within-seasons and across-seasons. Further, the competitive balance achieved within the three Negro Leagues was comparable to that of two Major Leagues. While there are many books, essays and research studies about the Negro Leagues, there is a paucity of empirical work within this rich body of literature. The present study seeks to add to this subset of research and provide further evidence of the reasons the leagues were well positioned to experience success (albeit short-lived).

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...

Baseball's Leading Lady: Effa Manley and the Rise and Fall of the Negro Leagues by Andrea Williams

Baseball's Leading Lady: Effa Manley and the Rise and Fall of the Negro Leagues by Andrea Williams