For many white baseball fans in America, the ugly specter of racism in baseball seems like thing of the past. During an era when Ken Griffey Jr.'s non-threatening, smiling face is one of the most popular images in sports, when Latino player makes over $25 million year, and when red-haired Caucasian and dark-skinned Dominican could hug each other while chasing Roger Maris's home run record, it seems that baseball has come long way from the Jim Crow days before 1947. Consequently, in 1997 many Americans observed the fiftieth anniversary of Jackie Robinson's Major League debut to honor his valuable effort to integrate professional baseball. However, as some commentators pointed out, Robinson was not the first African American to play Major League baseball. During the late nineteenth century, several blacks played for Major League clubs, but none was more famous than Moses Fleetwood Walker, the first black Major League player. (1) Walker caught for the Toledo Blue Stockings, team that was promoted to Major League status when it joined the American Association in 1883, and was the last African American to play Major League baseball until 1947. He also played with professional clubs in Cleveland, Newark (New Jersey), Waterbury (Connecticut), and Syracuse between 1884 and 1889. As David Zang points out in his recent biography Fleet Walker's Divided Heart: The Life of Baseball's First Major Leaguer, Walker was well known for his catching skills and enjoyed celebrity status despite and because of his racial identity. However, like other black players of his day, he was forced out of Major League baseball by network of bigoted white players , managers, and owners led by Chicago White Stockings player-manager Adrian Cap Anson. It is no coincidence that as baseball was becoming America's national pastime, it was also becoming more aggressively lily white. Part of this connection between nationalism and race in baseball has to do with the sport's mythical qualities. As Gerald Early notes in Performance and Reality Race, Sports and the Modern World, baseball is a 'pastoral' sport of innocence and triumphalism in the American mind, sport of epic romanticism, sport whose golden age is always associated with childhood. (2) Of course, these mythical qualities that (white) Americans gave baseball have also been associated with whiteness in the West for centuries. This whiteness can literally be seen on baseball diamonds--home plate, the bases, the pitching rubber, the foul lines and batter's box, and even the ball are white. On symbolic level, when the 1919 Chicago White were dubbed the Black Sox after throwing the World Series, their nickname implied the innocence of whiteness and the wickedness of blackness, even though all the guilty players were of European descent. Because both baseball and whiteness symbolized innocence, it should come as no surprise that the Major Leagues became the exclusive domain of white men. Less than decade after Walker's ouster from Major League baseball, New England author and critic Bliss Perry published his second novel, The Plated City (1895), which focuses in part on Tom Beaulieu, the star third baseman for the Bartonvale Nine, Connecticut team. The novel begins with baseball game that Tom singlehandedly wins, to the delight of Bartonvale's white spectators, even though they believe that he is colored. However, later in the novel, when Tom is told that he is not colored after all, he obtains sworn affidavit testifying to his whiteness. He then moves to California, joins winter league team, and takes on Spanish identity under the surname Mendoza. When he tries to pass on another team, he is spotted by spectators from Bartonvale, and his colored identity is revealed. Perhaps Perry had never heard of Walker, but there are some interesting parallels between the fictional third baseman and the flesh-and-blood catcher; these parallels demonstrate how ideologies of race, manhood , and athleticism intersected in late-nineteenth-century America. …
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Sep 1, 2005
Edwin J.R Beek 
Open Access