Introduction to Baseball's Negro Leagues

Question: What were the Negro leagues all about? When did they exist? How many leagues were there?

Negro leagues were born out of the desire for players of races other than white -- mainly African-Americans and dark-skinned Latins -- to play baseball in organized leagues. As the color line became entrenched in white "organized" baseball in the 1880s and 1890s, non-white ballplayers led by such luminaries as Sol White and, later, Rube Foster made it their life's work to create and maintain leagues for the 10-15% of the American population shut out from the mainstream by blatant racism.

In my book and throughout this web site, I refer to the "Negro leagues" with a lower-case "l," while a number of current books capitalize both words. "Negro league" is a generic term the same way "major league" is. Both terms encompass the numerous specific organizations that do deserve capital letters, like American League and National League, etc. I think capitalizing both words makes it seem as if there was only one single specific league called "The Negro League" when, in fact, there were more than half a dozen different ones.

Some such leagues included the Negro National League, Negro American League, East-West League, Eastern Colored League, Negro Southern League, and others. The Negro American and Negro National Leagues were the most famous and most successful, annually pitting the pennant winners in a "Colored World Series." League seasons generally lasted only 70 or 80 games; the rest of a team's schedule was made up of exhibition games against barnstorming major leaguers, local semipro teams, and anybody else who wanted to challenge them. As you can tell, the leagues were loosely organized, subject to the whims of the national or local economies. During the Depression, for example, a number of teams and leagues folded.

Clubs depended on gate receipts to make payrolls, and because of that, Negro league play was probably the most exciting baseball played in the country. From the 1920s until the 1960s, by contrast, major league baseball was stuck in a rut. Babe Ruth had taught players how to hit home runs, so managers didn't ask for anything else. With few notable exceptions, the game was played station to station. Get a hit, draw a walk, wait for a home run. Boring! Negro league players, on the other hand, danced off bases, stole home, used the bunt-and-run. The players considered themselves professional entertainers, paid to put on a show. Flamboyant players like Satchel Paige would call in his outfielders while he struck out the side. Cool Papa Bell would score from second on an infield out. Josh Gibson would hit mammoth home runs and throw out baserunners from his knees. It's no coincidence that major league baseball changed dramatically for the better in the 1960s and 1970s, after players like Jackie Robinson, Minnie Minoso, Willie Mays, Maury Wills, and dozens of others had made their impacts.

It wasn't until 1972 that the Hall of Fame, after years of stalling, finally agreed to create a special committee to select Negro league players for enshrinement. After electing nine, the committee was disbanded; since then, several more Negro leaguers have been elected. But from the same era of white major league baseball, there are more than 160 players in the Hall of Fame. And since the proportion of blacks in the American population from that era remained steady at 10%, argued Robert B. Peterson in his landmark study of the Negro leagues called Only the Ball Was White, "it could be assumed that 10% of the Hall of Fame members from that era should be Negroes" (Peterson, incidentally, wrote his book in 1968). Some of the most popular candidates, such as Cristobal Torriente and Willie Wells, are described elsewhere in this book [Note: Wells was elected in 1997].

John B. Holway, in his book Blackball Stars, presents other interesting data: research showing that Negro leaguers and major leaguers played against each other 436 times, with the "non"-major leaguers winning 268 games. People often wonder how Negro leaguers would have done in the white major leagues. Holway wonders just the opposite: How would white major leaguers have fared in an integrated league? Ruth and Gehrig no doubt would have lost some homers, argues Holway, and Cobb and Hornsby would have lost some points off their batting averages if they'd had to face a Satchel Paige or Smoky Joe Williams on a regular basis.

Alas, the sad consequences of breaking major league baseball's color line in 1947 were the death of the Negro leagues and the creation of another color line: the one keeping nonwhites from the ranks of major league team owners.

Copyright 2008 David H. Martinez. All rights reserved.