MLB hits it out the park with acknowledgement of Negro League

26th April 2021   ·   0 Comments

By Ryan Whirty
Contributing Writer

In the June 22, 1940, issue of The Louisiana Weekly, sports columnist Eddie Burbridge confirmed the reports that had swirled around Black New Orleans for a few weeks. The city was joining the baseball big leagues.

In a recruiting and economic coup, local businessman, promoter and baseball kingpin Allen Page had become part owner of the St. Louis Stars of the Negro American League, which, along with the venerated Negro National League, was one of the segregation-era Black major leagues.

Beginning with a July 7 clash with the Cleveland Bears at Pelican Stadium, the Stars would split their second-half season with the Gateway City as the New Orleans-St. Louis Stars. After steadily growing in national influence and economic clout on baseball’s biggest stage for several years, Page had landed what he and the city’s African-American hardball fans had dreamt of – recognition and reward in America’s pastime.

Burbridge voiced the elation and pride of the Crescent City’s Black fandom.

“This column wishes Allen Page the best of luck in his new venture,” Burbridge wrote. “He has long tried to provide the city with major baseball, and it looks like his efforts have been crowned at last.”

However, running under the exhilaration was an ever present current of frustration and lingering melancholy, one the city’s Black population had battled for decades – that because of intransigent segregation and acute racism, the Stars, like all of Black baseball, and indeed all of Black society, were still viewed by mainstream white America as second-class and unworthy of respect or equality.

As long as the looming shadow of Jim Crow and its pernicious, lingering impact on history continued to exist, the Stars and the fans who loved them would never get their full due.

However, after decades of persistent advocacy and tireless research, that has now, at long last, changed.

In December of last year, Major League Baseball announced that the histories and statistical records of seven Negro baseball circuits – the first Negro National League (1920-31), the Eastern Colored League (1923-28), the American Negro League (1929), the East-West League (1932), the Negro Southern League (1932), the second Negro National League (1933-48) and the Negro American League (1937-48) – would now be considered fully major league, equals with every long-recognized MLB leagues of so-called “organized baseball.”

That means that now, after decades in the shadows, legendary slugger Josh Gibson is officially equal to Babe Ruth, that ageless pitcher Satchel Paige is officially on par with Walter Johnson, and tenacious, pugnacious Oscar Charleston – the man long considered by many as the greatest all-around player in history, regardless of race or era – officially stands shoulder to shoulder with Ty Cobb, the infamous racist whose malevolent bigotry held undo sway on the minds of white America and helped maintain Jim Crow in baseball.

It also means that every team that was a member of those seven Negro Leagues during the stated time periods are now officially, in every way, Major League teams. That includes the 1940-42 New Orleans-St. Louis Stars of the Negro American League and every player and manager on its rosters.

New Orleans now, for the first time ever, has a history as a Major League Baseball city.

The news struck a deeply personal chord with Rodney Page, son of Allen Page, the entrepreneur and unflagging advocate for New Orleans Black baseball who brought the Stars to the Big Easy.

“This milestone achievement is deeply personal for me,” said Rodney, who now lives in Austin, Texas. “It is an important part of my life’s journey, and a significant dimension of my family’s story. It is something that I am extremely proud of and treasure immensely.”

The significance of the Stars’ elevation to major league status is certainly appreciated by Negro Leagues researchers, writers and educators nationwide. Kent State-Stark professor, Negro Leagues author and Society for American Baseball Research official Leslie Heaphy noted Allen Page’s many accomplishments – including the establishment and operation of the annual North-South All-Star Game at Pelican Stadium – as evidence of New Orleans’ importance to Black baseball history. She hopes that might help the modern baseball world shine a light on the Big Easy.

Ray Doswell, vice president of curatorial services at the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, noted that at the time the Stars moved to New Orleans, America was on the verge of a great awakening of national awareness and social conscience, one precipitated by the entry of the United States into World War II.

“World War II was a major revelation,” Doswell said. “African Americans were fighting valiantly against fascists and Nazis abroad, while suffering indignities and bias at home. Among the opportunities denied African Americans, of course, was the ability to play Major League Baseball. This irony is not lost on many observers in progressive politics, the Black press, as well as the communist left press and others. It was often reported, reflected and investigated.”

While the early 1940s was a time of significant social change, the effects of World War II were also immediately and more tangibly visible on the baseball diamond. Between the draft and the military enlistment of hundreds of professional players, both Black and white, the quality of the game presented in the Negro Leagues and the Major Leagues suffered to varying degrees.

However, Doswell said, the impact of the personnel drain on Black baseball was less significant, meaning the Negro Leagues now often offered a more exciting, appealing version of the game than the depleted major leagues, a development that opened the eyes of a growing number of whites to the top-notch quality of Black baseball.

“Fans and others began to question the validity of segregated baseball,” Doswell said. “This is not to say that all Negro Leagues teams enjoyed the same success as the [Homestead] Grays or the Kansas City Monarchs on the field and with fans, but as Black communities and economies faired, so did Black baseball.”

Such a heady situation is what birthed the New Orleans-St. Louis Stars, whose migration to the Big Easy also reflected the clout Allen Page had on the national scene.

The seeds of the Stars’ move were sowed in the years immediately preceding 1940, when Page routinely recruited numerous top-level Negro Leagues teams from across the country – including the Homestead Grays, Pittsburgh Crawfords, Kansas City Monarchs, Birmingham Black Barons and Chicago American Giants – to come to New Orleans for pre-season and post-season exhibition games, usually at Pelican Stadium. Thousands of fans usually attended the games – some reached 10,000 or more – and helped raise the city’s baseball profile.

That build-up in popularity got another huge shot of adrenaline in the fall of 1939, when Page hatched the North-South All-Star Game. Designed as a postseason complement to the prestigious East-West All-Star Game held each year in Chicago that was the highlight of each Negro Leagues season.

While the North-South game never developed into the same grand spectacle as the East-West contest, it became a staple of the Negro Leagues’ post-season festivities and exhibitions, drawing the best players from across the country, including, specifically, players from New Orleans, Louisiana and the South as a whole. The contest further cemented New Orleans as a reliable, attractive Black baseball outpost in the South, a region that traditionally didn’t have a baseball scene as thriving and vibrant as the more traditional ones in the North and Midwest.

“With popular interests in New Orleans stimulated by major attractions presented last season,” Burbridge wrote in the March 16, 1940, The Louisiana Weekly, “Mr. Page expects 1940 to prove a banner year for local baseball fans and has made plans to present the best talent possible.”

Page delivered on the promise.

“New Orleans became the home of a major ball club this week,” trumpeted the June 1, 1940, Pittsburgh Courier, one of the country’s most important Black newspapers, “following the announcement that Allen Paige [sic], well known New Orleans sportsman, had purchased the St. Louis Stars of the Negro American League.

“One of the best baseball cities in the country, New Orleans has been dickering for a team in organized baseball for some time,” it added. “Paige’s [sic] purchase now assures Crescent City fans a season of topnotch [sic] baseball.”

The newly branded New Orleans-St. Louis Stars debuted in their new hometown, and launched the second half of the league’s split season – on July 7 at Pelican Stadium, where they hosted the Cleveland Bears.

The team that now called the Big Easy its “half home” was managed by George Mitchell, a 40-year-old Sparta, Ill., native whose career as a journeyman pitcher in the Negro Leagues was winding down. He first joined the Stars organization as player-manager in 1938 and piloted the club through the 1941 season. (The franchise had actually begun life as an incarnation of the Indianapolis ABCs, then spent a season or two as the Mound City Blues in St. Louis before officially adopting the St. Louis Stars moniker during the 1939 campaign.)

The Stars’ pitching staff was anchored by Gene Smith, a 24-year-old righty from Ansley, a small community in Jackson Parish in north central Louisiana. Smith was just starting his career as a hurler, debuting with the Atlanta Black Crackers in 1938. Overall, Smith spent eight seasons pitching in the Negro Leagues, a tenure broken up by a three-year hitch in the Army, and his biggest claim to baseball fame would be pitching three no-hitters during his time as a professional moundsman.

Also pitching for the Stars during the tenure in New Orleans was right-hander Jack Bruton, an Alabama native whose brief Negro Leagues career lasted five seasons; Walter “Lefty” Calhoun of Tennessee, whose lengthy, respected time in Black baseball stretched for a decade and a half from 1932 to 1946 and included stops with the Montgomery Grey Sox, the Memphis Red Sox, the New York Black Yankees and the Indianapolis Clowns; and righty Frank McAllister, a kid from Arkansas whose career spanned several years in the 1930s and 1940s with a handful of teams.

So how did the New Orleans-St. Louis Stars fare? Despite the early blush of optimism experienced by the New Orleans faithful in summer 1940, the team did OK. They finished the season at .500, with a mark of 22-22, placing them in fourth place in the seven-team NAL. Riddle led the team in batting at .377, and Smith paced the pitching staff with a mark of 4-3 and an ERA of 2.76. Riddle and Calhoun were selected for the 1940 East-West All-Star Game, while Smith pitched for the South in the North-South contest.

Fast forward to 2021, and the beginning innings of another year of the American pastime, the Negro Leagues enter a new era of fame and recognition.

However, Doswell urged caution and measured optimism when it comes to celebrating the Negro Leagues’ new presence in the Major League record books. He said much work still needs to be done in terms completing the accumulation, evaluation and integration of the complete statistical record of the Negro Leagues into that of Major League Baseball.

Doswell said much of segregation-era Black baseball’s statistical record needs to be uncovered and compiled. As a result of shoddy record keeping and spotty media coverage, countless Negro Leagues games and league standings have remained incomplete and hidden in history; what statistics that have been found and compiled so far are the results of the tireless investigative efforts of a handful of dogged researchers.

Also remaining to be ascertained and agreed upon is the exact process by which Negro Leagues stats will be officially and mathematically integrated in the MLB record books.

Still, Page says, “Major League Baseball’s acknowledgment represents atonement and proper recognition for the Negro Leagues contributions to the game of baseball and our country.

“It is not just baseball history or Black history – it’s American history. The great work and consistent, bulldog determination of Negro League historians and researchers made it possible. Their efforts keep alive the memories, faces, and voices of so many who have gone before and remain worthy of remembrance and recognition.”

This article originally published in the April 26, 2021 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.