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Strat-O-Matic Negro League All-Stars Guide Book

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Strat-O-Matic Negro League All-Stars Guide Book 22332 Negro League AllStar Guidebook:Layout 1 6/3/09 5:22 PM Page 2 Strat-O-Matic Negro League All-Stars Guide Book By Scott Simkus Acknowledgements Above and beyond everybody else, I want to thank Hal Richman for green lighting the Strat-O-Matic Negro League project. Not only has he provided encouragement, he’s also “gently pushed” me to dig deeper into the numbers in order to uncover the once-elusive information needed for creating a great Strat-O-Matic card set and computer product. Throughout this entire process, he’s been an extremely active collaborator, working with me to unlock the mysteries of translating Negro League performances into a Major League context. It’s been a fun (okay, sometimes “grueling”) process, several years in the making, but I’m glad Hal was along for the final leg of the journey. To Steve Barkan, Glenn Guzzo and everybody else inside (and on the periphery) of Glen Head, who helped with the programming, design and promotion of the Negro League set. All of us have had our normal daily routines ripped apart a little bit in order to get this thing done in a timely fashion. Thanks for all your hard work. Next, to my old friends John Paraoan, Big Al Kosek and Guy Snell (wherever you are); who spent countless hours in my basement rolling dice together. We burned cards, ripped them, threw dice, cheated, lied, skipped school and fought over Strat-O-Matic. I’ll never forget those days. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention George Brett, Steve Carlton, Orlando Cepeda, Woodie Held, Frank Lary, Mickey Mantle, Early Wynn, Hack Wilson, Al Simmons, Johnny Bench, George Altman, Gabby Hartnett, Joe Charboneau, Joe Adcock, Dazzy Vance, Lefty Grove, Don Money, Rickey Henderson, Harmon Killebrew and Luis Arroyo. No, not the actual people…the Strat cards. These are some of the cardboard legends (famous and infamous) from my past. And finally, to my lovely wife Joyce and two children (Joe and Libby); thank you, thank you, thank you!!!! Without some of the sacrifices you made over the past year, this project would have never been completed. Thank you! Scott Simkus July 1, 2009 “Certainly some of these colored players are deserving of a little notice, from the standpoint of their ability to play the American national game. (Dick) Lundy…could vie with any shortstop in the major leagues, (Biz) Mackey, catcher, (Oscar) Charleston, center fielder, (Oliver) Marcelle, third baseman and (Frank) Warfield, second baseman are only a few among a number of others who are first class ball players.” The Sporting News, December 11, 1924 THE NEGRO LEAGUES A Quick Tour of a Most Peculiar Baseball Institution By Scott Simkus Instead of beginning with the folklore, the colorful (but increasingly stale) tall tales about Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson and Cool Papa Bell; I figured I’d start with the cold, hard realities of financing in the Negro Leagues. More specifically, how the woefully under funded world of black professional baseball (and poverty’s impact on the structure of black teams, leagues and playing style), influenced the research and evaluation of players for the STRAT-O-MATIC Negro League set. As interesting as it is to discover Cool Papa Bell “was so fast, he could flip the switch and get into his hotel bed before the lights went out,” it’s important to understand why he was in the hotel room in the first place. Obviously, he wasn’t bouncing around the country on coal-choked rails and dusty country roads because of the excessive comfort level. Like his white contemporaries, Cool Papa loved the game deeply- and like the white big leaguers- endured the rigors of non-stop travel because playing the game happened to be his most marketable skill. He was simply trying to scratch out a buck or two. Black entrepreneurs who owned the teams (plus J.L. Wilkinson, a white businessman who operated the Kansas City Monarchs, as well as numerous white booking agents who controlled blackball on the east coast), discovered there was a market for colored baseball early on. Hall of Famer Rube Foster, who was a star pitcher at the beginning of the twentieth century, took over the independent Chicago American Giants in 1911 and helped found the original Negro National League in 1920. Within a year he was earning a personal income of $15,000, the equivalent of about $175,000 today. For comparisons sake, New York Giants manager John McGraw was taking in $50,000 annually (about $515,000 in 2008) at the same time, but benefited heavily by working within the framework of a white league which had been around since 1876. Putting race aside for a brief moment, Foster (in the context of a baseball league which was literally in its infancy) was doing astonishingly well. Of course, anybody who has studied Rube Foster knows he was not only a talented ballplayer, but a gifted businessman. On the other hand, the players didn’t enjoy the same financial rewards as their league magnates. Like the white leagues, their incomes were higher than the average working man’s, but not so great that they didn’t have to secure jobs during the off-season to help pay their bills. Cool Papa Bell, who came up as a pitcher in 1922, was making only $90 a month his first season in St. Louis. By 1931, although an established star, he was earning only $220 a month, or $15,000 annually in today’s money- for six months work. Satchel Paige, on the other hand (when viewed from the perspective of 2008 wages), was making about $16,000 as a rookie in the late 1920s, $44,879 by 1936, then in excess of $500,000 in the 1940s, when black baseball reached its financial zenith and Paige had become a nationally-recognized phenomenon. Unfortunately, very few owners or players enjoyed the success of Rube Foster and Satchel Paige. In almost every season, there were one or two (or three) teams which either folded or failed to play out their league schedules. In fact, at no time during the Golden Age of black baseball did the black leagues ever play a fully balanced schedule, nor did all the teams complete their string of games. A couple times, the entire league fell apart. In what was truly a hardscrabble environment, there were little things which separated those who made it from those who didn’t. Part of Rube Foster’s success might be attributed in small part to his relationship with a white businessman named John Schorling. Schorling’s father-in-law happened to own a dilapidated ballpark near the black neighborhoods on Chicago’s south side, which he agreed to let the American Giants call home. They fixed up the grandstands, and over the next thirty years this ballpark would host more official Negro League contests than any venue in history. Turns out Schorling’s father-in-law was a guy named Charlie Comiskey, who owned a team called the Chicago White Sox. His dilapidated field had been the home of the American Leaguers from 1901 through 1909. Here it was early on, albeit with one degree of separation- a semi-symbiotic relationship between blackball and the white Majors. Foster died unexpectedly in 1930, but the Giants (in their various incarnations) continued to play in Schorling’s Park up until 1940. With Foster’s death, the power in black baseball shifted almost completely to the east coast during the 1930s; where due to the Great Depression and fragmented leadership, the leagues sputtered and struggled to stay afloat. These were lean years, and not until World War II, when employment levels were at an all-time high and travel restrictions forced people to look for entertainment close to home, did folks began attending Negro League games en masse. The war years were among the most lucrative in blackball history. The white majors, in their own way, took notice. According to documentation uncovered by author Brad Snyder (in his best-selling book, Beyond the Shadow of the Senators), Washington owner Clark Griffith generated approximately $160,000 in revenue during the 1942 and ‘43 seasons by merely renting his ballpark- and leasing its flood lights- to the Negro National League Champion Homestead Grays. The white Washington Senators had a good year in 1943, when wartime travel restrictions (and a 2nd place ball club) helped boost their attendance to over 574,000 in 75 games. Yet in that same summer, the all-black 1st place Grays attracted over 225,000 fans in only 26 home appearances! Now, that pencils out to about 1000 more fans per game for the black team, but more importantly (if we use the Consumer Price Index), $160,000 in rental fees is equal to almost 2 million dollars in today’s economy. Major League baseball wasn’t nearly as big a business back then as it is now, and clearly Griffith’s relationship with black baseball had a significant impact on his wallet. In a very real sense, Griffith may have made more off of black baseball in a couple seasons than Rube Foster did in a lifetime. This is, as Snyder suggests, part of the untold story of Negro Organized Baseball, and the painfully slow march to integration. Part of this inertia (perhaps a lot of it) simply had to do with cold hard cash. While Jesse Owens could accept his medals on a stand in Nazi Germany and Joe Louis could destroy all comers in the boxing ring, black baseball players were forced to ply their trade in the obscurity of the Negro Leagues, in separate arrangements often benefiting white Major (and minor) League operations.
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