Black baseball’s OPening day
One hundred years ago today … The “Negro Leagues” (as Black baseball is popularly called) season opened in NYC. Local favorites the Lincoln Giants played a mixed double-header at Catholic Protectory Field on 177th Street near Tremont Avenue in the Bronx, beating teams from Peekskill and Stamford. In both games, the starting pitcher was their player-manager Joe Williams, who is in baseball’s Hall of Fame.
Joe Williams. Negro League Baseball E-Museum.
Note: we previously reported on the Giants, Joe Williams, and Catholic Protectory Oval last July 17 in a guest post by Jacob Leland. See also our October 9, 1920 post.
New York Herald, 4 April 1921, p. 11. Newspapers.com.
In other Black baseball results: The Colored All-Stars beat the Tesreau Bears at Dyckman Oval, 204th Street in Washington Heights. The Bronx Giants beat the Paterson team at Bronx Field. The Brooklyn Bushwicks, which fielded integrated teams throughout its history, beat Hoboken at Dexter Park in Ridgewood, famous for being the first professional baseball stadium to install lights.
The Herald seems to have been the only major daily to report on these games. Its list of results categorized the games as “semipro,” and does not indicate which teams (so we may have missed one or more). Throughout the history of the Negro Leagues the quality of the play was popularly downgraded from Major Leagure level, though evidence suggests otherwise; note that Williams had showed himself to be at the same level as legendary pitcher Walter Johnson. The current regime of Major League Baseball is trying to correct the malfeasance by including the Negro League players’ statistics among those of the white leagues. (See Rowan Ricardo Phillips’s recent New York Times Magazine article, “Justice for Negro Leagues Will Mean More Than Just Stats.”)
References/Further reading
Barthel, Thomas. Baseball's Peerless Semipros: The Brooklyn Bushwicks of Dexter Park. United States, St. Johann Press, 2009.
Phillips, Rowan Ricardo. “Justice for Negro Leagues Will Mean More Than Just Stats.” New York Times Magazine, 23 March 2021.
– Jonathan Goldman, April 3, 2021
TAGS: African American history, black sports, journalism, sportswriting, racism