| QUOTE |
| SATCH, DIZZY & RAPID ROBERT: The Wild Saga of Interracial Baseball Before Jackie Robinson Timothy M. Gay Simon & Schuster ISBN 978 1 4165 4798 3 349 pages $26 Reviewed by Wil Haygood, a staff writer for The Washington Post and the author, most recently, of "Sweet Thunder: The Life and Times of Sugar Ray Robinson." He can be reached at haygoodw(at symbol)washpost.com It is hardly a secret that Negro leagues baseball players squared off against white players on the barnstorming circuit before Jackie Robinson integrated professional baseball in 1947. Aging Negro leaguers have been telling stories about those games in their memoirs for decades. The players had to solidify their bona fides themselves, since the games were rarely covered by the mainstream (read: white) press. Now Timothy M. Gay sheds more light on the phenomenon in "Satch, Dizzy & Rapid Robert." Gay focuses on the mid-1930s as well as a few contests in the early 1940s. His three marquee players are all pitchers: the fabled Negro leaguer Satchel Paige, the phenomenal St. Louis Cardinals pitcher Dizzy Dean and Cleveland Indians ace Bob Feller. Gay makes it clear that the interracial contests were staged for economic reasons, as opposed to furthering any social agenda on the part of white players, though Dean and Feller were a wee bit more enlightened about race than many others. (This didn't stop Dean, however, from using the "n" word with shameful frequency.) As the Depression raged, the players followed the money. Team owners -- who hated the idea of interracial barnstorming games, fearing they just might tempt the populace with unwelcome ideas -- were stingy, and the salaries they paid, save to stars like Babe Ruth, could hardly be called lavish. Dizzy Dean hitched on with retired pro players and amateurs to take on the Negro leaguers when his season had ended. The black ballplayers, working for even more parsimonious owners than the whites, either fled to Cuba after their season to make ends meet or tried to get in on this barnstorming kick. The games were a delight to black townsfolk, who flocked to out-of-the-way stadiums -- in the "unpoliced boundaries" of America, as historian Jules Tygiel put it -- and saw a kind of sly social experiment taking place. A New York sports columnist huffed that "there are any number of Southern players who apparently have no social scruples against playing with or against Negroes in the off-season and exhibition games when the opportunity to pick up stray dollars is inviting." Gay has written a workmanlike book. It has limitations, some of which are not really the author's fault. The records of these games, even when they can be tracked down, are not always dependable. The games seem to have been not so much "wild," as Gay implies in his subtitle, as slapstick. And some of the stories here sound apocryphal: Negro leaguers taking on the Klan and living to tell about it? Gay's repeated use of "according to legend" doesn't help either. Another drawback is that these were exhibition games, played in a relaxed environment. Pride was doubtless at stake, but not the kind of feverish athletic fervor that might have been displayed in a Negro leagues championship game. Feller doesn't enter the story until midway through. A World War II vet, he comes off as progressive and full of the truth: "The pre-war Paige was the best I ever saw," Feller said, "and I'm judging him on the way he overpowered or outwitted some of the best big-league hitters of the day." The author is more focused on Paige and Dizzy Dean. To Gay they are reminiscent of Mark Twain's Huck and Jim, but there is no evidence of a bond between these players, who clearly lived in different worlds. Gay does capture little nuggets of memorable dialogue, though. Dean had told Paige that if they were in the majors together, they'd likely combine to win at least 60 games. "Hell, Diz," Paige replied, "I'd win sixty by myself." Of course, this all ended when the game was integrated by the great Jackie Robinson. Those barnstorming affairs receded into history -- until they came back in vivid and colorful memories. The players who were there trusted themselves to remember those moments. "I was helpin' the writers out," Dizzy Dean once allowed about his past pronouncements on matters large and small related to his life and baseball. "Them ain't lies; them's scoops." |
| QUOTE (Career200 @ Mar 24 2010, 08:40 AM) |
| I read a book a couple of years ago named, "Beyond the Shadow of the Senators." |
| QUOTE (Sluggo @ Mar 24 2010, 10:45 AM) | ||
That's a good one. If I remember right, it also has a lot of biographical background on Josh Gibson. It was surprising to read how those guys travel to South America and Mexico and literally play baseball year-round. |
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| William Julius "Judy" Johnson (October 26, 1899 - June 15, 1989) was an American third baseman in Negro league baseball. Johnson was born in Snow Hill, Maryland. Although his father wanted him to be a boxer, Johnson, who was 5 ft 11 in (1.80 m) and only 150 lb (68 kg), was far better suited for a career in baseball. After being a dock worker during World War I, Johnson began his baseball career in 1918, reaching the top-level Negro Leagues in 1921 with Hilldale, a team for which he played through 1929. In 1930 Johnson was a player-coach for the Homestead Grays, and in that capacity he discovered Josh Gibson. From 1935 through his last season in 1938, Johnson was the captain of the Pittsburgh Crawfords, one of the greatest franchises of all time. Although the Crawfords also included fellow Hall of Famers Gibson, Oscar Charleston and Cool Papa Bell, Johnson was the glue that held the team together. His vital role on the team was most apparent in the 1935 Negro League World Series, when he hit a clutch single to win the sixth game with the Crawfords down 3 games to 2 against the New York Cubans. The Crawfords won the series in seven games. Johnson was a precise contact hitter who batted an average of .416 in 1929, but his greatest ability was his fielding. Along with Ray Dandridge and Ghost Marcelle, Johnson was one of the greatest fielding third basemen in the Negro Leagues. He was also one of the smartest men in baseball, able to compensate for any physical shortcomings with an unsurpassed ability to think faster than his opponents, particularly in pressure situations. Although Johnson retired nine years before the integration of the major leagues, he was eventually able to apply his baseball knowledge in the majors, becoming the first African American to coach in Major League Baseball (1954). He also was one of the most accomplished talent scouts in baseball, responsible for signing Bill Bruton and Dick Allen. Johnson retired in 1973 and was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1975, the sixth Negro Leaguer so honored. Like Pop Lloyd before him, he was known for his exemplary character off the field. In 1976, he was the first athlete ever inducted into the Delaware Sports Museum and Hall of Fame. The home field of the Carolina League Wilmington Blue Rocks minor league baseball team is named in his honor. In 1994, Johnson was posthumously elected to the inaugural class of the Delaware High School Baseball Coaches Hall-of-Fame. He died at age 89 in Wilmington, Delaware. Known statistics: .344 career batting average |
| QUOTE (Career200 @ Mar 24 2010, 01:46 PM) |
| I love cerebral ballplayers like that. Baseball is as much a thinking man's game as it is a physical game. |
| QUOTE (Skipjack @ Mar 24 2010, 02:29 PM) |
| One of the greats was Judy Johnson from Snow Hill, Maryland down here on the Eastern Shore. |
