Providing a comprehensive history of the Baltimore Black Sox from before the team's founding in 1913 through its demise in 1936, this history examines the social and cultural forces that gave birth to the club and informed its development. The author describes aspects of Baltimore's history in the first decades of the 20th century, details the team's year-by-year performance, explores front-office and management dynamics and traces the shaping of the Negro Leagues. The history of the Black Sox's home ballparks and of the people who worked for the team both on and off the field are included.
Provides a history of the Elite Giants of Baltimore baseball team in the Negro League. Highlights pivotal games, players, and league decisions. Also discusses the relationship between the team and major league baseball during integration.
In Baseball in Baltimore: The First Hundred Years, James H. Bready presents a vivid and compelling portrait of the players, managers, ballparks, and games that shaped the history of the national pastime in one of America's oldest baseball towns. Packed with rare illustrations, colorful anecdotes, and fascinating details - many of them skillfully brought to life from the original box scores on preserved newspaper pages and scorecards - Baseball in Baltimore tells a story that will captivate baseball fans everywhere.
Under the guidance of Leslie Heaphy and an editorial board of leading historians, this peer-reviewed, annual book series offers new, authoritative research on all subjects related to black baseball, including the Negro major and minor leagues, teams, and players; pre-Negro League organization and play; barnstorming; segregation and integration; class, gender, and ethnicity; the business of black baseball; and the arts.
The "Greatest Baseball team of all-time" easily describes the 1931 Homestead Grays. They remain a team never to be forgotten—a team that rates with the greatest teams in all of baseball history. Organized in 1910, baseball’s Homestead Grays of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania—an exclusively African-American team—held claim to a regional championship and also a legitimate claim to baseball’s World Championship. The Grays’ well-known leader was Hall of Famer Cumberland “Cum” Posey. His 1931 Grays featured among others; Hall of Fame third baseman Jud Wilson, Hall of Fame infielder Oscar Charleston, a Hall of Fame catcher in Josh Gibson and two Hall of Fame pitchers in Willie Foster and Joseph “Smokey Joe” Williams—a total of five legendary players. Paced by young Josh Gibson, age 18 and the most powerful home run hitter in baseball, Posey’s 1931 Homestead Grays finished with a magnificent 143-29-2 record. This is their story told here for the first time. Included within the text are written accounts for every game from the Homestead Grays’ entire 1931 schedule of nearly 175 contest, with scores, attendance figures and player biographies. The work includes score and locations on more than 300 additional games played by the Kansas City Monarchs, Hilldale, Baltimore’s Black Sox, the Cuban House of David, New York’s Harlem Stars and other African-American teams in operation during that same 1931 season. The comparative scores and their related histories are a resourceful and entertaining aid for further analysis and assessment on the participation of African-American athletes in baseball as best represented from the perspective of a single championship season.
The Wild West had nothing on Montana's first baseball games. Fights, booze, cheating and gambling fueled the state's inaugural professional league in 1892. The turn of the century brought star-studded barnstorming tours and threats of bloodshed. Big Sky Country embraced a distinctly different version of the old ballgame, and Montana players who made their way to big league diamonds helped change the sport on and off the field. From the Lewis and Clark expedition to Dave McNally's historic career, award-winning journalist Skylar Browning and researcher Jeremy Watterson reveal Montana's relationship with America's pastime.
Presenting views from a variety of sport and history experts, Baseball in America and America in Baseball captures the breadth and unsuspected variety of our national fascination and identification with America's Game. Chapters cover such well-known figures as Ty Cobb and lesser-known topics like the "invisible" baseball played by Japanese Americans during the 1930s and 1940s. A study of baseball in rural California from the Gold Rush to the turn of the twentieth century provides an interesting glimpse at how the game evolved from its earliest beginnings to something most modern observers would find familiar. Chapters on the Negro League's Baltimore Black Sox, financial profits of major league teams from 1900 to 1956, and American aspirations to a baseball-led cultural hegemony during the first half of the twentieth century round out this superb collection of sport history scholarship. Baseball in America and America in Baseball belongs on the bookshelf of any avid student of the game and its history. It also provides interesting glimpses into the sociology of sport in America.
This guide to all things Baltimore Oriole covers the team's history as one of the American League's eight charter franchises, including the incredible legacy of Cal Ripken, Jr., memories from Memorial Stadium, and how singing "Thank God I'm a Country Boy" during the seventh-inning stretch has become a fan-favorite tradition. Author Dan Connolly has collected every essential piece of Orioles knowledge and trivia, as well as must-do activities, providing an entertaining and enlightening read for any Oriole fan.
Though Satchel Paige lived into the early 1980s, much of our information about his life and especially his career is the stuff of anecdote. He is nevertheless a central figure--arguably the central figure--in our reconstructions of Negro Leagues history. This collection of papers from the 9th Annual Jerry Malloy Negro League Conference focuses on the celebrity of Satchel Paige and the team he is most closely associated with, the Kansas City Monarchs. Accounts of Paige's exploits are scrutinized and the effects of his fame, on both the contemporary perception of black baseball and its depiction in the years since, are discussed.
America and baseball are rediscovering the game played by African Americans before Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in 1947. We now know a great deal about the Negro Leagues of 1920 on, and their great stars-Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, and their contemporaries. But what of the pre-1920 black game? From the onset in the 1880s of the "gentleman's agreement" that barred blacks from playing in white leagues, that game is nearly invisible. Financially shaky, with sporadic media coverage even in black newspapers and completely overlooked by the mainstream, Negro teams of this era played on for love of the game and in hopes that their skills would receive their due. In 1907, Sol White, a remarkable African-American ballplayer, successful manager, and baseball loyalist, wrote a small volume on the history of the black game. Part fund-raising effort, advertising brochure, team hype, celebration of black baseball, and throughout an implicit and explicit challenge to racism, Sol White's History of Colored Base Ball is the source of much of what we know of the events in the organized black game of that time. The original was poorly printed, and copies are exceedingly rare (known and rumored copies number only four). This edition republishes the full 1907 edition (with the even rarer supplement), completely reset for legibility, and reproduces all the original's illustrations, including the advertisements that speak volumes on the social world of the day. Fifteen additional documents from 1886 to 1936 augment the picture of the black game and our record of Sol White himself. The work is introduced by Jerry Malloy, a recognized expert on the history of Negro leagues who has spent years inpainstaking research into this vanished world.
