NOTES #229

NOTES FROM THE SHADOWS OF COOPERSTOWN

Observations from Outside the Lines

By Two Finger Carney (carneya6@borg.com)

#229 FEBRUARY 24, 2001

ALL TOGETHER AGAIN

We’re all together again, we’re here! We’re here!

We’re all together again, we’re here! We’re here!

Who knows when we’ll be all together again,

Singing all together again: “We’re here! We’re here!”?

I’m not sure where those lyrics got into my brain — at summer camp, after fifth grade? And I’m not sure when I last sang them, with what group. I am sure that the lyrics are true. We never know when we will all be together again. So let’s sing, celebrate the eternal here and now.

Baseball has emerged from its cocoon, it’s back on the sports pages, and the front pages of our conversations. For fans, the start of Spring Training is an annual reunion. We’re all together again, us and baseball.

Looking back, I recall springs when I was surrounded, it seemed, with friends, friends with whom I’ve lost touch. Some have passed away. So it goes with reunions, we pause and recall those who cannot come together again. Group reunions inevitably shrink in size. Life goes on, but not for everybody.

On the other hand, each spring is a chance to be together with new friends. Once upon a time, I had a habit of mentally awarding the title “Rookie of the Year” to the best friend I had made during the previous twelve months. Sometimes, I even gave out the award verbally. Once, that led to my marriage.

The issue of NOTES is coming together as I pack my bags for Florida. There, I hope to see my second ST game (see NOTES #210 in the Archive, for my report from Florida a year ago.) And I’m hoping to see it with two friends with whom I attended every class for four years in high school, in Pittsburgh. One of them is not much of a baseball fan, but he’s a pretty good doctor. The other is enough of a fan to make sure our reunion is at a Pirate game. They both live in Florida, so no one can bring Isaly’s chipped ham, or even Iron City beer. But we’ll manage.

But hey, it’s ST, Opening Day is like ninety feet away and taking a big lead, ready to burst home. Time is once more almost at and end (see NOTES #211 — Boswell had it wrong), we are braced for the season, and for all the reunions it may bring, with box scores and family and friends and ballparks, and with those friends we see only at the ballpark. Plaaaaay ba —

 

 

NOTES FROM A LEAGUE OF MY OWN

My third simulated season pitting the All-Timers of baseball history against each other has reached June 5. In the NL, the Pirates’ lead has been cut to four, the Braves and Reds tied for second. Season One’s champions, the Cardinals, are five and a half back (despite the addition of Big Mac), and the champs of Season Two, the Phils, are seven back.

Over in the AL, just three and a half games separate the first and seventh-place teams. Season One saw the A’s lead almost wire-to-wire, then get caught by the Yankees (who went on to sweep the Cards in the Series); this time, the A’s are in the cellar, for now, anyway. The Tigers, Season Two’s champs (and they topped the Phils in October), share 7th place with the Senators; both are just a game under .500. First place is occupied by the Orioles, with the Indians a half game back, and the Yanks a game behind the Indians. Too close to call!

Here are two more of the All-Time rosters I’m using. If you are interested, the Yanks & Braves are in #223; the Red Sox and Giants in #225; and the Indians and Pirates in 227.

THE ORIOLES

This team is led by flashy first-baseman George Sisler, who hits, runs and fields like he did in 1922 — he may not reach .420 in this league, but it’s fun watching him try. At second, I have Roberto Alomar. At short — you know who. I did not have Cal Ripken the first time around; he fills a big hole. At third, Brooks Robinson has won the job, after a couple seasons of sharing the hot corner with Harlond Clift. Old Bobby Wallace is my utility infield backup. He doesn’t see much action.

The outfield includes Kenny “30-30” Williams, a wonderful bat man, but his glove makes him a DH; Harry Rice; Bill “Baby Doll” Jacobson; and a rookie from the Negro Leagues, Herbert “Rap” Dixon, a huge addition. Backing up are Brady Anderson (with 50 HR potential), Paul Blair, and Johnny Tobin.

Hank Severeid is the only real Oriole in the catching corps; the O’s drafted Pudge Rodriguez, and then picked up “Double Duty” Radcliffe from the Negro Leagues. No more weak spots on this team!

My starting rotation is currently Jim Palmer, Mike Mussina, Dave McNally, Mike Cuellar, and Jack Powell. Sometimes “Handsome Harry” Howell gets a start, but more often he’s in the pen with Stu Miller, Jesse Orosco, Tippy Martinez, and draftee J.R. Russell. As with all of the teams in this league, pitchers who fail, are easy to replace. To just stay on the roster all season will be an accomplishment.

 

 

THE DODGERS

This Dodger team is better than ever. But so is every other team. On paper, none of these super-powers should ever lose. But of course, every game, one of them does. What amazes me is that any of them are ever shutout, but they are, a couple each week.

I have no regular first baseman on the Dodgers. Gil Hodges is having his best season yet. Pedro Guerrero is one back-up. And Babe Herman, my usual DH, plays some first, too.

Herman is the top hitter on the team, as usual — well after all, he does hold many Dodger all-time records. After reading Tot Holmes’ biography of the Babe, I am tempted to raise his fielding rating. But I really don’t need him to play in the OF.

Jackie Robinson owns second base; I don’t even carry a back-up. After two seasons of platooning with Pee Wee Reese, Maury Wills has won the shortstop position, and is on his way to a new record for stolen bases. At third, I’ve sent down Ron Cey and Billy Cox. I’m trying out Alex Radcliffe (Double Duty’s older brother) there, with draftee Jeff Cirillo waiting for a chance.

The Dodger outfield is loaded, but so far, no one has been consistent. I’ve had to bench Duke Snider, of all people — he’s been a mainstay. Tony Gwynn likes southern California, but he sometimes hits like he’s handcuffed in Brooklyn. Dependables Zack Wheat and Carl Furillo share time with rookie Raul Mondesi (who started the season with a barrage of HRs), Negro League vet “Terrible Ted” Page (a speedster with no power), and draftee Cesar Cedeno. Wish I could play five or six in the outfield!

The addition of Mike Piazza has been terrific — Mike is holding his own so far, filling in for Roy Campanella (just a tad more power and leather), or sharing the DH with Herman. I may need to teach Piazza to play third base before October.

Say “Dodger pitching” and you think Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale, and they happen to be the aces of this staff, too. I go with a four-man rotation on this team, and my hunch is that one of these guys will win twenty. Both have, in previous simulated seasons. Don Newcombe has been a steady number three, but Don Sutton is struggling to stay in the rotation.

He’ll be given competition by Claude Osteen, and Negro Leaguer “Bullet Joe” Rogan. The bullpen is solid — Mike Marshall, Jay Howell (the top closer this time around), Jim Brewer, and Ron Perranoski.

The rosters above are smaller than the ones described here in earlier issues of NOTES. After May 31, I trimmed them all to twenty-five. This takes away some options, but actually makes my life as a manager a little easier — and more challenging. Not easy, cutting Hall of Famers. But someone’s gotta do it.

 

 

BROOKLYN’S BABE

Brooklyn’s Babe: The Life and Legend of Babe Herman (Holmes Publishing, 1990) is one of those books that will hook some readers, pull others gently along, but have little or no appeal for still others. This can be said of many books, I realize that, but it is important to state it here so you can figure out exactly to whom I am recommending this book, and whom I am warning against it.

I was anxious to open Babe because I have had some contact with its author, Tot Holmes. When NOTES broke into the fanzine lineup in 1993, Tot and Pearlie Holmes were already there, editing Dodger Dugout out in Gothenburg, Nebraska. That’s right, Nebraska. I always suspected the Holmes’ fled Brooklyn in protest, but could never quite go as far as L.A., but their hearts were obviously pumping Dodger blue blood.

For years, I exchanged NOTES for Dugout (passing my copies along to my barber, Leo, a Dodger fanatic.) Tot and Pearlie were my kind of editors, they reprinted items from NOTES in Dugout from time to time, and even sent me a masthead, that (I admit) was a huge improvement over the Wordperfect Text Box I started with — and still use on the hard copy I print for my files, and that Cooperstown library. I also borrowed a few items from Dugout for NOTES.

So when I spotted the used paperback Babe in my favorite Cooperstown rare and antique bookstore, I almost had to buy it. And I knew a few things about Babe Herman, too. He’s been the best hitter for the Dodgers in my APBA simulated seasons. I once wrote a poem about Babe, “Three Dodgers on Third.” What fan can keep a straight face at the mention of “the Daffiness Boys?”

But Tot’s biography is, I think, mostly for Dodger fans. I enjoyed a bio of Honus Wagner that took a similar approach, and had no trouble with it. But that’s because I’m a Pirate fan, and knew not only the main character. but a lot of the supporting cast, and the city where much of the book takes place. Of course, it helps to be on a pennant-winner, too … plodding through a season where you know you’re going to finish well out of it, is, well, plodding.

Maybe it would have helped if I’d have known less, about Babe and his times. Then each chapter would open with the fresh hope of another Opening Day, with some suspense. I knew Herman once hit .393, so I really couldn’t get too excited as he came down the stretch in 1930 dueling with Terry and Klein and O’Doul, and chasing .400. I tried, but I just couldn’t. I knew.

But maybe a rookie fan would get hooked. Any fan can appreciate the painstaking research that Tot poured into this work. And the way he works in the times — all the events that we would read about outside the sports’ pages, season by season — a kind of treat for those who are chained to the microfilm machine as they undertake the task of looking everything up.

Tot Holmes does a super job of demythologizing Babe Herman’s clumsiness afield. Herman was error-prone in his first season or so, but worked hard to become a decent outfielder. He was a natural firstbaseman, but (like many other good hitters) moved to the outfield to make room for other bats. He has low ratings at both first and OF in my APBA simulation, and if he wasn’t my regular DH, I’d change those ratings myself, thanks to Tot’s thorough documentation of Herman’s defensive improvement.

Finally, Herman has taken the brunt of the joking criticism of fans, for being the third Dodger to wind up on third base in an otherwise forgettable game in August 1926. The Babe lined a shot off the wall in right with the bases loaded and one out, a cinch double. In fact, the blame for the traffic jam at third base seems to be better laid at the feet of the third base coach and the runners ahead of Herman, who should have scored. When the dust cleared, Herman had an RBI double (scoring the winning run), and an inning-ending double play.

The next day’s headlines, however, had Herman “Tripling Into a Triple Play” — wrong and wronger. But which is catchier, easier to remember, and fun to laugh at in every re-telling? the late Jim Murray observed that someone should have written, “Herman doubled to load the base.”

The story became a standard Brooklyn joke. Any time you mentioned to a fellow fan that the Dodgers had the bases loaded, you risked getting the reply, “Which base?”

Babe Herman was a character, by the way, and many of his one-liners still pack the punch of his off-the-scoreboard liners. The earlier chapters of Tot’s book are peppered with anecdotes that may be true, or exaggerations, or simple fabrications. It is the same with Babe Ruth’s bio — these players were such good copy that writers found it hard to resist making up tales and quotes and attributing them, without shame or footnotes. Which is OK for them at the time, they sold newspapers, but for folks like Tot Holmes, sifting through the records for facts, the fiction is an obstacle. Yet, it is also part of the lore.

Brooklyn’s Babe is a must for fans of Herman, they will savor every chapter; it is recommended for Dodger fans, they will skim some; everyone else takes their chances.

* * * * *

[In November 1992, I wrote this little ditty. You will notice there is no mention of the third base coach’s part in the comedy.]

THREE DODGERS ON THIRD

Babe Herman has an impressive list

Of notable feats and seasons:

Three-ninety-three in ‘thirty,

Three times hit for the cycle;

Tagged by Dazzy

“Ebbets’ Headless Horseman” —

This Babe personified

The Daffiness Boys of Brooklyn.

Had to be Babe

Sacks full of Dodgers

Line drive off the wall in right

(Yes, that’s the Babe)

But a close play

So only DeBerry on third could

Trot in

Vance from second made it halfway home

Then decided to play it safe

And retreated to third

Which was occupied by

Fewster from first

And guess who’s barreling head-down

Into the reunion

Standing on the hot corner?

Had to be Babe!

Three tags

Two outs

Double trouble play —

Give the bag and the rag

To Herman

And talk about it forever.

* * * * *

THE HALL?

Just one final thought on Babe Herman. Why isn’t this guy in Cooperstown? A lifetime .324 hitter, but in only eleven full seasons, he played on mediocre (.488) Dodger teams. With Babe in the lineup and getting at least one hit, they won at a .535 clip; without him, .313. His stats are super, but his career too short. He took too long to make it to the majors (he also put in seven productive years in the minors after he left MLB.) And then, of course, there was that image problem.

So Babe will likely never have a bronze plaque in that upstate NY gallery. But he is not likely to be forgotten, either, because he more than made his mark in the game. As poet Donald Honig put it, Babe is enshrined, all right, but “not in Cooperstown … but in the more enduring corridors of folklore.”

 

 

AND NOW, FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT

Maybe I am still WUI, writing under the influence — of that SABR Negro Leagues Conference I attended last summer in Harrisburg. In any case, I recently enjoyed the following, which appeared in A RED SOX JOURNAL; ARSJ’s editor, David Nevard, kindly granted me permission to reprint it in full here. You can visit ARSJ on line at www.buffalohead.8K.com, or you can e-mail ARSJ for more info at BuffaloHd@aol.com.

Subscriptions are $20/year ($35 Europe); write ARSJ at Buffalo Head Society, PO Box 540092, Waltham, MA 02454-0092. I’ve been reading ARSJ for going on eight years, and sometimes it makes me wish I was a Red Sox fan, so I could enjoy it even more!

WHO WAS PIPER DAVIS?

Lorenzo “Piper” Davis was the first black player signed by the Boston Red Sox, but he never made it to the majors, for reasons that are still unexplained.

By David Nevard with David Marasco

(c) 2001 Buffalo Head Society

Piper Davis is a footnote in Red Sox history, the black player they signed before they signed Pumpsie Green. Perhaps the Sox could have been one of the first major league teams to integrate, instead of being the last. Piper Davis played a short time with a Red Sox farm club in 1950 and was released in May despite a batting average over .300.

The excuse for many years was “We would like to sign a black player, but we can’t find any that are good enough.” People started asking obvious questions, such as how the Red Sox were unable to find Jackie Robinson when he was standing right in Fenway Park. Or Willie Mays, when he was standing in their farm team’s ballpark. But even in December 2000, Red Sox President John Harrington was still trying to perpetuate the myth, telling columnist Will McDonough how hard Boston had tried. After all, they signed Piper Davis, but he was just “not good enough” to make the team.

Rather than examining the larger issue of Red Sox race relations over the past 50 years, we’ll focus here on an individual, Piper Davis, a ballplayer of great skills who suffered greatly for the color of his skin.

Cast Iron Pipe

”Between 1900 and 1940 tens of thousands of rural black Southerners chose to make a dramatic change in their way of life. They uprooted themselves from postbellum rural life-a life of sharecropping and tenant farming on someone else’s cotton farm-and they migrated into cities in search of jobs and industry. Living in the shadow of emancipation, they and their families dreamed of getting their share of the benefits of modern America. No aspect of this dream was more poignant than the Birmingham story.” – North by South project, Kenyon College

Birmingham, Alabama, was bought, planned and built to be a new industrial center in the South, with its financial successes focused solely on its iron and steel industries. Laid out in 1871 at a railroad junction in iron-ore country, Birmingham became “the Pittsburgh of the South”, turning out pig iron, heavy machinery, and cast iron pipe.

As American corporations felt threatened by organized labor, industrial baseball teams grew up as a way to build employee morale and maintain loyalty to the company. Company teams became competitive, and it was common practice to hire good ballplayers for easy or nonexistent jobs at the mill. In the South the industrial leagues, like everything else, were segregated. The mill teams came to serve an important role in black communities, giving them entertainment, unity and a sense of pride.

Playing for Birmingham’s American Cast Iron Pipe Company (ACIPCO) black team in the early 1940’s was a young man named Lorenzo “Piper” Davis. He got his nickname from his birthplace (July 3, 1917), the little coal mining town of Piper, Alabama. One of nine children, Piper attended an all-black high school in nearby Fairfield, and won a basketball scholarship to Alabama State University. He played a year for Alabama State, but had to withdraw from college due to financial difficulties. Piper played some baseball for barnstorming teams like the Omaha Tigers and Yakima Indians, but returned to work the Birmingham mills and play in the industrial leagues.

In 1942 Piper Davis was approached by Winfield “Gus” Welch, the manager of the Birmingham Black Barons of the Negro American League, with an offer of $5 per game, and $7.50 per double-header, for part time play. Davis, who was making $3.36 a day at the pipe company, accepted. In 1943 he became a fulltime professional baseball player, and his paycheck soon rose sharply. Top players in the Negro Leagues were getting $500 a month, and even half of that was a handsome salary.

Two-sport Star

The Biographical Encyclopedia of the Negro Baseball Leagues by Jim Riley describes Piper’s game: “Equally adept at playing first base or second base, the tall, smooth infielder was a master of the double play and was considered a premier player in the league. He had outstanding hands, an accurate arm, and, while not a speedster, was proficient at executing the hit-and-run play. A good ground-ball man, he was also at home at shortstop and could play any position and often exercised this versatility during his professional baseball apprenticeship.”

Major League Baseball’s biography of Davis has stats which differ from the Riley book and the Macmillan Encyclopedia, but it’s safe to say he was a .300 hitter with some power. In 1944 Artie Wilson, another ex-ACIPCO player, joined the Black Barons; he and Davis made an excellent double play combination – one of the best in Negro Leagues history. Other teammates included Lyman Bostock Sr., Lester Lockett, Ed Steele, Bill Powell, Leroy Morney, Double Duty Radcliffe, and Jesse Walker.

According to local lore the Black Barons were an ACIPCO team that defected to create a professional franchise in the years following World War I. In the prosperous 1920’s they’d been part of the Negro National League. In the depressed 30’s they’d struggled as a minor league outfit. In 1939 they were bought by a Memphis undertaker named Tom Hayes, who restored them to big league status. The Black Barons shared old Rickwood Field with the Birmingham Barons of the Southern Association – the teams would alternate weekends there.

The Negro Leagues, National and American, would play split seasons, with the winners of the two halves meeting to decide the pennant. Then the two pennant winners would meet in a World Series. In 1943 the Black Barons won the first half and beat the Chicago American Giants in the playoffs. The Homestead Grays, who played home games in Pittsburgh and Washington, won the NL flag easily. The World Series was played as a barnstorming tour, with stops in Washington, Chicago, Columbus, Birmingham, and Montgomery. The Grays won it in seven games. In 1944 the Black Barons won both half-seasons, and again met the Grays. This time Homestead, led by powerful sluggers Josh Gibson and Buck Leonard, defeated Birmingham 4 games to 1.

 

Abe Saperstein was Tom Hayes’s partner in the Black Barons. Hayes owned the team but stayed in the background while Abe ran the club. Saperstein is best remembered as the roly-poly little man (5’3″) who owned the Harlem Globetrotters. Abe was extensively involved in black baseball, being a booking agent for several barnstorming teams besides running the Black Barons. He is remembered as someone who earned the respect of his players by paying them on time and in full (not always the case in the Negro Leagues).

In the off-seasons of 1943-44, 1944-45, and 1945-46 Piper Davis, who was 6’2″, played basketball for the Globetrotters, receiving $350 a month plus $2 a day meal money. The Globetrotters of that era were both a vaudeville act and an excellent basketball team. Playing so much soon caught up with Piper. He started experiencing involuntary shaking, and was forced to revert back to just playing baseball. While Davis was being honored in 1990 at a baseball game in Kansas City, he saw Bo Jackson sitting in the dugout, his legs quivering madly. Davis told Bo, “Now that is when your body is really telling you something.” (reported in Kenyon College’s North by South project).

The Negro American League included the Indianapolis Clowns, who featured Globetrotter Goose Tatum and could play both funny and serious baseball. Many people looked down on Negro Leagues baseball as more show than serious sport; in newspapers Satchel Paige was often compared to Steppin Fetchit. But players resented the buffoon image. “If you was black, you was a clown,” Piper Davis told Jules Tygiel in Baseball’s Great Experiment. “Because in the movies, the only time you saw a black man he was a comedian or a butler. But didn’t nobody clown in our league but the Indianapolis Clowns. We played baseball.”

Piper was named an All-Star for five consecutive seasons, beginning in 1945. He missed the first All-Star game due a suspension (Jackie Robinson replaced him), but played the next four years. The contest was known as the East-West Game, pitting the Negro AL (West) against the Negro NL (East). It was played in Chicago’s Comiskey Park to huge crowds, the highlight of the Negro Leagues baseball season.

In 1946, ’47, and ’48, Artie Wilson started the game at shortstop and led off for the West squad, while Piper Davis was the starting second baseman and batted third or fourth. In the 1947 Piper contributed to the West victory when he doubled off Maxwell Manning. In 1949 (with Wilson gone from the Negro Leagues) Piper started and again batted cleanup; his double off Pat Scantlebury broke up an East no-hitter in the seventh.

A Chance to Break the Color Line

By 1947 baseball’s color line was being broken. Jackie Robinson and Larry Doby were playing in the majors for Brooklyn and Cleveland. In July the lowly St. Louis Browns, in an effort to boost attendance, acquired options on Piper Davis, Willard “Home Run” Brown and Hank Thompson — the latter two from the Kansas City Monarchs. The club brought Brown and Thompson to St. Louis, but Piper was not placed on the roster. He remained in Birmingham while a St. Louis scout evaluated his performance. Back in the early days of integration, teams simply re-worked the “Gentleman’s Agreement” into an informal understanding that no more than two blacks could be on the roster at any given time.

Finally in mid-August Piper was given an offer to play at the Browns’ Elmira farm club. There was great anxiety about putting minor league blacks on the field in the segregated South. The Dodgers sent Robinson to Montreal, Roy Campanella and Don Newcombe to Nashua. For the Brownies, putting Piper Davis in the Eastern League meant he’d have no opponents further south than Pennsylvania. But by this time at was apparent that the Browns’ experiment was not working. Whether through pride or financial reasons, Piper declined the minor league offer.

The Browns, unlike Cleveland and Brooklyn, were not diligent in their scouting: Willard Brown was over the hill; Hank Thompson was a heavy drinker who carried a gun. Nor was the ballclub fully committed to integration: the two men were virtually isolated by their own teammates, forced to play catch with each other. Attendance didn’t rise, and Brown and Thompson were released at the end of August. The option on Piper Davis was allowed to expire. (Hank Thompson later reappeared with the Giants and had a solid career).

The chance to be a pioneer had eluded Piper before. According to Jules Tygiel, he was on the list of players the Dodgers secretly scouted in 1945, but they decided not to sign him.

By the time baseball was integrating, Piper was pushing 30, about seven years older than a typical baseball rookie. Only a few thirtysomethings managed to jump from the Negro Leagues to the majors, notably Luke Easter and Satchel Paige. More typically for that era, the great shortstop Lou Boudreau, born the same month and year as Piper, hung up his spikes at age 34. Second baseman Bobby Doerr retired at 33.

Piper’s age was definitely working against him, as was the perception that he didn’t really want to play in the majors. Refusing the Browns had hurt his reputation. A Yankee scouting report in 1950 said, “if he wasn’t good enough for the Browns two years ago, he couldn’t make it with the Yankees now.”

In the Chicago Tribune, July 14, 1949, an article about the Negro Leagues noted, “Tho’ most of the players are eager for a chance to play in the majors, Lorenzo (Piper) Davis makes $750 a month for being the Birmingham Black Barons’ playing manager and is satisfied to stay there despite attempts of several major league clubs to buy his contract.”

Managing the Black Barons

Piper became player-manager of the Birmingham Black Barons in 1948, and under his guidance the team won another pennant, with Artie Wilson leading off and Piper batting cleanup. Again they met the Homestead Grays for the championship and again they were defeated. This was the last Negro World Series, since the two leagues merged the following year.

Piper’s daughter Faye recalled to North by South that he was a stern but respected manager; by long baseball tradition the players called him Skip. “If Skip said you was going leave at 2:30, 2:31, if you wasn’t there, you were left. The bus driver’s name was a man named James Rudd, and Daddy would say ‘Rudd, let’s go.'”

Years later, pitcher Bill Greason recalled for the Birmingham News that Davis was “one of the greatest managers I ever played for. He was smart, firm and yet gentle. He got along with the players, but he was a disciplinarian. He had some older fellows on the team, and many times older fellows don’t want to listen, but he had a way of getting to them.

 

”He sought to instill some character in us. We had one of the finest teams in the league as far as character. You didn’t hear much cursing. It’s different now from what it used to be,” said Greason, a preacher now for the many years. “Guys now wear their pants down to the their shoes, and you can’t see their socks. They have long beards and long hair. They didn’t tolerate that back then.”

Riley’s Encyclopedia notes: “As manager, Piper had a commanding presence and an abundance of patience. One of his prize pupils that season was a teenager named Willie Mays… Davis became Mays’s mentor and was like a second father to the youngster.” Willie was a junior at Fairfield Industrial High School. He didn’t make road trips until school was out for the summer. The principal threatened to suspend Willie until his father promised that the youngster wouldn’t miss any games. The story goes that when Piper first wrote Willie’s name in the lineup, some of the veterans grumbled. Piper said anyone who didn’t like it could go take their uniform off.

Donn Rogosin, in Invisible Men, tells a story about what Mays would later call his “combat training”. Opposing pitcher Chet Brewer knocked him down and Willie lay on the ground a minute. Manager Piper Davis approached. “Can you stand up?” he asked. “Yes, I can stand up,” replied Willie. “Can you see first base?” “Yeah, I can see first base,” Mays said weakly. “Then you get up and you go down to first base,” said Piper, who turned and headed back to the dugout.

Willie played three seasons for Davis’s Black Barons. “When Willie came to the Barons he could do it all but hit,” Greason recalled. “Piper worked with him to become a hitter.” Mays learned to hit the curveball and raised his batting average to .311 in 1949 and .330 in 1950 before being signed by the Giants and shipped to Trenton.

The Red Sox and the White Barons

In 1948 the Boston Red Sox changed farm clubs in the Class AA Southern Association, moving their affiliation from New Orleans to the Birmingham Barons. This all-white club — originally the Coal Barons — had a long, proud history. They were born in 1885 and had been playing in the Southern Association since 1901. Rickwood Field was built in 1910 by the Barons’ owner, a young industrialist named Rick Woodward, still his in twenties, who wanted to create “The Finest Minor League Ballpark Ever”. His new park was modeled chiefly after Forbes Field in Pittsburgh.

It is said that Piper Davis grew up listening to Barons games on the radio. Their radio announcer was Eugene “Bull” Connor, who later became Birmingham’s Commissioner for Public Safety and used police dogs and fire hoses against civil rights demonstrators. Birmingham was a tough town for blacks. In 1950 the city council passed an ordinance making it “unlawful for a negro and a white person to play together or in company with each other in any game of cards, dice, dominoes, checkers, baseball, softball, football, basketball, or similar game.” [The Southern Association, by the way, turned out to be the last bastion of segregation in the higher minor leagues. An attempt was made to integrate the league in 1954, but Atlanta outfielder Nat Peeples appeared in only two games. There were no other black players in the Southern Association before it dissolved in 1961.]

While the Black Barons were winning the 1948 NAL pennant, the white Barons, led by slugging first baseman Walt Dropo, won the Dixie Series over Fort Worth. It was a banner year at old Rickwood Field, where Birmingham drew 445,926, leading the Southern Association in attendance by a wide margin.

Al Hirshberg, in his book What’s the Matter with the Red Sox? (1973), says, “There was a weird story, which I have never been able to check but which always sounded reasonable to me, that the Red Sox had a crack at Willie Mays before the Giants did.”

You see, the Black Barons had an agreement with the white Barons to use their ballpark. In return, the Barons had first refusal on any of the Black Barons’ players. Not that they would hire one, mind you, but they could buy his contract and resell it to the big league club.

The Barons told the Red Sox about Willie Mays; the Boston Globe says that scout George Digby recommended the Sox sign Mays for $5,000.The Sox sent a super-scout – a Texan named Larry Woodall – to check him out. “It rained all the time Woodall was there,” writes Hirshberg. “Without ever watching him play, Woodall gave the front office a more accurate report on the weather than on Mays and, as I heard the story, when he came home he still hadn’t seen Mays in action.”

The way Hirshberg explains it, the real problem wasn’t with prejudice in the Boston front office, but with the middle and lower echelons of the scouting system. Many of the scouts, especially the older ones, were out-and-out racists. If they were sent to evaluate a black prospect, Hirshberg writes, “they always came back with unfavorable or lukewarm reports.”

So instead of signing Willie Mays, Woodall signed Piper Davis. Why? Perhaps if Woodall had to sign some black player, Piper Davis, the manager, was the easiest one to find. In any case, the Black Barons were to be paid $15,000 for Piper’s contract. This was considered the top price paid for Negro League talent in the early years of integration, and only three players are known to have gone for that much. The other two were Dan Bankhead, purchased by the Dodgers from Memphis, and Willie Mays, purchased by the Giants.

Some say that Piper Davis himself received a $5000 signing bonus. If this is true, the money probably would have come from Birmingham and not Boston. After Jackie Robinson, Negro League clubs made sure they had their players under valid contract, so the transactions were purchases, not “signings”. Black Barons owner Tom Hayes reportedly gave Willie Mays $6,000 of his $15,000 selling price; he might have given Davis a similar bonus.

Jules Tygiel is of the opinion that Piper could have played in the major leagues right away. But the Red Sox didn’t see it that way. According to Jim Riley, first baseman Walt Dropo (1950 Rookie of the Year) blocked Piper’s path. According to John Harrington & Will McDonough, second baseman Bobby Doerr (future Hall of Famer) kept Davis from promotion. One might even add super-sub Billy Goodman, who played all infield positions plus the outfield for the Sox, and led the league in batting in 1950.

The Red Sox were a very strong ballclub with a lot of good white ballplayers – which makes the signing of Davis a bit curious. Why weren’t they looking for young black players who would help them when aging stars like Doerr, Pesky, and Dom DiMaggio would be gone in a few years? Why sign an old player who played at positions that were already filled? There’s still something that doesn’t add up in this story.

Fifteen Games in Scranton

Red Sox General Manager Joe Cronin told reporters that he’d found a “sleeper” in the 26-year-old Davis — either Piper or the ballclub was lying about his age. “He’s a fine kid. I’m going to try him out with the Scranton club. If he makes good, I’m going to waste no time in moving him to Boston.” (quoted in the Pittsburgh Courier December 17, 1949).

A black man couldn’t be sent to the top two farm clubs, Louisville and (ironically) Birmingham, because they were in the South. So Davis was assigned to the Scranton Red Sox of the Eastern League. The Red Sox paid owner Hayes $7500 up front for Piper’s contract. An additional $7500 was promised to Hayes if Davis remained with the team after May 15.

Piper Davis describes his stay at the Red Sox Florida training camp in the spring of 1950: “I couldn’t stay with the white players. I stayed in the servants’ quarters until I found a room in a private home. I ate breakfast in the servants’ quarters.” When Davis arrived at the ballpark each day, he found no label written “Davis” above his locker. “The trainer said I was on the other side . . . the visitors’ dressing room. I was the only one in there.”

In Bruce’s Adelson’s book Brushing Back Jim Crow Davis recalls, “One game, I don’t remember the town, when I came to bat, there was a guy in the stands who said, ‘Well, I’ll be goddamned. Boston done got a nigger.’ I stepped back and I said to myself, ‘Lord, let me hit this ball for this peckerwood, please.’ And I hit me a home run. He was sitting right back there in the grandstand, in the box seats on the third base side next to the dugout. I circled the bases. After I touched home plate, I went over to him and said, ‘Take that!’ One of the other fans close by said, ‘That’s the way to go, Piper!’ That was one of the highlights of my career.'”

Piper played fifteen games for Scranton and was leading the team in batting (.333), homers (3), and RBI’s (10). But two days before the May 15 deadline he was called into the office and was told that he was being released for economic reasons. The Red Sox apparently couldn’t afford to pay the other $7500 to Birmingham.

Jules Tygiel, quoted in Peter Golenbock’s Fenway, “Scranton manager Jack Burns was so incensed, he took Piper down to the locker room and said to him, ‘Take anything, take the bats, take the gloves, take anything you want.’ Davis said he took only his hat and his hairbrush…

”And so they cut him… On the way back home to Birmingham, he had to take a train to Washington, D.C. At Washington, D.C., in those days, you changed trains. If you were black, you could ride anywhere you wanted in the train until you got to Washington. In Washington you had to change to the all-black section.

”As he was changing cars, who did he run into but Red Sox General Manager Joe Cronin. Davis asked him, ‘What happened?’ And Cronin told him the same thing as at Scranton. Piper said, ‘You didn’t even give me a ticket home.’ When Cronin returned to Boston, he sent Davis money to cover a first-class ticket. And that was it.”

Piper Davis, in an interview with Tygiel, recalled “They told me, ‘We got to let you go because of economic conditions.’ Tom Yawkey had as much money as anyone on the East Coast. I don’t talk about it that much. It wouldn’t help. Sometimes I just sit there and a tear drops from my eye. I wonder why it all had to happen, why we had to have so much hate.” Red Sox officials were quoted in The Sporting News: “At 33, the Negro first baseman was not considered a major league prospect.”

Riding the Buses

What happened next? The Macmillan Baseball Encyclopedia says Piper played and managing back in Birmingham in 1950, batting .383. Piper’s old DP partner Artie Wilson was having troubles of his own. According to William B. Stubb (Oakland Oaks web site), “Wilson’s contract was purchased by the Yankees, who assigned him to the Newark club in the International League. Wilson refused to report there because the salary would have been less than what the Barons were paying him, so he negotiated a contract with the [PCL] San Diego Padres in 1949. The Yankees appealed to the Commissioner Chandler, who immediately ordered Wilson off the Padres roster. Wilson was then sold to the Oaks, where he finished the 1949 season.” He won the Pacific Coast League batting title with a .348 average, as well as the stolen base crown, but he never got more than a cup of coffee in the major leagues.

In 1951 Artie suggested that his friend Piper Davis come out to Oakland; Piper ended up doing a lot of the Oaks’ catching. At the end of the ’51 season, manager Mel Ott started Davis on the mound. After retiring three batters, Davis then played each of the remaining positions during the 10 inning game, receiving a $500 bond from the Oaks’ boosters for the feat.

But some of the fans weren’t so friendly. “In the Northern and Western states,” writes Tygiel, “these athletes, a combination of youthful prospects and Negro League veterans, were greeted by a storm of insults, beanballs, and discrimination.”

At a 1952 game in San Francisco, Davis was twice sent sprawling in the dirt by pitcher Bill Boemler, who had hit him in the elbow in a game two weeks before. Davis responded with a two base hit, and while attempting to score on the next play he slid hard into Boemler covering home plate. Boemler was bowled over, and attempted to tag Piper hard in the face. Davis came up swinging. Both benches emptied and a free-for-all ensued, with Davis and his Cuban teammate Ray Noble in the middle of the fracas. Several days later Davis and Noble received a threatening letter signed by 19 San Francisco fans, promising retribution the next time the pair showed up at Seals’ Stadium. The matter was turned over to local police and the FBI, and Oakland fans vowed to accompany the team to Frisco and defend the two black players.

At this stage in his career, Piper Davis should have been managing a ballclub, or at least coaching. But there was little money in the vanishing Negro Leagues, and there were no coaching jobs open for a black man in white baseball. So he had to continue as a player. Piper played in Oakland for parts of four more seasons (with a side trip to Ottawa), consistently batting around .300, before moving on to the PCL Los Angeles Angels. He also spent eight winter seasons in Venezuela, Puerto Rico, Mexico, and the Dominican Republic. Piper’s final stop was the Fort Worth Cats in the Texas League in 1957 and ’58.

”All the towns in Texas were the same — Dallas, Fort Worth, San Anton’. You were a nigger anywhere you went. I was called all kinds of names when I played. I’ve been called ‘black boy,’ ‘rastus,’ ‘coon,’ ‘snowball,’ ‘alligator bait.’ You know ‘nigger’ was in there, too. I can’t tell you how many times I heard, ‘Stick one in that nigger’s ear.’ That was number one… I ignored it. It didn’t bother me, because I grew up in it. I grew up being called names. You stayed on one branch of the river, and the whites stayed on the other… On each team I played with, I told the other players… Don’t think about it. What you think about is hitting that pitcher and hitting that ball. I helped out three or four black players. They just listened to me. They were eager to play, like I was.” (Brushing Back Jim Crow)

Texas League teams would leave their black players at home when travelling to Shreveport because Louisiana law didn’t allow blacks and whites on the same playing field. “I couldn’t play when Fort Worth was in Shreveport because I was black,” Davis said. “I couldn’t eat at any of the restaurants with the team. I had to wait on the bus when the team ate. Someone always was assigned to bring me some food back.” One time someone forgot the chow. “The manager was Lou Klein,” Davis said. “He wanted to hold up the bus. I said no, I wasn’t worth it. I told them I was sick of this mess. I quit the next year.”

(MLB web site)

As Piper Davis was hanging up his spikes, the Boston Red Sox finally put a black player on the field — utility infielder Elijah “Pumpsie” Green, whom they’d purchased from the Oakland Oaks in 1955. Green told Jules Tygiel that the advent of blacks in the Pacific Coast League “was the greatest thing I’d ever seen.” Among his boyhood heroes was the Oaks’ Piper Davis. Pitcher Earl Wilson, also a Californian, was actually signed before Green and would have preceded into the big leagues, but his arrival was delayed by military service. The last four major league clubs to integrate were the Yankees (Elston Howard 1955), the Phillies (John Kennedy 1957), the Tigers (Ozzie Virgil 1958), and the Red Sox (Pumpsie Green July 21, 1959).

At 42 years old, Piper Davis went back to Birmingham to pilot the Black Barons one more time, though by now they were little more than a barnstorming team. He managed the West in the 1959 East- West Game – the next-to-last one. Piper also renewed his relationship with the Harlem Globetrotters, working as a coach and bus driver. Piper accompanied the team on its 1961 world tour. He later scouted Alabama and Mississippi for the Detroit Tigers, St. Louis Cardinals (1968-76), and the Montreal Expos (1984-85). “I did what I wanted to do,” Davis said in 1993. “I started playing baseball so my children could get the education I didn’t get. I made $350-$400 a month and that was big back then.” “One year Daddy came home, we went to every college within a 300 or 400 miles radius,” his daughter Faye told North by South. (Faye ended up attending Taladega College.)

Remembering Piper

Lorenzo “Piper” Davis died of a heart attack in Birmingham in May, 1997 at the age of 79. Survivors included his wife, Laura Perry Davis, and a daughter, Faye Joyce Davis. “He was a superstar player like Pete Rose,” former teammate Artie Wilson said. “He could play any place you put him and he wanted everybody else to hustle like he did.”

”He could play all positions and he was a very smart guy about the game,” his teammate Bill Powell said. “He also helped quite a few guys in the game. He was the one who helped Willie Mays.”

A year later Kevin Scarbinsky wrote in the Birmingham News:

“It’s important to remember the past and honor those portions of it that deserve elebration. You can’t walk into Rickwood Field without thinking of an old pro named Piper Davis, whose eyes danced long after his legs lost a step.

“If he weren’t born too soon, at a time when baseball chose its stars on pigment as well as talent, Piper Davis might have been Willie Mays when the Say Hey Kid himself was still in diapers.

”The first Rickwood Classic honored Piper Davis and the old Birmingham Black Barons. He since has passed on to that great ballpark in the sky where he’s probably slashing out line drives and breaking up double plays but every game in the old house honors his memory.

”If the sun shines a little brighter today, it won’t be a hole in the ozone. It’ll be Piper smiling down on the place he used to play.”

 

 

MENOLOGIES

In one of my former lives, I belonged to a religious community that used to publish something called a Menology. The several volumes I remember reading back in the sixties were already old. But I found them fascinating, as they contained profiles of men who had joined and died in the community, many or most in the nineteenth century. You did not need to be “Hall of Fame” to get into the Menology, if my memory is correct — all you had to do was join and persevere.

In baseball terms, reading the Menology was like strolling through the gallery in Cooperstown, except that there is a bronze plaque for everybody who played at least one inning in the majors. Indeed, the Menology held several stories of young novices who died, of a tragic accident or a fatal illness, in their rookie seasons. Their stories were short, but they were in there.

The Menology came to mind as I started reading The Green Mountain Boys of Summer, edited by Tom Simon (New England Press, 2000.) “Vermonters in the Major Leagues, 1882-1993” is the subtitle of this handsome but large paperback, put together last year by Tom and twenty-three contributors. Four years of research by the Larry Gardner Chapter of SABR are reflected in GM Boys, and it is well-edited into brisk reading material, and dotted with nearly two hundred photos that give it the feel of a family album.

I usually finish a book before I review it, so this is either an exception, or not really a review. You make the call.

The Green Mountain Boys of Summer is literally a slice of American pie (with some Canadian crust.) Pick any state, pick any profession, now write a chapter on each person on your list. That is pretty much the plan that produced GMBS. The state is Vermont, the profession is major league baseball — anyone who played at least one inning. So along with the Carlton Fisks and Larry Gardners, there are a number of Moonlight Grahams; in all, there are thirty-four biographies, grouped into three eras.

A lasting impression the Menology gave to me, is that our ancestors were much more interesting than we are. I think we see it in baseball, too, ballplayers were much less homogenous a century ago. In his intro, Tom Simon puts it this way: “The biggest surprise was the colorful variety of their lives, both in and out of baseball.” Examples of Green Mountain Boys include an engineer who played ball as a summer job before going on to found a Fortune 500 company … a pitcher who might have pitched in the first World Series, with proper medication — instead of winding up in an asylum … a doctor who left his team (speaking of Moonlight Graham) to become a national hero and healer in the Philippines … and a teacher unjustly banished from the game, even though his socks were not black.

There is almost a rule, that I must name someday, that comes into play. It seems that the less famous the ballplayer, the more fascinating the life story. Of course, the story depends on the research, which can be difficult to do in some cases; and on the writing. (Can a great writer take a dull biography and make it interesting? I think so. But the writer cannot change the bare outline of a biography. If Moonbeam Smith was a lush who beat his wife and died young in prison, those three games he pitched for the Indians will not offset the louder facts.)

My point (finally) is that I am finding each and every bio in Green Mountain Boys of Summer to be interesting. Yes, I skipped ahead to read Carlton Fisk. But I found any number of the early era bios to be just as engaging, or more. (The older bios have the merit of brevity, while a profile of Fisk, for example, can go on and on, like a speech at a Hall of Fame induction.) I perked up when there were connections for myself — Ed Doheny was a teammate of Honus Wagner’s, I’d met him before; Amby McConnell is a big name in Utica baseball, and now I know why: Amby played here, married a gal from Utica and off-seasoned here, and later co-owned a team here (the other owner, Father Martin, was a Catholic priest, who also was league president.) No wonder there was a ballpark named after McConnell.

So I recommend The Green Mountain Boys of Summer, which I will take to Florida and finish there. For a copy, contact The New England Press, PO Box 575, Shelburne, VT 05482, or e-mail nep@together.net I believe SABR members can get a discount ordering thru SABR, but I could be wrong; contact Tom Simon.

LAST UPS

When I wrote the opening lines of this issue, I was not at all sure I would have this ready to go before I was ready to go, off to Florida, I mean. Leaving (on a jet plane) Feb 26, back March 8. I intend to see at least one ST game, but that is not at the top of the agenda.

No one needs to explain why they go to Florida from the Shadows of Cooperstown, this time of year. There is still ice on my roof and snowbanks walling my driveway and sidewalks. It has been a tough winter here, over a hundred inches of snow (some of the stuff out there arrived last December), and some bitter cold days. We’ve had bigger storms and chillier days in previous winters, but this one will nevertheless be memorable. My snowblower has never had such a workout.

And how is that relevant? Well, another rule of mine goes something like this: the worse the winter, the better the season of baseball ahead. So there are real grounds for optimism for the 2001 season … although those grounds are covered with snow for the moment. My rule has not always worked, nothing is perfect, but it makes some sense. Even if this year’s team is lousy, hey, at least I didn’t have to clear my driveway to get to the ballpark. And I drove here with my car windows down!!!