78 years ago today, Jackie Robinson sat in the visitor’s locker room of Jersey City’s Roosevelt Stadium. Suiting up with his Montréal Royals teammates, Robinson was about to do what no Black man had done since 1899 – play in a minor league baseball game. Johnny Wright, another Black ballplayer was on the roster that day, too, but Wright was a pitcher and was not scheduled to play. Robinson would be the one and only Black player in the game that day. Opening Day in Jersey City was a big deal back then, a city-wide holiday. Mayor Frank Hague and his political machine that ran the city ..read more

  The problem with the Baseball Hall of Fame is that Sammy T. Hughes ain’t in it. During the 1930s and 40s, Hughes was the best second baseman outside the major leagues. According to Cum Posey, owner of the Homestead Grays and a guy whose involvement with Negro League baseball stretched back to the 1910s, Sammy T. was the best second sacker he’d ever seen. When it came time to pick a Black nine to play against Rogers Hornsby, Ted Williams, or Jimmie Foxx, it was Sammy T. Hughes who was the one they called to play second. Yet, while other players of arguably lesser talent have their mug ..read more

THE AUDIENCE in the courtroom let out a collective gasp when attorney Samuel Leibowitz called his next witness: Dr. Frank Sykes, D.D.S. Dr. Sykes breezily walked through the packed chamber, ignoring the searing stares of the spectators, and took his seat on the witness stand. The trim, elegantly attired Dr. Sykes sitting upright in the witness stand was in marked contrast to the burly, sloppily dressed men in the audience. Some expectorated loudly into large spittoons while others slumped on the benches with their legs disrespectfully propped up on the brass rail that separated the spectators ..read more

  Phil Weintraub is one of those ballplayers whose numbers you look at and think, “what the heck happened?” PHILIP WEINTRAUB was born on the west side of Chicago to Israel and Rose Weintraub, Jewish immigrants from Russia. Phil had two older sisters, Celia and Esther, as well as a younger brother George and two little sisters, Gertrude and Harriet. Israel Weintraub has been described by various sources as a butcher, tailor, small shop owner, and auctioneer. I was able to find his 1917 draft card on which he lists “clerk” as his job, and the 1920 census records Israel as a retail-mercha ..read more

  Every so often, a baseball team is given the rare gift of a player who, no matter what the circumstances, seems to excel just when needed the most. While most of the time that spark burns just for a single game or series, some players can sustain it for longer, earning the eternal thanks of the countless fans who cheered wildly at their clutch heroics. In the majors, Babe Ruth and Christy Mathewson possessed that gift; Josh Gibson and Satchel Paige had it in the Negro Leagues; and in the minor leagues there was “Pinch” Mulvey. EMMET “PINCH” MULVEY was born on March 21, 1895, in St. L ..read more

Of all the players who conspired to throw the 1919 World Series, Joe Jackson had the most to lose. JOSEPH JEFFERSON JACKSON was born in Pickens County, South Carolina in 1887. He overcame a life of poverty and illiteracy to become one of the greatest baseball players of the Deadball Era, batting over .400 once and hitting .350 or better in seven of his thirteen big league seasons. Babe Ruth said he modeled his home run swing on Jackson’s and Ty Cobb simply said, “He was the finest natural hitter in the history of the game.” Many opine that Jackson’s lack of education allowed Chick Gandil and ..read more

A LONG, LONG TIME ago, I was an 18-year-old art student on my summer break between freshmen and sophomore years. While all my well-to-do classmates backpacked across Europe or sailed around the Caribbean, I spent my vacation working in a sweltering garment factory in Passaic, New Jersey earning the cash for my second year of school. One afternoon on my lunch break, I was flipping through a copy of Sports Illustrated and came across an article about a guy in Upstate New York who was making absolutely beautiful baseball caps. These weren’t the stiff-crowned, mesh-backed adjustable ones you foun ..read more

While the distance of more than a century since the fixing of the 1919 World Series has given a sympathetic cast to several of the Black Sox players, this has not been the case for Chick Gandil. Photographs of Gandil show a man with dark eyes peering warily out from deep-set sockets, his face displaying the signs of the prizefighter he once was. It’s the face of a man who is constantly on the make, using both his hard-earned street smarts and brute physical strength to get out of life what he thought was rightly his. HE WAS BORN Charles Arnold Gandil in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1888. His parent ..read more

I’m going to tell you the story of two ballplayers and best friends. Neither are in the Hall of Fame, but for a short time their unlikely friendship and nightlife hijinks made the city of Los Angeles forget about Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale and root for Bo Belinsky and Dean Chance. From their background to personality, the duo were as different as could be. The left-handed Bo Belinsky was born in New York City and grew up in the inter-city slums of Trenton, New Jersey. Right-handed Dean Chance was born on an idyllic 166-acre dairy farm in rural Ohio. Bo had to fight his way through his neig ..read more

IN THE FALL of 1934, baseball fans across Japan were whipped up in a frenzy over the imminent arrival of Connie Mack and his team of American League All-Stars. Since the 1910s, American teams had regularly toured Japan, ranging in talent from college nines and Japanese-American amateur clubs to Negro League All-Star teams and Major League squads. Because there was no professional baseball league in Japan, the Americans on previous tours usually played games against teams from Japan’s six major universities, called the “Big Six.” Japanese baseball fans followed the Big Six teams as closely as ..read more