Tag Archives: Negro Leagues

Changing History

In Plant City, like most American cities there is a local little league team. In this place however the star pitcher is 12 year old Chelsea Baker who has recently thrown her second perfect game.  I am sure she will follow in the footsteps of other women players such as Eri Yoshida and play baseball professionally.

With that in mind I thought this week I would highlight some people who are associated with the game that have been trail blazers.  We all know the likes of Jackie Robinson however there are many other people who have advanced the game.

Mr. Hernández Nodar

Nodar spent 13 years in a Cuban jail. The only crime he committed was to help Cuban baseball players defect to the USA. He spent nearly all of his sentence at the Combinado del Este prison; a notorious prison known for its many human rights violations.

The story reads like a movie plot and includes lows such as Nodar spending 15 months in Solitary Confinement for cheering the USA baseball team. As well as the negative there were positive times such as the friendship he forged with a fellow prisoner Rolando Alberro Arroyo who taught him the ‘ways of prison’. The friendship is one so strong Nodar owes Albeero his life when he protected Nodar from orders of being killed from fellow prison inmates . Nodar since his release has vowed “For each year I spent behind bars, I vow to get one Cuban player into the U.S.,”. The story is one of human hope and I am sure someone will turn it into a movie.

Ila Borders

Borders was the first female to start a men’s NCAA or NAIA college baseball game and she became one of the first females to be part of the men’s professional game. She signed up for the St. Paul Saints of the independent Northern League and her first game was May 31, 1997 against the Sioux Falls Canaries. After a career moving around the various minor league teams, she retired mid way through the 2000 season. Over her minor league career, she was 2-4 with a 6.73 ERA.

Toni Stone

Stone was one of the first women to play in the Negro League. A graduate from Roosevelt High School she started playing professionally in 1949 with the San Francisco Sea Lions.  Unfortunately she was not welcomed by her fellow players and In her words she spent most of her time on the bench with people who hated her. She once described it as “hell”.  She retired after the 1954 season and moved to Oakland, California to work as a nurse and care for her sick husband. Stone died on November 2nd 1996 aged 75.

Stone’s most memorable baseball moment was against the legendary Satchel Paige in 1953 in her own words, “He was so good. That he would ask batters where they wanted it, just so they would have a chance and I said,’ It doesn’t matter just do not hurt me’. I stood there shaking, but I got a hit. Right out over second base. Happiest moment in my life.”

What other people  do you know of that has changed baseball for the better?

Shadowball

The crushing disappointment experienced by all within the baseball and softball community of the two sports’ removal from the Olympic tournament prior to the 2012 London Games will only increase as the big event gets nearer.  However, baseball will not be completely absent from the Olympic experience in the UK thanks to an innovative new baseball project by the Hackney Music Development which has been awarded the highly coveted ‘Inspire Mark’ by the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games and Paralympic Games.

Shadowball is a new Jazz Opera, by composer Julian Joseph and author Mike Phllips, about Black Baseball players linked to a sports programme for primary schools, “using the arts both as a learning tool for other areas of the curriculum, and to stimulate interest in baseball”.

The opera itself premieres at The Mermaid Conference Events Centre in London on 29 and 30 June.  It tells the “moving and compelling story of the struggles, triumphs and challenges facing black athletes in the USA during the sixty years they were excluded from playing with the Major Leagues. It also recounts the influence and development of black jazz music at the time”.

The impact that baseball had on the Civil Rights movement, through the Negro Leagues and the ‘breaking of the color line” in MLB,  is well known in the States.  It’s an important and compelling story that deserves to be told more widely and this project looks set to do that in a very creative and powerful way.

“Shadowball’s extensive educational programme includes workshops with Julian Joseph for children to develop their composition skills as well as baseball training. Following the June performances the project will be extended to more schools and including artistic residencies, in-school performances and a range of baseball activities. The creative team, which includes composer Julian Joseph, writer Mike Phillips, award winning opera director Jonathan Moore, Cleveland Watkiss and designer Neil Irish, has been working alongside Baseball/Softball UK to introduce hundreds of young people in over 20 schools to the sport and music

The Shadowball legacy also includes the provision of baseball as a schools’ community sport and plans are already underway to create Borough Leagues”.

MLB International have also pledged their support to the project:

“Major League Baseball is proud to support HMDT’s Shadowball programme and its aim to get children actively involved in playing baseball while educating them on the history of the sport through music. The sport of baseball has a rich history of breaking down racial barriers, and Major League Baseball believes HDMT’s creative approach in both combating racism and stimulating interest in baseball will be an effective and fun way for the community to become involved in the sport”.

It really is heart-warming to learn of such an incredible project.  Baseball has a long tradition of bringing communities together in the States and Shadowball shows how this can travel across the pond and be just as relevant and inspirational here in the UK.

You can learn more about Shadowball at http://www.hmdt.org.uk/community_shadowball_1.html

Book Review: Shades of Glory edited by Lawrence D. Hogan

Shades of Glory edited by Lawrence D. Hogan (National Geographic, 2006), 424 pages

Much has been written about the seminal moment, and following seasons, when Jackie Robinson ‘broke the color line’ in 1947.  The story of baseball paving the way for greater integration in America is an immensely important one to know, but the preceding period of segregated baseball deserves equal attention.  While whites played in the Major Leagues, African Americans had to compete on their own teams in their own leagues: the Negro Leagues. 

The Negro Leagues are a complicated topic to come to terms with.  Their existence starkly revealed the ingrained racial prejudice that dominated America from the late 1800s on past the middle of the twentieth century; their ultimate obsolescence sounded a clarion call that equality and freedom should prevail.  Yet to depict the Negro Leagues as nothing more than a horrid aberration risks eliminating an important, often joyful and brilliant part of baseball and social history.  Shades of Glory provides a detailed and highly readable account of African-American baseball, recognising the inherent injustice of the Negro Leagues while also celebrating all that was good about them as well.  Continue reading

The Soul of Baseball by Joe Posnanski

The Soul of Baseball: A Road Trip Through Buck O’Neil’s America by Joe Posnanski (Harper, 2008) 282 pages

You would be hard-pressed to find a better central character to a book than Buck O’Neil.  Not many could match the experiences that he went through, the stories he could tell and the wisdom he could impart.  Even less could generate so much joy while sharing such memories.  O’Neill died not long after this book was written and every baseball fan should be grateful that Joe Posnanski captured the essence of the man before he left this world.  Not that O’Neil would have been forgotten without it, in fact nothing could be further from the truth.  The Soul of Baseball shows just why he will always be a part of baseball history and how everyone who met him was touched by his presence.  Continue reading