Negro Leagues Baseball: A Brief History

1) The name of the team located in Indianapolis, IN, where my mother lived until moving to Chicago for college, and of which she was unaware of their very existance until last week: "The Indianapolis Clowns."

The fuckin' Clowns. Thank the lord we are so much more enlightened these days.


2) Actual names of actual Negro League teams:

Birmingham Black Barons
Washington Black Senators
Atlanta Black Crackers
the above mentioned Clowns
Louisville Black Caps and Black Colonels
Baltimore Black Sox
New York Black Yankees
Cincinnati Clowns
Chattanooga Black Lookouts

This was well before African-Americans supposedly began to prefer the term "black". No, these teams were named by their usually black owners to avoid any confusion with such teams as the um....Yankees or White Sox. Or something like that.

3) First Black Players on some of the MLB teams - 1947 to you know who in 195fucking9:

1947 - Brooklyn Dodgers, Cleveland Indians, St. Louis Browns (later Orioles).
1949 - New York Giants, who were the first team to have two blacks on the roster (Monte Irvin and Hank Thompson).
1950 - Boston, now Atlanta, Braves
1951 - Chicago White Sox
1954 - St. Louis Cards - Their dynasty in the '60s was fueled by black players like the great Gibson and Cepeda, and the saintly centerfielder, Curt Flood.
1955 - 4th from last in baseball at the time were the NY Yankees.
1959 - second to last (this is why the AL get their asses beat a lot in the 60's and 70's in the World Series) - Detroit Tigers
and last and least, 1959, the very last team in one of America's most rascist cities, our own Red Sox with the "who's he?" non prospect, Pumpsie Green. ("Get the n----rs off tha field!!!")

Curse of the Bambino? Nah, it was curse of Tom Yawkey and Eddie Collins, et al. Thank God we can still hang our hats on Ted's greatness and his courageous HOF induction speech, calling for the induction of Negro Leagues greats like Josh Gibson (HOF '72, best catcher ever), Cool Papa Bell (HOF '74), Oscar Charleston (HOF '76) and Satchel Paige (HOF '71), who may have been baseball's greatest pitcher.


4) The recently departed Buck O'Neil, baseball's sweetest and most winning ambassador of goodwill, is not in the Hall of Fame. Missed it by a vote of two last time.


5) As you should probably know by now, the great Jackie Robinson was not the first black men to play alongside whites as a professional baseball player. But that's a story for another day.