Starting IX Newsletter: Cubs run rampant again; a Turkey and a Mule!
For those unfamiliar with the set-up — welcome! Here’s the scoop.
A few weeks back we laid out a tweaked format, focusing on Negro League legends, which we’ll continue to do each newsletters until Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Let’s get to it!
“One Final Imagination of the Baseball Hall of Fame” Pre-excerpts: Some under-the-radar non-MLB stars
In my first book, I can sadly say that I gave short shrift to the Negro Leagues, and really non-MLB players, writ large. The premise of the book was to look at the best player at each position in each MLB franchise’s history, but I left out a whole portion of baseball history, and baseball franchises who have long been loved by many by not given the spotlight by others. I was part of that. I ended up with only a cursory glance at a dozen or so of the best Negro League players in Starting IX, but I do think we can all learn over time, and my second book lent itself to including the stories of many more of the men and women whose stories demand telling:
Martin Dihigo: When reading about Dihigo in Black Writers/Black Baseball, something struck me. Check out this passage from Dr. W. Rollo Wilson: “I thought that [Dihigo] was better at first base than anywhere else. Then I saw him pitch and changed my mind, seeing him in the class of the league on the mound. And since then, I have reversed by opinion numerous times… I have not witnessed a better team in action this season than Alexander Pompez’s outfit. With a pitcher on first base, a first baseman at short and a hurler in the garden, they still looked the part of potential champions. Try such a combination on your club and see what happens.” This was Wilson, in 1927, basically suggesting the multi-positionality that teams like the Rays are now bringing back into vogue in the modern moment. Just your friendly reminder that history is indeed cyclical.
Although, it should be noted that Dihigo was one of a kind in his positional flexibility. Negro League Hall of Fame President Bob Kendrick has highlighted Dihigo as the best player to not be a household name in all of baseball history, and if anything that sells Dihigo short. As Kendrick noted, Dihigo is the only athlete to be enshrined in the Halls of Fame in Cuba, Mexico, and the U.S. But maybe Joe Medwick put it best when he simply described Dihigo as the best player of all time. I’m personally not going to dispute that.
For an excellent deep dive into Dihigo’s career, check out “‘The Immortal’ Martin Dihigo may have been the best baseball player ever” by Bijan C. Bayne on The Undefeated.
Alejandro Oms: The fact that baseball was so slow to integrate probably isn’t a fact lost on many, but it still bears repeating over and over again. This was a sport that actually went from being one of the most progressive sports to the exact opposite. In 1859, Frederick Douglass Jr. (yes, the son of that Frederick Douglass, who had also been a fan of the sport) played for the Charter Oak Juniors in Rochester, New York, an integrated team before the sport went backwards in time and decided it was in their best interest to keep out players like Oms, who was basically a 1920s Rickey Henderson. The extent people will go to to stay homogenous never ceases to blow my mind.
Bingo DeMoss: Often referred to as the best second basemen in Negro League history, he has yet to be enshrined in the OBHOF, but we’re correcting that wrong right now. Born Elwood DeMoss in Topeka, Kansas in 1889, he either played or managed for just about every pro and semi-pro team you can imagine during his career. In fact, his Wikipedia page lists 16 teams with whom he was affiliated, from his hometown Topeka Giants to the Brooklyn Brown Dodgers to some sort of team named Bowsers ABCs — they were always trying to rescue Peach in alphabetical order. In honor of the many different teams on whom DeMoss left his impact, here are the top floor [aka best], official Negro League team names:
* San Francisco Sea Lions
* Homestead Grays
* Secret Nine
* Oakland Larks
* Mineola Black Spiders
* New Orleans Crescent Stars
* Portland Rosebuds
* Tennessee Rats
* Seattle Steelheads
* Ethiopian Clowns
* Boston Resolutes
Some amazing team names.
John Donaldson: Of all the players on this floor deserving of a higher floor, this is the easiest case you could make. However, he’s also one of the best, true What If’s, so I wanted to keep him here on the third floor. Honestly, almost all these players here are better than those in the “Are We Sure They’re OBHOF Good?” floor — it’s my biggest regret about the setup.
Back to Donaldson — he is written to have thrown 14 no-hitters, won over 400 games, and struck out over 5,000 batters in his illustrious career. Even with slight qualification those numbers (which hopefully we won’t have to do for long!), they still pop. Buck O’Neil said of Satchel Paige, that Donaldson was the one to show him the way — the first true dominant pitcher in the Negro Leagues. A mantle Paige picked up with aplomb.
Donaldson also sent a strong message off-the-field, as relayed by Steven Marcus in an excellent Newsday feature on Donaldson: When Donaldson was playing in the 1930s, he was told to go to Cuba, change his name, and apply to enter the majors that way because he was light enough to pass. That was not in Donaldson’s nature, as he replied that he was not ashamed of his color.
Home Run Johnson: One of the co-founders of the Page Fence Giants (a team that went 118–38 in their first season of existence), Graham Womack of Sporting News has said that the slugger has a decent case as the most underrated player in baseball history. Well, with his reported 60 home runs in 1894, and virtually complete lack of recognition among even hardcore baseball fans, it’s fair to see where Womack is coming from. Honestly, he has far more claim to the “Home Run” moniker than the far more famous “Home Run” Baker, who merely got that nickname from a series of game-winning home runs in spring training. Personally, I will only being honoring one Home Run-moniker ball player from now on: Home Run Johnson.
Oscar Marcelle: Marcelle was a mercurial talent in the 1920s, who is best known for his role on the 1924 Leopardos de Santa Clara, one of the most stacked non-MLB teams in baseball history. In fact, in honor of Marcelle, here are the top floor non-MLB teams of all time:
1940s Homestead Grays — Pittsburgh in the 1930s was Black Baseball Mecca, and the Grays won nine consecutive Negro National League pennants and three Negro World Series from 1937–1945. They had an absurd wealth of talent: Josh Gibson, Cool Papa Bell, Martin Dihigo, Buck Leonard, Judy Johnson and late-career Smokey Joe Williams. You could make a pretty strong case this was the most talented team in all professional baseball history.
1932 Pittsburgh Crawfords — Like I said, Black baseball in the 1930s flowed through Pittsburgh. This club had five OBHOFers and several other stud ball players, and they ran the league until the Grays took their, cough, stead, cough, in the latter half of the decade.
1924 Leopardos de Santa Clara — As Larry Brunt puts it writing for the Baseball Hall of Fame, “Even today, Cubans speak of the 1924 Leopardos de Santa Clara like many baseball fans speak of the 1927 Yankees. It was simply the greatest team the country had ever known.” The team hit .331 and were so dominant that they actively hurt attendance because they were winning games by too much.
1943 Tokyo Kyojin: This team was the Yankees of the 1940s Japanese Baseball League. The team had the league MVP seven times in nine tries from 1937–1943 (1937 and 1938 had two MVPs, one for spring and one for fall), but here’s the most impressive part: Five of those six were different players, meaning they had a team with five MVP winners by the end of their reign. Unsurprisingly, the team won eight titles from 1936–1943, including six in a row (fall of 1938–1943).
1903 Cuban Giants: Is Rube Foster, the aforementioned Home Run Johnson, Pop Lloyd, and a Colored World Championship enough? Yes.
1923 Baltimore Orioles: This was a minor league team before baseball’s minor league system worked as it does today, and as such, it was far more stacked than any minor league team in recent memory could be. The 1923 roster included 15 future major leaguers, highlighted by Lefty Grove, Max Bishop, and Chief Bender. Stacked.
By the way, anyone interested in an awesome deep-dive on Marcelle should check out “Forgotten Heroes: Oliver “The Ghost” Marcelle,” a PDF available for download from the Center for Negro League Baseball Research website, an excellent source, writ large. Almost all the players you will find here are highlighted in far more depth at cnlbr.org.
OOTP Year-by-Year Re-Simulation: 1908
We continue our trek through re-simulating each season in baseball history using Out of the Park Baseball 21, the most realistic baseball simulation game on the market.
MVP: Bobby Wallace and Frank Chance
Cy Young: Ed Walsh and Christy Mathewson
American League pennant winners: Boston Red Sox
National League pennant winners: Chicago Cubs
World Series: Cubs 4, Red Sox 0
Welp, our Cubs reign of terror rolls right along. This year it was 117 wins and a second consecutive sweep of their American League foes in the World Series. For fans of dynasties, this is clearly turning into our first simulated such dyantasy, and it’s appropriate since those turn of the century Cubs teams were indeed dominant. Now, the real-life version fell off a bit after 1908, famously failing to win another title until 2016.
However, I wouldn’t be surprised to see this OOTP version of their dynasty last a little longer, as the 1909 and 1910 versions of the Cubs are just as stacked if not more so, each collecting 104 wins, with the 1909 Cubs only failing to raise a fourth straight banner thanks to a 110-win season from their divisional foes in Pittsburgh.
Back in our 1908 sim, Chance joined poem-mate Tinker as the second of that Cubs famous trio to grab an OOTP MVP, with only Johnny Evers needed to complete the trifecta now.
Bobby Wallace is a lesser star from baseball’s early days, but he’s right there alongside all these big names in the Hall, thanks to a 76.3-WAR career located mostly in St. Louis for losing Browns teams. He played 25 seasons in total, and was the among the truly elite glovemen of his time, moving from third base to short stop, a position that SABR notes he helped to revolutionize in their early days of baseball.
Walsh and Mathewson are about as strong a one-two punch as you’ll find in a pair of Cy Young Award winners, and both managed to nab the singular starting pitching spot for the franchise’s respective rosters in Starting IX, so you can read plenty about both of them here.
“Starting IX” Excerpt: Turkey and Mule!
As noted earlier, there wasn’t enough emphasis on Negro Leagues history in my first book, but there was some! Here’s a few more big names from Negro League history that were covered in my first book.
Turkey Stearnes: A man truly devoted to his bats, Stearnes kept them in special cases and would often talk to them. His all-time ranks among Negro Leaguers are quite impressive. He is first in triples, second in home runs and doubles, and fifth in batting average. Cool Papa Bell said of him, “If they don’t put [Stearnes] in the Hall of Fame, they shouldn’t put anybody in.”
Mule Suttles: According to the prolific Negro League historian John Holway, Suttles is the true Negro League record holder for home runs in a career. That’s right, more than Josh Gibson.
Monte Irvin
The Newark Negro League Club said of Irvin, “Monte was the choice of all Negro National and American League club owners to serve as the number one player to join a white major league team… He was the best qualified by temperament, and character, ability, sense of loyalty, morals, age, experience, and physique to represent us as the first black player…” Instead he became the fourth when he joined the Giants in 1949.
Buck Leonard: Leonard and Gibson formed the Ruth-Gehrig combo of the Negro Leagues. Monte Irvin said of Leonard, “Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson got more publicity in the Negro League, but Buck Leonard was just as good.”
Who Is This Player?
Answer at the end of the newsletter (I’m debating formats here, so feedback on how easy/difficult this section is would be appreciated)
Weekly Best Reads
I’ve got a pair of baseball article sets for you and then an all-time non-baseball long-form article to spend your Sunday reading.
- First, on the matter of money in baseball, since it was a trendy topic with the Cleveland Baseball Team trading away superstar Francisco Lindor this week: Here’s Ben Lindbergh on the deal for The Ringer, in probably the best analysis I read of the move. And here’s Craig Edwards’ annual check in on the correlation between payroll and winning percentage. There are a lot of factions in baseball fandom regarding this whole broader story right now, too much for this section of this newsletter, but my briefest two cents: Yes, the system that baseball has put in place does not incentivize winning enough; no, that does not mean we should let owners off the hook.
- Second, a pair of Athletic articles for you. If you aren’t a subscriber (both are behind their paywall), I would suggest you subscribe, despite their pretty ugly comments early in their run. Here’s Jen McCaffrey profiling Bianca Smith, who became the first Black woman to coach in pro baseball with her hiring by the Red Sox this week. And here’s Jayson Stark’s annual Strange but True column — both excellent reads.
- Finally, this seems like a decent (and terrifying…) time to re-read this.
Pop Culture Recommendation of the Week
We’re going throw-back and we’re going cult classic: Veronica Mars. Yes, yes, I know I’m slotting further into my Basic B mode, but I’ve been doing a re-watch of a bunch of 2000s show, and let me tell you, Veronica Mars holds up much better than most!
Keep You On Your Toes
If you are not yet on the email list for Color of Change, you should sign up immediately. Here is a link to a petition they created this week to support Cori Bush’s bill to investigate any member of Congress who supported the Trumpites attempted coup this week. While you’re there, make sure to sign-up for regular news updates from them.
Quiz Answer
Huh… That doesn’t look like B-Ref… or Seamheads… And over two decades of consistently playing every day! Who could this mystery man be?!
I got a little tricky this week. That’s Willie Wells on my OOTP Perfect Team roster. If you have yet to discover OOTP, or you know OOTP but haven’t played their Perfect Team mode — go do so immediately.
Remember to follow along here on Medium for the first few months before I move to the actual email newsletter format.
Feel free to reach out to Jim.Turvey21@gmail.com for any feedback or inquiries.
