Opening Day

Remembering some great ballplayers from another era

Apr 08, 2022

Morning Update

Friday, April 8, 2022

By Ken Tingley

Satchel Paige was torn.

He had an invitation to visit President Reagan at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue during the summer of 1981, but he also had an invite to a reunion of old Negro League baseball players.

He just couldn’t decide, so he talked it over with his wife.

She asked what the event was in Kentucky.

“I told her it was reunion of black ballplayers,” Paige said.

“Have you looked in the mirror lately,” his wife said.

That’s how Satchel Paige ended up at the Third Annual Negro League Baseball Reunion in Ashland, Ky. In 1981.

I graduated from college in 1979 and was hired as a sportswriter in Ashland, Ky. that spring. None of the other writers on the staff seemed to think much of this inaugural event so they gave it to the kid. As a baseball phanatic growing up, it was the most exciting thing I covered in Ashland.

By 1979, just nine Negro League stars had been admitted to the Baseball Hall of Fame. The first, Satchel Paige, was not admitted until 1971.

Unfortunately, statistical records were inconsistent and sometimes missing entirely which made it difficult for many to see how the Negro League stars measured up to their major league contemporaries. I suspect there was still a strong whiff of racism in the air.

I remember vividly hearing Happy Chandler, the former Kentucky governor and commissioner of baseball when Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier, laughing and saying that he had seen many of these “boys” play. Even as a young sportswriter, that just didn’t seem right.

The whole idea for a Negro League reunion in Kentucky seemed a bit out of place. The idea originated with Herb Stultz, a native of Greenup, Ky. and a weekly newspaper owner, after he read an article in the Charleston, W.V. newspaper about a man named Clint Thomas. Stultz found out that Thomas was an old Negro League player from his hometown in Greenup. He found Thomas “was kind of a big deal” in the Negro Leagues and was known as the black Joe DiMaggio.

With Thomas’ 80th birthday approaching, it was Stutz’s idea to get some of the old Negro League stars to come in to celebrate his birthday. The idea not only took root, it blossomed into a celebration of the Negro Leagues and was merged with the annual Tri-State Fair and Regatta.

Hall of Farmers William “Judy” Johnson, Buck Leonard and James “Cool Poppa” Bell were there along with future Hall of Famer Ray Dandridge. Buck O’Neil, Monte Irvin, Jake Stephens, Turkey Stearns, Ted Page, Eugene Benson and Leon Day.

Bob Feller, who barnstormed across the country with the black stars in 1946-47, was there to pay his respects. So were Monte Irvin and Ernie Banks, who both played briefly in the Negro Leagues before going to the majors.

“All of you gentlemen here who are not in the Hall of Fame, you should be,” Feller said during that first reunion. “You belong there.”

The weekend became a rare platform for the black players to present their case with media from around the state of Kentucky attending.

It surprised even Stultz.

“The mood just changed,” Stultz remembered. “When they got up and saw a couple hundred people turned out, those guys instead of getting up and joking were all choked up.”

“I’m as happy as an ice cube on top of an ice cream cone,” said Clinton Thomas, who had been honored in 1979. “This is the one thing I never, ever though would happen to me. I haven’t seen some of these fellas since 1937. I never thought I would see them again.”

It was the first of several Negro League reunions and a movement to establish a Negro League Baseball Hall of Fame in nearby Ashland, Ky.

Baseball opening day has always been a special time for me. A month or so ago, an old college friend from Kentucky started telling me about another Negro League reunion, this time in Birmingham, Alabama. He pointed out that not many of the old players are left.

Last year, Buck O’Neil, who was at the Ashland reunion, finally got his call to Cooperstown. It was good to see that the only black players had not been forgotten. But it has been a long road filled with frustration for many of the players.

“You can’t make up 100 years by picking one at a time,” former major league pitcher Joe Black said about the Hall of Fame process in 1980. “I think they’ve got to do more if they want to say Negro League Baseball played a part.

“When I went to the Hall of Fame, I saw a corner for Willie Mays and a corner over here for some other players, but just a table over here with come clippings (for the Negro Leagues). That’s it, clippings,” said Black.

“These guys were not clowns,” said Ted Page, who hit .429 during one barnstorming campaign against the major league players. “They could do anything the guys in the major leagues could do. I feel sorry for you that you did not get a chance to see these guys perform.”

Paige made it to the major leagues when the Cleveland Indians, desperate for pitching in the heat of the 1948 pennant race, signed Paige.

He was 42.

He was 6-1 down the stretch with a 2.47 earned run average.

But the Indians only used him once in the World Series to mop up a 12-5 loss to the Boston Braves.

“That’s why I won’t go to Cleveland anymore,” Paige said.

Paige was finally inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1971. But Paige came away from that event bitter as well.

“I was talking about all the good black players, how so many of them would never have had to play on a farm team,” Paige related. “I was talking about how so many of them would have been in the major leagues and they told me to sit down.”

In 2006, Congress designated Kansas City as the official home of the Negro League Baseball Hall of Fame.

But the Negro Leagues continued to be celebrated in many places.

This June, the Jerry Malloy Negro League Conference will be held in Birmingham, Ala. The June 2-4 event is sponsored by the Society of American Baseball Research’s Negro Leagues Committee. It is designed to promote scholarly, educational and literary objectives. Since 1998, it has been the only event devoted solely to the examination and promotion of Black baseball history.

Any monies from the event is targeted to donate books to schools or libraries; raise funds for the Negro Leagues Baseball Grave Marker Project; and award scholarships to high school seniors in nationwide essay and art contests.

Sadly, it’s a part of baseball history that many people still don’t know about.

Birmingham Negro League reunion