From Rube to Robinson

From Rube to Robinson brings together the best Negro League baseball scholarship that the Society of American Baseball Research (SABR) has ever produced, culled from its journals, Biography Project, and award-winning essays. The book includes a star-studded list of scholars and historians, from the late Jerry Malloy and Jules Tygiel, to award winners Larry Lester, Geri Strecker, and Jeremy Beer, and a host of other talented writers.

The essays cover topics ranging over nearly a century, from 1866 and the earliest known Black baseball championship, to 1962 and the end of the Negro American League. Todd Peterson’s “May the Best Man Win: The Black Ball Championships 1866-1923” opens the volume and looks at championships that preceded the Colored World Series of 1924. The late Jerry Malloy covers an early circuit in “The Pittsburgh Keystones and the 1887 Colored League.” Malloy points out that the short-lived league garnered the acceptance of the National Agreement of 1883, something no other Black organization was able to do.Not only did Black baseball begin earlier than most fans of the sport may realize, it took root in places that might not be expected either. Steven R. Hoffbeck and Peter Gorton tell the story of legendary southpaw John Donaldson, who pioneered baseball in Minnesota and who would eventually be part of the NNL’s 1920 inaugural season with the Kansas City Monarchs.

Two seminal Negro Leagues researchers—Dick Clark and John Holway—place the 1921 NNL season in context, including a sidebar from the original 1985 article detailing SABR’s Negro Leagues Committee’s efforts to compile a statistical history.Of course there are also profiles of some of the Negro Leagues’ now-mythic figures: Sol White (by Jay Hurd), Rube Foster (by Larry Lester), and Oscar Charleston. Jeremy Beer contributes his article “Hothead: How the Oscar Charleston Myth Began,” which rebuts the notion that Charleston was a brawler in need of anger management.

Ballparks and venues also get a look, with a major league field and a Negro League field included. James Overmyer’s “Black Baseball at Yankee Stadium” describes the tenant/landlord relationship of Negro Leagues teams with the New York Yankees during the 1930s and 40s, while Geri Driscoll Strecker’s “The Rise and Fall of Greenlee Field” is a cradle-to-grave biography of the Pittsburgh Crawfords stadium.

The final section of the book covers integration and the socio-economics of Black baseball. Leading off is Larry Lester’s masterful “Can You Read, Judge Landis?” which refutes the contention that Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis was blameless for the persistence of baseball’s segregation. MLB’s official historian John Thorn and the late Jules Tygiel weigh in with “Jackie Robinson’s Signing: The Real, Untold Story.” And Japheth Knopp’s “Negro League Baseball, Black Community, and the Socio-Economic Impact of Integration” explores Kansas City as a case study in the effects of integration.Brian Carroll’s “Early Twentieth Century Heroes: Coverage of Negro League Baseball in the Pittsburgh Courier and the Chicago Defender” studies the cooperation among the African American press, local business communities, and baseball men such as Rube Foster to form the Negro National League, and later, the Eastern Colored League. And Duke Goldman presents an in-depth and meticulously referenced recap of the winter meetings and in-season owners meetings from the formation of a second Negro National League in 1933 through the last gasp of the Negro American League in 1962.

Larry Lester, for over 25 years, has been a leading force in the research and recognition of the historical significance of the Negro Leagues and their players. Lester co-founded Kansas City's Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, and served as Research Director and Treasurer from 1991 through 1995. From 2001 through 2004, he co-chaired the National Baseball Hall of Fame & Museum's groundbreaking "Out of the Shadows" project, which unearthed huge amounts of new data about Negro Leagues baseball. As the chairman of SABR's Negro Leagues Committee, Lester organizes the annual Jerry Malloy Conference, and has has been honored by numerous awards, including the Henry Chadwick Award, which recognizes baseball's top researchers for their invaluable contributions to making baseball the game that links America's present with its past. Lester has also written or co-written many of the seminal works about the Negro Leagues, including books about the East-West All-Star Game; Rube Foster; black baseball in Detroit, Kansas City, Chicago, and Pittsburgh; and black baseball's first World Series.

Longtime SABR member and researcher Duke Goldman won the 2018 McFarland-SABR Baseball Research Award for his research undertaking, "1933-1962: The Business Meetings of Negro League Baseball,"  which originally appeared in Baseball's Business: The Winter Meetings, 1958-2016 and is reproduced in From Rube to Robinson. His article "The Double Victory Campaign and the Campaign to Integrate Baseball" was chosen for inclusion in the SABR 50 at 50 anthology of SABR's best articles of the past 50 years. Duke is a former practicing attorney and marketing professor and now does research, consulting and presentations on baseball history.  He has been published in Harvard Business Review, Native Americans in Sports Encyclopedia, and The Northern Game.

JOHN GRAF is a member of SABR's Negro Leagues Research Committee who works for the Wisconsin State Assembly as an assistant clerk. He is a past winner of the Jerry Malloy Negro League Conference's "Significa" (trivia) contest and has been a newspaper sportswriter and radio news reporter/announcer. Graf lives in Janesville, Wisconsin.