Integrating Legacy

For more than 30 years, an associate professor at Kent State University at Stark has been working to see that Black baseball players receive their place in history – and in the record books.

Hank Aaron, Willie Mays, Satchel Paige and Larry Doby are some of the more well-known Major League Baseball players who came from the Negro Baseball Leagues. However, for every one of these players, there are hundreds more who many people have never heard about. These are men who began and ended their careers long before Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in 1947 by joining the Brooklyn Dodgers and began the desegregation of Major League Baseball.  

Leslie Heaphy, Ph.D., is an associate professor of history at Kent State Stark in North Canton, Ohio, where she has taught for nearly 30 years. She also is the author of four books and numerous articles about the Negro Leagues. She has been the editor of the national, peer-reviewed journal Black Ball since 2008.  

She currently teaches a class in sports history, a class in baseball history and a class in the history of the Negro Leagues.  

For most of her academic career, Heaphy has been working to preserve and promote the history of Black baseball in the United States and has been a strong advocate in getting the players and their stats integrated into the overall history of baseball in America.  

‘Why Not?’ How Heaphy Found Her Calling as a Voice for Forgotten History

Heaphy’s introduction to the topic of Black baseball is a result of her lifelong love of baseball. Growing up in New York State, she was a Mets fan and continued following her favorite team through her years as an undergraduate at Siena College and as a graduate student at the University of Toledo.  

It was while she was studying at the University of Toledo and was looking for a topic for her master’s thesis and dissertation in her history of labor class that she found her calling. She was searching the shelves in the library with a friend, looking for a topic when her friend asked her, “Well, what do you want to do?” Heaphy replied, “I’d love to do something on baseball, but they’ll never let me.” Her friend said, “Why not?”

She went to her instructor and asked, and he said, “Sure, you can.” Heaphy went on to explain that she wanted to do something on the Negro Leagues because so little had been written about them. But she added, it’s baseball and this is a labor history class. Her instructor said, “Baseball has labor in it. We can do that.”  

“That was how I got started, with someone just saying to me ‘Why not?’” Heaphy said. “The rest is history.” 

Black Baseball in America and the Negro Leagues

Heaphy wants to make a clear distinction between the history of the Negro Leagues and the history of Black baseball in America. “The history of Black baseball goes back to the origins of baseball itself, and certainly its origins in this country,” she said. “So, you’re talking the 1830s, and we’re talking about Black baseball as it incorporates all of the teams, all of the players, whether they were part of the Negro Leagues or not.”

The Negro Leagues were born out of segregation. From the 1830s to 1869, “everybody was an amateur,” Heaphy said. “It was all amateur baseball, so anybody could play. It didn’t matter. There wasn’t any particular issue about who was playing because there was no money to be had, and that makes a huge difference.”  

In 1869, professional baseball was born with the establishment of the Cincinnati Red Stockings as one of the first professional teams. The seeds of segregation had been planted even before then, however, in 1867 when the Pennsylvania State Convention of Harrisburg denied admission to the Philadelphia Pythian Baseball club. At that point, there was not a formal ban on Black players or teams, but the feeling that Blacks and whites should play on separate teams began to take root.  

The Exclusion of Black Players and the ‘Gentleman’s Agreement’

Adrian “Cap” Anson played for the Chicago White Stockings and was one of the superstars of his era. He also was one of the strongest voices for segregation. In 1883, he refused to play in an exhibition game against the minor league Toledo Blue Stockings unless they benched their Black catcher, Moses Fleetwood “Fleet” Walker. The team moved Walker to center field, and Anson did not make good on his threat when he learned it would cost him a day’s pay.

Anson continued to push to have Black players excluded from baseball and gained support due to his prominence in the game and the white players who shared his racist views. He once again took a stand in 1887, refusing to play in an exhibition game against the Newark Little Giants.  

“He forfeited a game because the opposing team had a pitcher and a catcher who were Black and he said teams couldn’t afford to lose their paycheck,” Heaphy said. “The threat of forfeit led to the eventual creation of a ‘gentleman’s agreement.’” 

This unofficial “gentleman’s agreement” effectively banned Black players from the professional leagues for the next 60 years. “And so, from basically 1890 to 1947, Black players are shoved out and they are forced to create their own opportunities to play,” she said.  

The Birth of the Negro Leagues

Black players were pushed out of any teams with white players, both in the minor and major leagues. “That led to lots of Black teams being established and a number of attempts at leagues in the 19th and early 20th century,” Heaphy said. “The first one was in 1887 and it only lasted a week, so it was not very successful at the time.”

Then in 1920, “Along comes a gentleman by the name of Rube Foster,” she said. “He was a pitcher in his playing days and he moved up from Texas and came up north to play baseball, even though his dad didn’t want him to. His dad was a minister and he thought that baseball was not a true job; it was a game. But Foster didn’t listen to him. He went north and eventually ends up in Chicago. Over the course of his career, he is a pitcher, a manager and an owner. He has all of these different components, which were really necessary. He becomes the key figure in the start and is referred to as ‘the father of the Negro Leagues’ because he’s the one who makes this happen.”

Foster brought together a group of owners and reporters in Kansas City for a meeting. There, they signed off on the contracts to start the Negro National League. “This was the first of many Negro Leagues that last from 1920 until about 1960, so it’s about a 40-year existence of the official Negro Leagues,” Heaphy said.  

There were eight teams in that initial league, and at that league’s highest point, there were 12 teams. Through the late 1930s and part of the 1940s, there was more than one league, so there were then more than 12 teams. “It depended on the year as to how many leagues were in operation,” she said. “The Negro National League is actually the only one that operated consistently from 1920 into the 1960s. And then there were all these other leagues that came and went.”  

As for the teams, “There were lots of interesting team names and some are really well known,” Heaphy said. “The Kansas City Monarchs are probably the best known because of Satchel Paige and the Homestead Grays with Josh Gibson. Pittsburgh Crawfords, Newark Eagles, Atlanta Black Crackers, Toledo Crawfords, Dayton Marcos, Chicago American Giants, New York Cubans, Cuban Giants, Cuban X-Giants, Schenectady Mohawk Giants.”

Prior to the birth of the leagues, the teams played by barnstorming – traveling from their home bases to various locations, usually small towns, to stage exhibition matches. When league play began, the teams played other league teams but also continued to barnstorm. “Barnstorming remained a huge, necessary part of Negro League baseball simply because they didn’t get paid enough otherwise,” she said. “Let’s say you’re playing in New York and your next league game is in Chicago. You could take four days to travel, which means you have four days of playing. So, you might stop in Canton, Ohio, you might stop in Toledo on the way and play barnstorming games with whoever was there. So, a lot of people got to see Negro League players because of all the barnstorming.” 

‘Tall Tales and the Myths Are Part of Baseball History’

“It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about the Negro Leagues, the Major Leagues or the kid playing in their backyard,” Heaphy said. “Tall tales and the myths are part of baseball history. It’s the fun of it.”

One story about center fielder James Thomas Bell, better known as “Cool Papa” Bell, was that he was so fast that he was once hit by his own line drive as he was running to home base. “It’s an apocryphal story,” she said. “But it reinforces what people know about Cool Papa Bell, which is that he was arguably one of the fastest players that has ever played the game.”

Heaphy’s favorite tall tale is about Cool Papa Bell and Satchel Paige when they were both playing for the Pittsburgh Crawfords in 1937. The story was told that Bell was so fast that he could turn off a light switch and jump under the covers in his bed before it got dark. “Satchel Paige was a great storyteller,” she said. “He liked to play pranks on his teammates.” To get back at Paige, his teammates told him this story about Bell. Satchel didn’t believe it, and his teammates told him that they could show him.  

“So, they took Satchel Paige to Bell’s hotel room, and he’s standing in the doorway,” Heaphy said. “Bell flips off the switch, runs across the room, jumps under the covers and the light goes out. It was a true story.” 

“You have to remember, back in the day, the old light switches were the ones you had to push in. There was an electrical short in the light switch, so he wasn’t lying. And people who don’t know that backstory think that this is a myth, but it’s actually somewhat true,” she said.  

Another tall tale with some truth to it involves Luke Easter, a first baseman who played for the St. Louis Titanium Giants, the Cincinnati Crescents, the Homestead Grays and later, the Cleveland Indians. While visiting Toledo, playing for the Titanium Giants, Easter is said to have hit the longest home run ever. 

Heaphy said, “And here’s why, because he supposedly hit the ball standing on home plate, where there is now a grocery store. Then, it was Swain Field. He hit the ball out of the field, and it landed on a train car and kept going.  

“I grew up in Toledo and I went to grad school there,” she said. “Swain Field was right around the corner from my house. So, I went there and walked around and found the train tracks. So, it’s possible that it could have happened.

“Tall tales are part of the game. You don’t have one without the other. They go hand-in-hand,” she said. “The stats are only a small part of the picture. It’s the stories that go with it, the stories that explain why the Negro Leagues existed in the first place. It’s the stories that explain how they came to be and how they declined and disappeared, and why, without those stories, the stats mean nothing.” 

The Souls of the Game: Voices of Black Baseball

In her capacity as a historian of the Negro Leagues, Heaphy has worked with Major League Baseball, the National Baseball Hall of Fame and the Negro Leagues Museum in Kansas City. For the past two years, she has served as an external consultant as the Hall of Fame prepared to open its new exhibit about Black baseball. “The Souls of the Game: Voices of Black Baseball” opened in May 2024.  “It was a complete redo of their previous Negro Leagues exhibit,” Heaphy said. “They took down the whole thing and started from scratch because we wanted it to be the true story of all of Black baseball and not just the Negro Leagues, because it’s a much bigger story.”

This exhibit includes history that is still being made today. “It incorporates all of the Black players who are still playing and who are coming up through the minor leagues,” Heaphy said. “So, it’s the much fuller story of the participation of Black people in baseball since its beginning.” 

Barnstorming and Buckeyes: Black Baseball in Ohio

Ohio plays large in the history of Black baseball because of its location between New York and Chicago. In the four days that it took to travel between the two cities, players could pick up four games in Ohio and earn money as they traveled.

But more than just a pass-through state, Ohio had its own prominent teams in the Negro Leagues. Between 1920 and 1950, Cleveland was home to 11 Negro League teams, Columbus and Toledo each had three and Akron and Cincinnati each had one team.  

“The most famous of the Negro League teams in Ohio is the Cleveland Buckeyes,” Heaphy said. “The Cleveland Buckeyes won the Negro League World Series in 1945, before the Cleveland Indians won the Major League World Series in 1948.” In that series, against the Homestead Grays, the Grays were heavily favored as the better team, with five or six future Hall of Famers on their roster. It was an upset win. “Cleveland beat Homestead four games to zero with two shutouts. It was awesome,” Heaphy said.  

Also, one of the key figures in the early history of Black baseball, Sol White, was born King Solomon White on June 12, 1868, in Bellaire, Ohio. He played baseball starting in the 1880s and played his last game in 1927. “More importantly,” Heaphy said, “and part of what got him elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2006, was that he wrote a book.” The book, titled “The History of Colored Baseball,” came out in 1907. “It was a look back into the 19th century and to the present day. It is still the most significant history that we have on Black baseball in the 19th century,” Heaphy said. “Without it, trying to recover that history would have been so much harder.”

On Sept. 13, 2024, Heaphy attended a dedication of a monument to White in his hometown of Bellaire, honoring him for his pioneering contributions to the game as an infielder, a manager, an executive, an author and a newspaper sportswriter.  

Eagles, Indians and Billy Joel 

Legendary center fielder Larry Doby began his career in the Negro Leagues playing for the Newark Eagles. He took a hiatus from the team during World War II when he joined the Navy and served for two years. Doby returned to the Eagles in 1946 to help them win the Negro League World Series.  

In 1947, one month after Jackie Robinson became the first Black player in the National League, Doby became the first Black player in the American League, playing for the Cleveland Indians.  

Singer-songwriter Billy Joel made note of Doby’s trailblazing contributions to baseball when he played a concert at Progressive Field in Cleveland on July 14, 2017, taking a break between songs to talk about Doby’s stats and accomplishments. Then, while shining a spotlight on Larry Doby’s number on the upper deck of the ballpark, Joel brought Doby’s son, Larry Doby Jr., onto the stage. Doby Jr. has been a rigger on Joel’s concert crew for decades. Joel said, “It feels good to be in first place,” after delivering a quick rendition of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.”  

In its review of the concert, entertainment newspaper Cleveland Scene called it “The night’s classiest move.” 

Bringing the Negro Leagues to the Hall of Fame

Heaphy said that research about the Negro Leagues has been ongoing since the 1970s but picked up momentum in the early 2000s. This is when the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame put out a call for a grant for the collection and creation of stats, which they said were needed to induct Negro League Players into the Hall of Fame. The grant was awarded to an organization called the Negro League Researchers and Authors Group, and its compilation of stats led to 17 players from the Negro Leagues being elected to the Hall of Fame. There was no move for induction at the time, but the group kept collecting stats.

The stats that are most relevant are the box scores, and that’s what Heaphy has been doing for years. The primary source of information is newspapers, particularly Black newspapers. These newspapers were generally published once a week, which is a problem for research. “So, let’s say they announce a game one week, so you have to wait a week, and in between, four more games were played,” she said. “So that first game might not ever make it into the paper or might just make it in as a line score. The only things that are included in the stats that exist now are those that have a box score, not an apocryphal story, not an article that says Josh Gibson hit those four home runs, but it has to have an actual box score to be included and that’s the only way they get included.”

In 2020, the Hall of Fame made the announcement that it was going to recognize seven of the Negro Leagues. “Those of us who have studied the Negro League said that they were always Major League,” Heaphy said. “They didn’t need Major League Baseball to grant them that status, but Major League Baseball did.”  

Using the stats that were in their records, Major League Baseball chose to grant seven of the Negro Leagues and their more than 2,300 players Major League status based on determining factors including the caliber of their play, who their opponents were and how many of them had players in the Hall of Fame. 

‘It’s Not a Done Story’

Beyond those seven leagues and the players in them, there are many others that remain to be counted. “One of our jobs going forward is to continue to grow that and get Major League Baseball to acknowledge others,” Heaphy said. “We’re working on that because there were certainly other individual teams in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s who were never part of some of those leagues [but] who were just as good or better than some of them. There are teams past 1948, and into 1950. The records, even those that have already been incorporated aren’t complete yet. So, it’s going to be ongoing work and an ongoing story. It’s not a done story.” 

Changing History and Opening Eyes

For many fans of baseball, Heaphy said, the inclusion of these players and stats is going to change everything they’ve known to this point. Names like Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth will no longer be on top of the leaderboard, and names like Josh Gibson and Turkey Stearns will be.  

Heaphy sees this an opportunity for some people to “get mad or get interested.”  

“Who are these people we’ve never heard of? That’s the cool part,” she said. “The bigger part is that we’re not just talking about the Turkey Stearns, the Josh Gibsons and the Satchel Paiges, but we’re also talking about the Biz Mackeys and the other people that nobody has ever heard of – from the guy who played two games to the guy who played 700, because they’ve all been incorporated because Major League Baseball stats include anyone who played in even one game.” 

Why Inclusion Is So Important – and Possibly a Concern

Through the efforts of Heaphy and others, more than 2,300 players and stats from the Negro Leagues, who had never been part of Major League Baseball history, have been added to the official records. “My only concern with incorporating all of this is, if people only look at the stats, they’ll lose track of why the Negro Leagues ever existed,” Heaphy said. “That’s where the telling of the stories becomes important. Why the stories? The stories are how those stats came to be, and they have to go hand-in-hand. It’s the stories that tell us who was ‘Double Duty Radcliffe’ and how he got his nickname,” she said. “Well, ‘Double Duty Radcliffe’ got his nickname because he pitched, and he would pitch and catch a double-header.” 

It's ‘the Right Thing to Do’

Heaphy feels passionately that the stats from the Negro Leagues need to be integrated into the Major League stats because “it’s where they belong.”  

“We have to tell those stories, and that’s what rounds out the picture of baseball to be a truer picture of America and American history,” she said. “Without them, you don’t have the full story of what baseball is all about. It was also the right thing to do. It fills out the picture of what baseball is and has meant to America. Even though it’s not watched quite the same as it once was, it’s still America’s national pastime. That’s how it is referred to. That says something, and if that is true, everybody should be included who has participated. Without incorporating them, you don’t have a full story.”