It is truly amazing how much a simple game can mean to a nation. The game of baseball has been a means of excitement, joy and dubbed as “America’s past-time”. The baseball we watch today is littered with stars from many nations and ethnic backgrounds; however, it was not always like that. Anyone who knows anything about baseball is aware of who Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb and Cy Young are, but are they aware of the players who never got a chance to strut their stuff at the major league level? I would guess probably not. The reason for this was not, by any means, that they did not have the talent, but rather the simple fact that they were black, not white.

While Cy Young was pitching shut outs, and the great bambino was smacking tape-measure shots, Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson were doing the same, if not better. Yet they lived their lives just like a majority of the Negro League stars, never given an opportunity to show the world what they had and baffle those fans that had never seen them play. Paige, Gibson, James “Cool Papa” Bell and Buck Leonard are only a few names of stars that lived their lives in the shadows of their “superior” players who were all white. Fans watched in awe as Babe Ruth smashed 60 home runs to be crowned the home-run king, yet they were totally unaware that for a team called the Homestead Grays, Josh Gibson had just smashed 86 in a season. Skeptics will often say the talent was nowhere near Major League caliber, but the thousands of fans and major league players who faced and watched them will tell a different tale. They tell one of the legacy of masked heroes who never got revealed to the world because of the color of their skin.

During the early twentieth century Major League Baseball officially drew the first color line that stated any team with one or more colored players would not be permitted to compete in major league baseball. However, the fact that the whites said they could not play did not kill the yearning and desire for the game. Needing to find somewhere else to play other then the major leagues they were barred from, blacks began to form their own teams that would travel around searching for any competition.  A great visionary, Andrew “Rube” Foster knew that if they ever were to gain any respect and maintain any kind of organization the teams would have to have form a structure that was later called The Negro Leagues. Although broken into three different leagues that rose and fell in their respective periods, the collective leagues as a whole are still referred to as the Negro Leagues.

Like any organization, the newly founded league faced there ups as well their downs. The one thing that you can be sure about though is that the competition was fierce and the players could flat out play. Just as the major leagues, the Negro leagues had their own dominating franchises. The Homestead Grays of Pennsylvania dominated the leagues from 1937-1945, winning a pennant a year. They had their share of perennial all-stars that could have found a starting spot on any major league team. While barnstorming, Negro teams would play Major League teams in exhibition games. These encounters left great impressions on the white ballplayers that saw them play. The great Yankee ball player Joe DiMaggio once said of pitcher Satchel Paige: “.. he was the best pitcher I ever saw.”

DiMaggio was not the only great that Paige left an impression on. Ty Cobb, who was known for making racist comments, once said of Paige “ If he were to play in the major leagues he would win 30 easily.”

I’m not telling you this as a proud African American trying to trace back to my heritage, or as a white kid trying to compensate for the treatment of the Negro players, but as a baseball fan trying to get some great players some recognition for their great accomplishments in the game. It is a tragedy that so many great players can go unnoticed for such a long time just because their skin was darker than ours. It was a long time ago and there is nothing that can be done about it now except educate our selves on these great players and hope that the legacy of them lives on for our children to learn and appreciate. The legacy of players left out of the spotlight despite their staggering numbers. The legacy of a forgotten league, the legacy of the Negro Leagues..

Jared Ward is the editor of this Negro League site...