Baseball season is over. Playoffs begin. Time to look back on how your team did (or is doing, if they made the playoffs). But right now, I’m looking way back.
I recently found out that Jackie Robinson wasn’t the third Black Major League player, but the fourth. I knew about Fleet Walker and Weldy Walker, but not about William Edward White.
So, the first Major League Black player was named White, went to college at Brown, and played for the Grays. Maybe I should say the Grays’ White, of Brown, was Black.
What colorful things do you have to share? It’s Monday Night Open Thread, and that means it’s your turn to control the conversation.
What’s on your mind.
Several things about this. By all respects and purposes the only “Major” league at the time was considered to be the National League. While the American association was trying to gain parity with the NL, as several other leagues tried only AFTER 1900, and officially in 1903, did they truly become the second “Major” league forming with the National in what we would today consider the major leagues. So while these gentlemen certainly played it is only semantically that we can say they were “Major” league players. Also one can also then acknowledge the many “Cuban” players in baseball after 1900 when many lighter skinned blacks called themselves and played as well as many who were called themselves “Indians”. You could also consider many of them the “First” but as they played under a false flag they are just a footnote in baseball history. It is not a case dissimilar to treating the many possible first contact civilizations like the Vikings as the true discoverers of America but it only with Columbus that the contact proved to be sustained, just as Robinson’s very public entry into the recognized major proved to be the true starting point of accepting desegregation in baseball. One downside not often noted was that is also killed the thriving business of the Negro Leagues, baseball franchises owned and operated by black businessmen. A sacrifice for the greater good but still a sad passing of a unique institution.
White played for the Providence Grays, who were in the National League. In fact, the year that White played, they were the National League champions.
https://www.baseball-reference.com/leagues/NL/1879.shtml
Thank you for the correction, from reading the CC for the video it appeared to me that he said the Grays were in the AA. I did not double check that.
One nugget of quality trivia from Basil, and three from walrus. I both am and feel smarter for coming to this site.
And Basil’s earlier link to “The General” makes everyone who clicks it a better person.
(The same goes for zyzxx’s snippets of Groucho Marx.)
Stuff you didn’t know about the movie Tombstone, and very possibly don’t care about. But that you may find interesting…………..or not.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObLaMLK5tzs
Glenn Hall, the man who still holds the record for consecutive starts as a goaltender in the NHL, was born October 3, 1931. He was a truly great goaltender, at a time when there were only six teams in the NHL, and five of them are in the Hall of Fame, and deserve to be. The other four are, in no particular order, Jacques Plante, Johnny Bower, Terry Sawchuk, and Lorne “Gump” Worsley.