While the quality of play in the Negro Leagues was on a major league level, the wages, travel, playing conditions, press coverage, and record-keeping were more varied, primarily due to systemic racism. Additionally, Negro League teams played a shorter regular season schedule, but with an extensive amount of exhibitions and barnstorming games that made for seasons that often approached 200 or more games in total.
Andrew “Rube” Foster and the 1916 Chicago American Giants.
Chicago Tribune, February 16, 1920
Eight Clubs to Make Up Negro Baseball League
Indianapolis, Ind., Feb. 15.- Organization of the National Negro Base ball association was announced tonight by C. I. Taylor, owner of the Indian apolis As B. C. club. The league will be composed of eight teams and will begin its season May 1.
The clubs are:
The American Giants, Chicago: the Chicago Giants, Chicago: the St. Louis
Giants. St Louis: the Monarchs, Kansas City; the A. B. C’s, Indianapolis; the Marco’s, Dayton, and the Cuban Stars, a traveling team.
Rube Foster of Chicago was elected president.
Chicago Defender, December 13, 1930
Andrew “Rube” Foster, the master wind of baseball, perhaps the most colorful figure the game has known, was called out by Umpire Father Time after a battle of two years in an effort to regain his health. He died Tuesday evening at 9 o’clock in a hospital in the central part of Illinois.
Funeral services will be held Sunday afternoon from St. Mark’s M. E. church, 59th and Wabash ave., at 3 o’clock. The Rev. John B. Redmond will preach the service. The North Star lodge No. 1 of Masons and the Stranger lodge No. 26 Knights of Pythias will take part. Burial will take place Monday at Lincoln cemetery.
Mr. Foster was bern in Calvert. Tex., Sept. 17, 1819. the son of Rev. and Mrs. Andrew Foster. His father was presiding elder of the Methodist Episcopal church. He was married to Miss Sarah Watts at Temple, Tex., Oct. 28. 190S. The wife and one son, Earl Mack Foster. age 20, a student at Wilberforce university, survive him. A little girl, Sarah, died at the age of 3 years In 1921. Other relatives to mourn his loss are two sisters. Miss Geneva T. Foster, teacher in Sapulpa, Okla., and Mrs. Gertrude Edwards of Santa Monica, Cal, and one brother. WIll Foster. now pitching baseball in Los Angeles.
Mr. Foster’s colorful career not only as a ball player and pitcher but as a manager and later as president of the Negro National league, which he founded in 1920, starts back in his home town of Calvert, Texas, where he learned the game on the sand lots.
He went to Fort Worth to become a member of the Fort Worth Yellow Jackets, and while a member of that team in 1899 he was at Hot Springs. Ark., where Connie Mack’s Philadelphia American league team did their spring training. Just to show them he “could fling them over” in grand style, Rube pitched to Mack’s men for batting practice. When Mack went east he carried the news of the greatness of this young “Rube.”
Foster got his first northern trial as a member of Frank Leland’s Giants in Chicago in 1901. After a year with Leland, Foster went east to play with the Philadelphia Cuban Giants. who were then owned E. B. Lamar.
He rejoined the Leland Giants and brought with him from the East such men as Nate Harris, Danger Talbot, James Booker. Pete Hill, Andrew Payne. George Wright and Pat Moore, all first-class ball players. The team played at 79th St. and Wentworth Are. and was a member of the Chicago City league.
Foster founded the American Giants in 1910 and played all comers, including all-star teams with such major league. players on their roster as Jimmy Callahan. manager of the Chicago White Sox; Jimmy Hutton, now head of the Postoffice league; the late Jake Stahl, who afterward went to manage the Boston American league club: Mike Donlin of the New York Giants, Percy Skillin, Gus Munch, McNichols and others.
In 1920 he founded the Negro National league. It was a child of his brain, and Foster not only invested time but lost considerable money trying to assist promoters of teams in Milwaukee, Cincinnati, Columbus, Toledo and other cities. In fact, he was not only the brains of the league but was the league itself.
Ho save away enough ball players to make four first-class clubs. asking nothing in return. He was president of the league at the time, two years ago, when his health caused him to give up the game and seek a rest.
Rube Foster’s name is not only written is in the baseball history of his Race. but he is known wherever baseball was played between 1900 and today. He knew more big league players and owners than any other individual, and knew perhaps more newspaper men than any of the present-day players with the possible exception of Babe Ruth, who is the only man to have more space devoted to him in the dally newspapers than Mr. Foster.
His death comes on the eve of the midwinter meeting of the league which he founded. His loss is more than a loss to basceall—it is a loss to mankind.
Chicago Tribune, July 19, 1997
By K.C. Johnson
Tribune Staff Writer
Like many historic endeavors, the formation of the Negro National League started with a dream. But it was a dream born of of necessity as much as persona fulfillment.
Andrew “Rube” Foster, considered the father of Negro-league baseball, was the driving force behind its formation in 1920 which marked the first organized league for black players more than one season
Blacks had been playing baseball since the game was invented. But when the National and American Leagues were formed, blacks were prohibited from playing.
And while baseball and its fans pay homage to the 50th anniversary this season of Jackie Robinson’s breaking baseball’s color barrier. Foster’s influence cries out for re-examination. Much of his life was spent in Chicago, which shares a rich history with the Negro leagues
This history includes the Negro leagues’ crown jewel, the East-West All-Star Game, played annually starting in 1933 at Comiskey Park.
“We all knew who Mr. Foster was, even if we weren’t from the same era.” said Napoleon “Nap” Gulley, who started playing in the Negro leagues in 1941, well after Foster’s death in 1930. “We knew his organizational skills. He was a baseball genius.”
That genius was recognized officially on Aug. 2, 1981, when Foster was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. For a big-boned man from tiny Calvert, Texas, the posthumous honor must have exceeded even his dreams.
So, too, must the expansion and relocation or the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, which opened in January, 1991 but is experiencing a big year in Kansas City, Mo. The museum, complete with interactive exhibits, video presentations and a tribute to Foster tripling in size and moving to a location just a few blocks from the YMCA building where Foster founded the Negro National League. The reopening is scheduled for this fall.
Foster began his career in 1897 as an 18-year-old pitcher for two semipro teams in Texas. He eventually signed with the Chicago Union Giants, a barnstorming team for $40 a month and 15-cents-a-day meal money. As a rookie in 1902, he was credited with 51 victories, testament to his unique talent as a screwball-throwing submarine-delivery pitcher
The next season, in a move mirroring the haphazard nature of black baseball, Foster signed for more money with the Cuban Giants from New York. He helped pitch the Giants to the so-called “Colored Championship of the World” over the Philadelphia Giants. The next year, he switched teams again and, in perhaps the best testament to his pitching dominance, led Philadelphia past the Cuban X-Giants for the same title.
In 1907, Foster returned to Chicago to play for the Leland Giants and, three seasons later, he became player-manager. It was in this role that his true brilliance started to develop.
In 1910, Foster’s team took on all comers and finished an astonishing 123-6. The games featured what became Foster’s trademark style½daring baserunning, superb bunting, hit-and-run plays.
High on success, Foster formed a partnership for the next season with John Schorling, a white tavern owner who had leased the grounds of the White Sox’s former home (South Side Park) at 39th Street and Wentworth Avenue after the major league team had moved to Comiskey Park.
The team became known as the Chicago American Giants, and it is legendary. It held a grip on the Midwest-and in particular, Chicago, where it occasionally outdrew the White Sox and Cubs for the next 15 years. Foster played regularly until 1915, then resorted strictly to managing. But he remained a commanding figure with his authoritative style and omnipresent pipe in the dugout.
Having proved himself as a player and manager, Foster sought new challenges. Tired of teams* raiding players and players’ jumping teams on a whim similar to what Foster had done as a player—the budding entrepreneur as a booking agent stressed a desire to form an organized league. Previous efforts had failed.
But Foster persisted. Finally, a select group of owners met Feb. 13-14, 1920 at a YMCA in Kansas City, and the Negro National League was born. Foster was elected president of the eight-team league, which paid $500 each to bind themselves to a constitution.The teams: the Chicago Giants, Chicago American Giants, St. Louis Giants, Detroit Stars, Indianapolis ABCs, Cuban Stars, Dayton Marcos and Kansas City Monarchs.
On May 2, 1920, the Negro National League debuted as Indianapolis defeated the Chicago Giants 4-2. Foster’s American Giants won the pennant.
Foster worked to eliminate the clowning aspect that had pervaded some black baseball during barn-storming. His players traveled in a private Pullman train car, dressed to the nines and conducted themselves in a manner suitable for an impeccable reputation.
But the stress of building a successful league took it toll on Fos-ter. In 1926, after suffering a nervous breakdown some attributed to overwork, he was committed to a state mental hospital in Kankakee. He died four years later.
“Foster just wouldn’t give up. The success of the league meant everything to him,” wrote Dave Malarcher, who played for Foster and eventually succeeded him as manager before becoming a writer and poet.
Foster’s death and the Depression weakened the Negro leagues, which turned mostly to barnstorm-ing. The Negro National League disbanded after the 1931 season.
In 1933, other influential figures helped oversee a resurgence of Negro leagues, including the formation of the second Negro National League, the Negro American League and the beginning of the East-West All-Star Game.
Foster’s goal for his Negro National League to face the’ World Series champion each year never materialized. But he succeeded in adding to black baseball the stability that was desperately needed.
“He was a nice human being,” said Ted “Double Duty” Radcliffe, who met Foster in 1920 and is one of the few living Negro leaguers to have played during Foster’s tenure. “He did so much for base. ball. What more could he do? He would’ve been a good man for us if he would have lived, but he died early.”
Not, however, without leaving a lasting imprint.
During Foster’s Hall of Fame induction, then-baseball Commissioner Bowie Kuhn said this:
- Buck O’Neil, a member of the Hall of Fame Committee on Veterans, described him as a combination of Connie Mack and John McGraw, but here in Cooperstown he represents something more. He represents the people of the Negro league(s), players and leader. Men who worked in near anonymity for many decades, they should be remembered and here in Cooperstown and in the heart of the American public, they will always be remembered.
What a fitting epitaph for a man who fulfilled his dreams.
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