A Game of Their Own

Before African Americans were allowed in the major leagues, the Negro League East-West Game showcased some of the best talent in baseball

By Eric Enders
Published in the Major League Baseball All-Star Game Program (2000) 

It is July 14, 1953, at Cincinnati’s Crosley Field. Ancient Satchel Paige, finishing up his career with the St. Louis Browns, trots in from the bullpen to pitch the eighth inning of the All-Star Game for the American League. It is the most poignant moment of the game, because it is the first All-Star Game the 47-year-old Paige has pitched in since he was brought up to the majors in 1948. What a great feeling it must be, people say, for him to finally get into in an All-Star Game.

But Paige knew the feeling well. Few realized that he had actually pitched in five previous all-star games, more than any of his eight teammates that day. In the years before integration, while Bob Feller and Carl Hubbell baffled white hitters in the major league All-Star Game, Paige and other Negro Leaguers were all-stars in a game of their own. It was called the East-West Game, and for more than a quarter of a century it was the biggest event in the forgotten world of black baseball.

The East-West Game was first played in 1933, the same year as the first major league All-Star Game. But unlike many baseball innovations of the day, such as night baseball, the idea for the all-star game did not originate in the Negro Leagues. The concept had existed since the 19th century, but a more immediate influence was Chicago Tribune sports editor Arch Ward, who had convinced his newspaper to sponsor a major league All-Star Game. Inspired by Ward’s idea, Pittsburgh Crawfords traveling secretary Roy Sparrow organized the first Negro League all-star game, played on Sept. 10, 1933.

“One particular day we were sitting in a restaurant in Pittsburgh,” the late Dave Malarcher, manager of the Chicago American Giants, recalled before his death in 1982. “And [Sparrow] said, ‘You know, Dave, we could organize a big game like the major league All-Star Game and call it the East-West Game.’ About three weeks later when we came to Chicago, we found that... they had organized the first East-West Game. They picked the best of the players from the East and the best of the players from the West, and they rented Comiskey Park.”

In the beginning, the East-West Game paralleled the white All-Star Game in nearly every way. Both games were sponsored by newspapers: The white game by the Chicago Tribune, the black game by the Chicago Defender and Pittsburgh Courier. Fans elected starters for each game by clipping ballots out of the papers and returning them by mail. (In 1933, the leading vote-getters in the respective contests were Hall of Famers Al Simmons and Willie Foster.) Babe Ruth hit the first All-Star home run, while Mule Suttles -- whom current research shows to be the Negro Leagues’ career home run leader -- hit the first homer in the East-West Game.

That initial contest, though played on a rainy day during the bleakest days of the Great Depression, drew more than 20,000 fans. It was so successful that the East-West Game became an annual midsummer fixture at Comiskey Park. For African-American players who could not dream of playing in the majors, making the all-star squad represented the highest level of achievement they could aspire to. Usually played in August, the game was the pinnacle of the black baseball season, surpassing even the Negro League World Series in prestige and attendance.

“The first one I played in was 1941, and Satchel Paige pitched,” said Monte Irvin, then a shortstop with the Newark Eagles. “He proved that day why everybody wanted to see him. Our first baseman, Len Pearson, was the first batter up. So I told him I felt sorry for him, and he said, ‘Why?’ I said, ‘Well, since you’re the first batter, you know Satchel’s gonna want to strike you out. But you go on up and do your best.’ So he went up and took three strikes and sat down. I said, ‘How’d he look?’ and he said, ‘I don’t know. I didn’t see it, he was throwing so hard.’”

Though Paige was the Negro Leagues’ most visible star, the East-West Game provided a stage on which dozens of equally talented players shone. “I think the one that stands out the most for me is one where we lost the ballgame on a great play by Willie Wells, one of the greatest shortstops that ever lived,” former Kansas City Monarch Buck O’Neil said. “I hit the ball up the middle and I just knew it was a hit that was going to drive in the two winning runs. But Willie Wells was playing shortstop, and he made that play. I don’t know how he could have made that play, but he made it, and we didn’t win that ballgame. That night, we had dinner together and I said, ‘Man, I don’t know you did it.’ He said, ‘Listen, when the pitcher threw the ball and I saw where he was throwing it, I started moving.’ And I tell you, that’s the greatest play I’ve ever seen, and it was made against me!”

Another shortstop who starred in many East-West games was Artie Wilson of the Birmingham Black Barons, who hit .402 in 1948. He remains the last player to bat .400 in major professional baseball. “In 1944 I made the all-star team when I was just a rookie in the Negro Leagues,” Wilson said. “I asked my teammates what I had to do to make the all-star team, and they said I wouldn’t make it because I was a rookie. ‘You didn’t answer my question,’ I said. ‘What do you have to do to make it?’ They told me I had to be better than all the other shortstops, but I wouldn’t make it because it was my first year. But I never had a doubt in my mind. I made it the first year, and I made it every year after that.”

From its debut in the first year of Frankin D. Roosevelt’s presidency, the East-West Game was a national event, and many black families planned their summer vacations around a trip to the game. For an African-American population that had been hit even harder by the Depression than most Americans, it was a weekend that offered a temporary diversion from the harsh realities of life.

“Oh, man, it was quite an affair,” O’Neil said. “The Illinois Central train in the city of New Orleans would put on a couple of extra cars, and they would bring people and pick ’em up in Memphis and all the way up. The New York Central would put on a couple of extra cars in New York City, and the Santa Fe Chief would put on a couple of extra cars coming out of California, picking up people along the way. It was quite an evening. I’ll tell you what it was like: It was like a Joe Louis prizefight. Everybody was there, all of the dignitaries.  I’ve seen Joe Louis throw out the first ball, I’ve seen Bojangles throw out the first pitch at the East-West Game, all of the great ones.

“We’d fill up the ballpark. In fact, they always said we outdrew the major leaguers. Well, if you’re wondering why we outdrew the major leaguers sometimes, part of it’s because we always played at Comiskey Park, where we could get 55,000 people in the ballpark. But the major leaguers might be at Wrigley Field or one of the other parks that wasn’t that large. They were filling up the ballparks just like we were, but we were playing in a bigger yard.”

In fact, attendance at the East-West Game and the major league All-Star Game was usually about the same. For the first 18 years in which the games operated concurrently, the Negro Leaguers drew a larger crowd nine times, and the major leaguers drew more nine times. In years when the Negro Leagues were financially unstable, the owners relied on the windfall from the East-West Game for most of their annual income. The leagues paid 20 percent of gate receipts (usually about $15,000) to the White Sox for use of Comiskey Park, after which the owners divided the remainder of the money amongst themselves. Like their major league counterparts of the day, nobody thought to give the players a share.

“Yeah, they made a lot of money, but all we got was $50 expenses,” Irvin said. “No rings, no watches, no photos, no anything. But then one year, in ’40, I think, the players went on strike and wouldn’t play. Instead of fifty dollars they demanded a hundred, and the owners promised to pay them -- and did, because the players wouldn’t go out on the field unless they got more money. So it was a strike, and it was very effective.”

Although the East-West Game always drew a large crowd and usually grossed about $85,000, it drew little fanfare from the white press, largely because white-owned corporations were reluctant to sponsor an event operated by and for African Americans. “It didn’t have the same kind of financial backing as the major league All-Star Game,” said former Baltimore Elite Giant Joe Black. “The major leagues had sponsors and all that. For the East-West game, we only had the Negro League owners and the fans spending their money on the game, so you really can’t compare them on a financial basis. But the attitude of the players toward the game was the same as the major leagues, because a lot of the guys in the Negro Leagues thought they were as good as the guys in the majors, and history has proven that to be a fact.”

Most fans who attended the East-West Game were African Americans. But the game always drew a handful of white fans, curious to see if the stories they’d heard about the great black players were true. “I think it was the ’41 game, there was this white kid from Oregon, about seven or eight years old,” late Hall of Famer Judy Johnson recalled before his death in 1989. “He said his father had brought him all the way from Oregon and he wanted all the players to autograph a ball for him. And we did.”

For more than a decade the game was the biggest event of the year for black baseball fans. But everything changed on August 28, 1945, when Jackie Robinson -- a rookie shortstop with the Kansas City Monarchs who had recently played in his first East-West Game -- agreed to a contract with the Brooklyn Dodgers. (Robinson went 0-for-5 in the East-West game, but ended his only Negro League season with a .387 batting average for the Monarchs.) In the years immediately following Robinson’s signing, the East-West Game took on added significance. Not only was it still the centerpiece of the Negro League season, but now it became an important showcase for the best black players to show their stuff in front of major league scouts.

“The stands would be filled with scouts, and they knew that these fellows had a lot of talent,” Irvin said. “Unfortunately, they would have gotten the cream of the crop of Negro League players if they had started ten years sooner. They would’ve gotten Willie Wells, Buck Leonard, Oscar Charleston, Martín Dihigo, Satchel Paige, Ray Dandridge, and right on down the line. They would have gotten the best ones. But most of those guys were over the hill when Jackie came in.”

Another player who barely missed making the majors was Josh Gibson, who may have been the greatest power hitter ever. He played in nine all-star games and batted .483, the highest career average in East-West history, but his life was marked by tragedy. When he was 18, his wife died giving birth to twins, and he later developed alcohol and drug addictions that landed him in a mental hospital. He died of mysterious causes at age 35 on January 20, 1947 – just three months before Jackie Robinson opened the door for black players in the majors. “I know the real reason Josh Gibson died,” Wendell Smith wrote in the Pittsburgh Courier. “And I don’t need a doctor’s report for confirmation, either. He was ‘murdered’ by Big League Baseball!”

Major League teams may have been uninterested in older players like Gibson, but they lost little time in signing the Negro Leagues’ brightest young stars. One of the first to sign after Robinson was Cleveland Buckeyes speedster Sam Jethroe, who took a pay cut in order to sign with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1948. Three years earlier, Jethroe had been one of the first black players to officially try out with a major league team when he, Robinson, and shortstop Marvin Williams tried out for the Boston Red Sox.

“We had a good tryout,” Jethroe said. “We hit the ball, went to the outfield and worked out. But they didn’t tell me nothing. I never heard from them again. It was a sham.”

By 1950, the East-West game was ready for its last hurrah. That year, two hard-throwing veterans -- Joe Black of the Baltimore Elite Giants and Connie Johnson of the Kansas City Monarchs -- pitched against each other in the East-West Game.

“The 1950 East-West Game, that’s the one where I hit the ball and went to third,” Johnson said. “You know how when a player hits the ball, he’s supposed to run to first? Well, by mistake I went to third.  Yeah, but later I hit a triple on top of that fence, deep center field in Chicago. I wasn’t that good of a hitter, but I was mad and I just swung at it. I was mad because I had made that old crazy mistake, running to third. But he threw it up there and I hit it- boy, I hit it good.”

Thanks in part to his own triple, Johnson was the winning pitcher in the West’s 5-3 victory. That 1950 game was a great success, with an attendance of about 25,000. But it was also, in many ways, the end of an era. Two years later, Black, the East’s starting pitcher in 1950, was pitching Game One of the World Series for the Brooklyn Dodgers. (He beat the Yankees, 4-2.) The next year, 1953, Johnson followed him into the majors. By then, the best young black players, such as Henry Aaron and Ernie Banks, were spending no more than a year or two in the Negro Leagues before being purchased by Major League teams. The glorious heyday of the Negro Leagues was over. Once thriving, competitive organizations with players at least as talented as those in the majors, they were now merely an unofficial farm system.

“The East-West Game lost its glitter and glamor then, because now some of your best guys are playing in the majors and there’s not that much interest in the Negro Leagues anymore,” Irvin said. “When Jackie came in, that wonderful period was over, and it was great while it lasted, but now you had to look ahead to the Major League All Star Game, because you had some of the better Negro League players in it-- Robinson, Doby, Campanella, guys like that.”

As integration continued into the 1950s, Negro League teams began folding one by one. The last East-West Game was played in 1958, and by the early sixties the glory days of black baseball were just a fading memory. But for those who were there, the crack of the bat and the roar of the crowd remain.

“It was an occasion for people to get dressed up in their best clothes and hats and go out on the town, and it was a happy day for the players, too,” Irvin said. “Our uniforms were all pressed and clean, and we’d shine our shoes just a little bit shinier than we had all season. It was a happy, happy time.”  

EricEnders.com Home
Baseball · Books · Film · Music · Photography