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Oscar Charleston: Life and Legend

Oscar Charleston: Life and Legend

Monthly Archives: December 2015

Short video on Charleston–featuring his niece

31 Thursday Dec 2015

Posted by Jeremy Beer in Videos

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Anna Charleston Bradley, Indianapolis, Oscar Charleston, Reid Duffy, Roy Charleston

The following video, produced by Indianapolis journalist Reid Duffy in 1996, is pretty darn good. It’s quite accurate and best of all features Anna Charleston Bradley, Oscar’s niece (she died in 2002 and was his oldest brother Roy’s daughter). Enjoy!

Oscar Charleston and Jim Robinson

29 Tuesday Dec 2015

Posted by Jeremy Beer in Managing Career

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Dizzy Dismukes, James Robinson, Jelly Taylor, Kansas City Monarchs, Oscar Charleston, Philadelphia Stars

Today I had the privilege of speaking to James Robinson, an ex-Negro Leaguer who played a few games for Oscar Charleston’s Philadelphia Stars in late 1952.

Mr. Robinson was playing for North Carolina A&T University in 1952 when Charleston, in town with the Stars, stopped by to do some scouting. “After that particular game he approached me and said ‘Look, when the season is over I’d like you to join the Philadelphia Stars.” Robinson agreed. A week later, though, Robinson broke his wrist and sent Charleston a letter saying he wouldn’t be able to join the team right away.

“So late that season — maybe late August, the last Sunday in August — the Stars came to New York to play in Yankee Stadium. I caught up with them there.” There were only a few games left in the season, but Charleston took him on and, in his first game, turned to him and said, “‘Robinson, go into left field.’ So my first Negro League game was in Yankee Stadium.”

Robinson later played with the Indianapolis Clowns and, after a stint in the Army, latched on with the Kansas City Monarchs for three full seasons in 1956-58, playing third base, second base, and shortstop for managers jelly Taylor and Dizzy Dismukes. In retirement, he became the head coach at South Carolina State University.

Mr. Robinson turns 86 next month. He didn’t know Charleston well, but he is a great source for information about Negro League baseball in its later days. It was a great honor to speak with him.

Seven reasons to care about Charleston

28 Monday Dec 2015

Posted by Jeremy Beer in Evaluation

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Branch Rickey, color line, Connie Morgan, Indianapolis Clowns, Jackie Robinson, Jim Thorpe, Mamie Johnson, Native American, Neil Lanctot, Oscar Charleston, Pittsburgh Crawfords, Roy Campanella, Satchel Paige, Tiger Woods

Why should anyone care about Oscar Charleston? Seven reasons:

First, Charleston achieved the highest level of excellence within his field. For black Americans in the pre-integration era, a transcendent star like Charleston served as an exemplar, if not the exemplar, of what virtue and excellence looked like with respect to the practices of baseball. Charleston’s mastery of those practices represented the apex of the black baseball tradition’s development. It revealed what was possible for the black player to achieve, and by extension what was possible for black flourishing more generally. To powerfully influence the black imagination, Charleston didn’t have to fight for black liberation or play in the white major leagues. He simply had to symbolize black equality, if not superiority, through his achievements on the diamond. And that is precisely what he did.

Second, Charleston was a great manager. One poll of former Negro Leaguers ranked him as the best, and virtually all black baseball historians agree he was one of a handful of truly great managers in the game. He not only managed after his career was over, he was a manager while he played, as was the style at the time. Among the teams he led were the 1935 Pittsburgh Crawfords, one of the greatest teams of all time, black or white.

Third—and no one that I know of has ever made this point before—Charleston was probably the first black scout to work for a major league team. The Dodgers’ Branch Rickey hired Charleston sometime in 1945 or 1946 to help him identify and research black players who might be good prospects for breaking major league baseball’s color line. And (as historian Neil Lanctot pointed out to me) it was Charleston who convinced the Dodgers to sign future Hall of Famer Roy Campanella.

Fourth, Charleston was allegedly part Sioux Indian. If true, this makes him one of the three greatest Native American athletes in history, along with Jim Thorpe and Tiger Woods. And honestly, I’m not certain that Thorpe and Woods were greater.

Fifth, Charleston managed and mentored two of the three women to play professional baseball in the Negro Leagues. This was one of the Indianapolis’s Clowns’ tactics for getting fans to the park in the post-Jackie Robinson era. Charleston took his job seriously, putting Connie Morgan and Mamie Johnson through drills in winter-time Philadelphia to prepare them for the season. Mamie Johnson recalled to me on the phone that Charleston was “a beautiful person.”

Sixth, Charleston was perhaps the most respected man in the Negro Leagues because of his fierce commitment to his craft. He played hard—and, earlier, in his career, with a terrifying mean streak. In a word, he was a badass (but not a berserker). Charleston illustrated for the black community the toughness necessary to make it in an unjust world.

And finally, seventh, Charleston served a critical imaginative need within the black community by being more representative than either the theatrical Satchel Paige or the college-educated Jackie Robinson. To other Negro Leaguers and to black America at large, the temperamentally flawed blue-collar Charleston was much more clearly an everyman, one of them. That was worth a lot.

Charleston the (relatively) obscure

27 Sunday Dec 2015

Posted by Jeremy Beer in Post-Career Reception

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Buck Leonard, Donn Rogosin, Monte Irvin, Oscar Charleston, Quincy Trouppe, Robert Peterson, Satchel Paige

Why has Oscar Charleston remained so obscure, even among hardcore baseball fans?

That is probably the first question someone who claims that Charleston is baseball’s greatest forgotten player must answer.

There are several reasons.

First, Charleston died relatively young, at the age of 57. Within black baseball circles, he had been regarded as a living legend for years, but within those same circles the Negro Leagues, in which Charleston was still active at the end of his life, had become regarded as an embarrassing reminder of the ugly, segregated past. In the postwar years, almost no one, black writers included, was in a mood to celebrate yesterday’s Negro League stars. Quite understandably, they were focused on today’s heroes of integration—Jackie Robinson, Hank Aaron, Willie Mays, Monte Irvin, Larry Doby, Don Newcombe—and on the injustices and obstacles that remained.

It was not until the 1970s and 1980s that historians trained their sights on the Negro Leagues. By the time the history of black baseball took off with seminal works such as Robert Peterson’s Only the Ball Was White (1970) and Donn Rogosin’s Invisible Men (1983) were published, Charleston was long gone. Most of the Negro League veterans whom researchers interviewed had encountered Charleston only at the very end of his playing and managerial career. He stands larger than life in these reflections, many of them second-hand, but also shrouded in the mist of a fast-receding history.

Similarly, by the 1990s, when a new generation of statistics-savvy baseball scholars arose to show beyond doubt just how competitive and deep was the talent in black prewar baseball, Charleston had been dead for decades. Buck O’Neill, who played and managed against Charleston, was “right on time” in the 1990s and 2000s as the conscientious, compelling voice of black baseball, but Charleston never had his media moment.

Second, Charleston left behind little in the way of a paper trail. He could read and write, but there is no Charleston memoir—unlike, say, those of Satchel Paige, Monte Irvin, Quincy Trouppe, and Buck Leonard. There are no Charleston diaries, and so far as I can tell only a couple of known extant letters. He was quoted in the papers from time to time, and he gave a few radio interviews, but the interviews seem to be lost to history, and he wasn’t quotable like Paige. The record is such that in some cases we can probably have as much historical confidence in attributing words to Jesus as we can Charleston.

Finally, though he was twice married, Charleston seems to have left no descendants (I’d be so happy to be corrected about this!). No family members have publicly tended his flame. There has been no obvious person for sportswriters or historians to approach for the Oscar Charleston Story. And so that story has rarely been told. Legends and anecdotes—some contradictory, some dubious, some probably true—have risen up in that story’s stead. Few have bothered to subject these scattered fragments of memory to the test of sober historical analysis or to integrate them into a larger narrative.

And so Charleston remains unknown to most baseball fans, let alone most sports fans, and let alone students of black or American history. He is a ghost who resists historical enfleshment.

Baseball’s greatest forgotten player

26 Saturday Dec 2015

Posted by Jeremy Beer in Evaluation

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Bill James, Hall of Fame, Oscar Charleston

Negro Leagues veteran Oscar McKinley Charleston–born 1896, deceased 1954–was inducted into baseball’s Hall of Fame in 1976. His legendary playing, scouting, and managerial career stretched from 1915 to 1954. Most people, including most baseball fans, have never heard of him.

That’s not so strange, in and of itself. Lots of Hall of Famers from that area are unknown to the majority of baseball followers. But Charleston is different. Were they better known and understood, his accomplishments as a player alone would make him an inner-inner-circle Hall of Famer–someone worthy of standing with Ruth and Mays and Cobb and a handful of others as a first-team all-timer.

My evidence for this claim? Bill James, than whom no one has ever more carefully or impartially considered the historical evidence. In his New Bill James Baseball Historical Abstract, James ranks Charleston the fourth-greatest baseball player of all time.
Only Ruth, Wagner, and Mays were greater. Cobb, Mantle, Musial, Aaron, Williams, and other elite members of the tiny, last-names-only club don’t quite measure up.

Think about it. Bill James said that. Not a random fan or family member. Not a sportswriter ginning up a story. Not a basement-dweller blogger at Bleacher Report. Not an attention-seeking talking head. Not a revisionist historian with a social or political agenda. Bill James. The father of sabermetrics. The man who brought a new level of rigor in our thinking about baseball—indeed, about sports generally. The man who launched the analytics revolution. A walking baseball encyclopedia. A man who prides himself on not giving a damn what other people think.

He is the one who said that Oscar Charleston was the fourth-greatest player of all time, which of course makes Charleston one of the greatest athletes in American history.

Surely that makes Charleston worth getting to know.

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Oscar Charleston: Life and Legend

Oscar Charleston: Life and Legend

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