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Oscar Charleston: Life and Legend

Oscar Charleston: Life and Legend

Monthly Archives: February 2016

Bill James and Oscar Charleston, II

28 Sunday Feb 2016

Posted by Jeremy Beer in Evaluation

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Bill James, Cristobal Torriente, Josh Gibson, Mickey Mantle, Oscar Charleston, Pittsburgh Crawfords, Satchel Paige, Willie Mays

As Black History Month winds down, a little bit more from Bill James on Oscar Charleston.

In the second edition of his Historical Baseball Abstract, James rated Charleston as the best Negro League player in 1921, 1922, 1923, and 1925, and as one of the two best players (along with Cristobal Torriente) from 1917 through 1919. Charleston, in other words, was James’s retrospective Negro Leagues MVP for up to seven years. Josh Gibson was James’s Negro Leagues MVP choice for five years, Buck Leonard for four, John Henry Lloyd for four, and the Cuban Torriente for up to four.

Charleston was named by James as having had the “best power/speed combination” of any player in the Negro Leagues. He was one of six players who could lay claim to the title of “most aggressive baserunner.” Charleston also made James’s Negro League Gold Glove team.

MVP-level hitting, power, speed, baserunning, fielding. Not a bad combination. Good enough to make Charleston, in James’s estimation, the best center fielder in Negro League history. And with respect to two more highly celebrated New York center fielders, well, “Charleston, in a sense, put Mays and Mantle together. He combined the grace, athleticism, and all-around skills of Mays with the upper body strength of Mantle, plus he was a left-handed hitter.”

In sum, along with Josh Gibson at the plate and Satchel Paige on the mound, Oscar Charleston was for James one of three Negro Leaguers who could stake a credible claim to being the best ever at their positions.

Paige, Gibson, and Charleston played together for the 1932–36 Pittsburgh Crawfords. Not only did Charleston man first base for that team; he was also the manager.

Only the Ball Was White

19 Friday Feb 2016

Posted by Jeremy Beer in Evaluation, Post-Career Reception

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Babe Ruth, Jimmie Crutchfield, Negro Leagues historiography, Only the Ball Was White, Oscar Charleston, Robert Peterson

Published in 1970, Robert Peterson’s Only the Ball Was White was, I believe, the first comprehensive history of Negro League baseball. Based on numerous interviews and much archival research, Peterson brought attention to dozens of long-neglected black players, games, and incidents, and his work did much to reveal the texture of day-to-day life in the Negro Leagues.

Only the Ball Was White

With Peterson, Charleston began to get his due. “If an old Negro ballplayer is asked to name an all-time team, the odds are good that the discussion will start with Oscar Charleston,” said Peterson. Former player Jimmie Crutchfield told Peterson that he’d have a hard time choosing between Charleston and Gibson as the best player he had ever seen—and Crutchfield’s career didn’t begin until Oscar was thirty-three years old.

Peterson also emphasized how popular Charleston had been: “At his peak, . . . perhaps the most popular player in the game.” He cited a Pittsburgh Courier report that, in Philadelphia, “Scores of school kids turned out regularly just to see Oscar perform. He was to them what Babe Ruth is to kids of a lighter hue.”

Oscar Charleston and Jesse Owens

13 Saturday Feb 2016

Posted by Jeremy Beer in Toledo/Indianapolis Crawfords

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1936 Olympics, Indianapolis Crawfords, Jessie Owens, Mack Robinson, More Than Gold, Oscar Charleston, Race, Toledo Crawfords

Both the forthcoming movie Race, as well as a new documentary, More Than Gold, take a their subject Jessie Owens and his achievements at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. It’s doubtful that either will mention what he did in the years immediately following the Olympics: which was to become a part-owner of, and travel with, Oscar Charleston’s Crawfords baseball team in its wandering post-Pittsburgh phase. Owens would engage in races at Crawfords games as a gate attraction–often with horses. And he would win.

Charleston and Owens must have gotten to know each other quite well. These were two of the greatest athletes of all time. The nature of their relationship, though–what they thought about each other, said to one another, did together after games … I don’t know anything about any of that, yet, and am not sure what is out there. But it would be fascinating to know something about, wouldn’t it?

By the way, you know who finished second in the 1936 Olympics 200-meter sprint? Mack Robinson . . . Jackie’s older brother.

Jesse Owens Race

What Bill James Said

09 Tuesday Feb 2016

Posted by Jeremy Beer in Post-Career Reception

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Bill James, Black History Month, Josh Gibson, Oscar Charleston, Satchel Paige

It’s Black History Month. One of these days perhaps Oscar Charleston will be one of the figures routinely remembered and celebrated in February. That’s surely not the case now–but it’s no fault of Bill James, whose ranking of Oscar Charleston as the fourth greatest player of all time in his New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract first brought Charleston to my—and I suspect quite a few others’—attention.

Bill James HBA

When he created it at the beginning of this millennium, James knew that his list of the top 100 players of all time would be controversial for having included twelve Negro League players. Of the six other top-100 lists he consulted, five excluded Negro Leaguers entirely. The sixth, produced by The Sporting News in 1998, included only five Negro Leaguers, and of these five—Josh Gibson, Satchel Paige, Buck Leonard, Cool Papa Bell, and Charleston—Charleston was ranked last, 67th on the entire list.

Was James wrong to include more than twice as many Negro Leaguers on his list as had The Sporting News? Had he succumbed to sentimental muddleheadedness? It seemed unlikely, he argued. After all, thirty-four of his white players were born during the same time frame, 1867—1918, as his twelve Negro Leaguers. If anything, he reasoned, he was being too hard on the Negro League veterans. Consider: over the course of five years (1947—51), the Negro Leagues produced Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, and Ernie Banks. “If those leagues could produce five players like that in seven years, what about the previous forty?” asked James.

We might add that it’s not as if the Negro Leagues were competing against other sports for the best black athletic talent. Other than boxing and possibly track and field, which didn’t employ many athletes to begin with, baseball was often literally the only game in town for the aspiring black athlete of the 1900s through the 1940s.

But what about Charleston, specifically? After all, The Sporting News had ranked him 67th, behind four other Negro Leaguers. James chalked this up to ignorance; Charleston simply didn’t get any ink. There were no biographies of Charleston when James made his list, and there still aren’t—versus a dozen or so of Paige and a handful of Gibson. Charleston, to James’s knowledge, had never appeared on a single magazine cover. His anonymity accounted for why he was rated lower or not at all by other sources, not a considered, informed process whereby the other listmakers had simply come to a different opinion of Charleston’s accomplishments and abilities.

Besides, wrote James,

It’s not like one person saw Oscar Charleston play and said that he was the greatest player ever. Lots of people said he was the greatest player they ever saw. John McGraw, who knew something about baseball, reportedly said that. . . . His statistical record, such as it is, would not discourage you from believing that this was true. I don’t think I’m a soft touch or easily persuaded; I believe I’m fairly skeptical. I just don’t see any reason not to believe that this man was as good as anybody who ever played the game.

Charleston and the women

01 Monday Feb 2016

Posted by Jeremy Beer in Indianapolis Clowns, Managing Career

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Alan Pollock, Connie Morgan, Mamie Johnson, Oscar Charleston, Syd Pollock, Toni Stone

Oscar Charleston’s one year managing the Indianapolis Clowns–the final year of his baseball career and, indeed, his life–was made particularly remarkable by the team’s inclusion of two women: Connie Morgan and Mamie Johnson. These were the second and third women to play for the Clowns, actually, following the lead of Toni Stone the year before.

Prior to the Clowns’ 1954 season, owner Syd Pollock hired Charleston to replace Buster Haywood as his manager. Haywood had left to manage the Memphis Red Sox. Alan Pollock implies in his history of the Clowns, Barnstorming to Heaven, that part of the reason for Haywood’s departure was Syd’s decision to bring in female players.

Barnstorming to Heaven

Charleston, writes Alan, was to Syd “the greatest baseball player who ever lived.” By 1954, Charleston had been retired for a year from managing the Philadelphia Stars. Perhaps his health was already slipping. In any case, when he was hired by Pollock in early 1954, he was living in Philadelphia near Connie Morgan, the Clowns’ new second baseman.

Charleston immediately took Morgan under his wing. She recalled:

Oscar Charleston was my mentor. Once the Clowns hired me and hired him, he took me off-season and taught me all he could about sliding and running the bases and, when it warmed a touch, hitting and fielding. He was a strict manager, not so you couldn’t have fun, but stern enough so you knew to get down to business. He had us self-disciplined. Didn’t talk much about the old days. He was interested in winning here and now.”

The other Clowns’ woman player was Mamie Johnson, a pitcher. She said, “with Oscar Charleston, you either played ball or you went home.

The Clowns played ball; in 1954, they won the league championship. In retrospect, it was a fitting close to Charleston’s career.

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Oscar Charleston: Life and Legend

Oscar Charleston: Life and Legend

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