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Oscar Charleston: Life and Legend

Oscar Charleston: Life and Legend

Category Archives: Evaluation

How would Oscar have fared in MLB?

02 Saturday Feb 2019

Posted by Jeremy Beer in Evaluation

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Alex Rodriguez, Babe Ruth, Barry Bonds, Baseball Reference, Bill James, Honus Wagner, Jane Leavy, Josh Gibson, Larry Doby, Monte Irvin, Oscar Charleston, Play Index, Scott Simkus, Seamheads, University of Nebraska Press, Washington Examiner, Willie Mays

The copy edited manuscript for Oscar Charleston is back with the publisher, so I have turned my attention to preparing a talk on Oscar for this summer. That has led me to try to figure out how best to communicate Charleston’s greatness to a baseball-literate crowd. Which, in turn, has led naturally to the question of how Oscar would have compared in the (white) majors had he had the opportunity to play in the American or National League.

Let’s start with how Oscar did against top competition in the Negro leagues. Here is his Seamheads page. (As an aside, I note that word about Seamheads does not seem to have spread into the wider sports writing community. Jane Leavy implies in her recent biography of Babe Ruth, The Big Fella, which I am reviewing for the Washington Examiner, that even half-reliable Negro leagues stats do not exist. Of course they do—and they are at Seamheads!) As you can see, in Negro leagues competition Oscar compiled a .352/.430/.579 slash line in 5,159 plate appearances, good for a 180 OPS+—in other words, he created runs at a rate 80% percent better than league average, not counting what he contributed with his legs on the basepaths.

That’s . . . really good. It’s the fourth-highest career OPS+ in the Seamheads database. Oscar is also fourth all-time in batting average and on-base percentage, and seventh all-time in slugging percentage. And we might note that he is dragged down more than most other players by having debuted very young (age 18) and for having played until he was quite old (until 44, in the Seamheads database). On the other hand, precisely because of the length of his career (and helped a bit, perhaps, by the fact that the years he played are comparatively well represented in the Seamheads database) he is first all-time in total PAs, ABs, runs, hits, doubles, triples, home runs, RBIs, stolen bases, and walks.

When we fold in baserunning and defense, Oscar looks even better with respect to his blackball peers. He ranks second all-time in offensive Wins Above Replacement per plate appearance (behind Josh Gibson), and thanks to his baserunning and defense he ranks first all-time in overall Wins Above Replacement at 74—second place (51.5) is not even close.

His peak was higher than anyone’s. Charleston has five of the best nine offensive seasons, by OPS+, in the Seamheads database (minimum 300 PAs). In a seven-year span between 1919 and 1925, he posted an OPS+ above 200 five times, compiling a 1.143 OPS over those seven years. Four of these years—1919, 1921, 1924, and 1925—rank among the top five Negro Leagues seasons ever. Gibson is the only other player with 5 OPS+ seasons of 200 or greater in a seven-year window.

So, look, when you take everything into account Gibson is the only Negro Leagues batter whose production rivaled Oscar’s over a lengthy period of time. And when you fold in defensive and base running considerations, as well as longevity, Charleston stands out as having had the best all-around career in black baseball. Just by carefully examining the statistical record, that would be hard to question. And that is saying a lot.

What does that mean with respect to how Charleston would have fared in the majors? There are several facts to keep in mind as we investigate that question:

  1. Negro leagues teams, on the whole, were not as good as Major League teams, primarily because they did not have as much depth. Scott Simkus found, in a sample of 7,402 games, that against all levels of competition—military, AAA, AA, high Class A, low Class A, semipro, and college—Major League teams posted higher winning percentages than did Negro Leagues teams, usually by more than one hundred percentage points. The conclusion to which Simkus’s research points is that the average Major League team was noticeably better than the average Negro Leagues team during this period, but not by a huge margin, and that clearly the Negro Leagues offered the next highest level of competition after the Majors. This was also the subjective judgment of numerous former players, both black and white (although, if anything, both black and white players tended to underestimate the quality of black baseball)
  2. Other top-tier Negro leagues players saw their stat lines diminish when they went to the Majors. Larry Doby and Monte Irvin, to take the two best comps I can think of, saw their OPS+’s decline by 35 to 40 points.
  3. When he did face Major League teams (in exhibition settings, of course), Charleston performed extraordinarily well. The sample size is small, but in 111 PAs he hit .347/.418/.806. Some of those at-bats came against pitchers like Lefty Grove, Jesse Haines, Reb Russell, and Elam Van Gilder, all of them above average (at least) when Charleston faced them. That part of the record would seem to suggest that he would have done just fine against other Major League pitchers.

Let’s start, then, by not dinging Charleston’s numbers at all for having been compiled against a presumably slightly lower level of competition. And, with a little help from Baseball Reference’s Play Index, let’s ask whether there has ever been such a great all-around player.

Has any MLB player ever compiled a career batting average of .350 or higher along with an OPS+ of 180 or greater, stolen bases of 300 or more (Oscar had 335 in fewer than half the career PAs of Willie Mays), and defensive WAR of greater than zero, as Oscar did?

No, not a one.

If we get rid of the batting average criterion altogether, we pick up just one player: Barry Bonds, who had a career BA of .298 (and OPS+ of 182) and who may have had a little special help in obtaining his numbers.

OK, Oscar probably wouldn’t have had a 180 OPS+ playing in the majors. Let’s get serious. Let’s knock his OPS+ down by 40 points, with Doby and Irvin as our comps. I don’t think we need to adjust his defensive value at all–clearly he would have been not only an above-average defender but a premium one, even in the majors. Just as clearly, given more PAs he would have stolen even more bases; there is no question that the speed would have played in the AL or NL. But even there, let’s be very reasonable and limit Charleston to just 500 career SBs. As to total home runs, let’s give him only 300 (he has 187 listed on his Seamheads page–and again, he would have had more than twice as many career PAs had he been allowed to play in the majors, for we have no reason to question his durability or longevity; quite the opposite).

Let’s put it all together to come up with a conservative career line for our alternative Major League Oscar: OPS+=140; HRs=300; SBs=500; dWAR=+10. How many major league players have done that?

No one. Not even if we take the HR threshold down to 250. No one has managed simultaneously to be that good on offense, on the base paths, and in the field.

I feel very, very confident that Oscar would have put up such a career line. In fact, I’d bet on more than 600 stolen bases, more than 350 home runs, and an OPS+ of 150 or greater, but I am admittedly bullish on the man.

Anyway, if we lower the defensive WAR bar to 0 – if we just ask that the player have a career of being average or better on defense, then only Barry Bonds shows up as a comp.

Keep dWAR at 10, but lower the SB threshold to 300, and we pick up Willie Mays and Alex Rodriguez.

Keep dWAR at 10, keep the SB threshold at 500, keep the OPS+ threshold at 140, but get rid of the home run criterion altogether, and who do we get? Honus Wagner. That’s it.

Remember, we are being conservative in estimating what Charleston’s major league numbers would have looked like. And keep in mind too that we are putting no penalty on the major league players who didn’t have to play against blacks. We’re making it hard on Oscar here!

In short, you can make a good argument that there was never anyone like Oscar Charleston, anywhere. And you can make a near-airtight argument that the only players who were like him were inner-inner-circle guys like Bonds (ahem) and ARod (ahem) and Mays and Wagner. OK—maybe only Mays and Wagner. (We’re conceding the top spot to Ruth here.)

Bill James was right. At least among position players, there is little doubt that Oscar was a top-five-of-all-time sort of performer. And maybe, even probably, the best all-around player who ever lived.

 

Honus Wagner on Charleston, and Charleston on the color line

29 Monday May 2017

Posted by Jeremy Beer in Evaluation, Indianapolis Clowns, Managing Career

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baseball integration, Homestead Grays, Honus Wagner, Oscar Charleston, Pittsburgh Courier, Wendell Smith

Just came across this testimony on Oscar Charleston’s abilities from Honus Wagner, as quoted (or remembered by) Wendell Smith, crusading sportswriter for the Pittsburgh Courier.

The quote from Wagner is wonderful. But more wonderful is the direct, contemporary quote from Oscar about not getting the chance to play in the majors. This is the only place I have seen where he addresses the issue personally and directly.

(August 21, 1954, Pittsburgh Courier, p. 12)

I believe Oscar played against Wagner’s “All-Stars” in an exhibition game in 1929 or 1930, when Oscar was with the Homestead Grays. Wagner was, of course, long retired by then. But presumably he knew an elite ballplayer when he saw one. And he may well have seen or played against Charleston before then, although I have not come across such a game.

Within four months after Smith published this column, Charleston was dead. Wagner died the next year, in December 1955.

Thomas Boswell’s ignorance

14 Sunday Aug 2016

Posted by Jeremy Beer in Evaluation

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Bill James, Ken Griffey, Oscar Charleston, Sporting News, steroid era, Thomas Boswell

Thomas Boswell was pissed. It was the spring of 1999, and the Sporting News had just released its list of the top 100 baseball players of all time.

Boswell, who at the time was considered one of the nation’s leading baseball writers, griped that contemporary players were criminally underrated. The list represented nothing but baseball’s typical “ancestor worship.” Hanging his arguments with stunning cluelessness on the inflated counting stats produced by the hyper-offensive era of the 1990s–and ignoring the inflated hat sizes and biceps of its stars–Boswell even made a case that the 29-year-old Ken Griffey Jr. was a better player than Willie Mays.

That’s when he really got angry. Mays was ranked #2 by TSN, Boswell noted, whereas Griffey “is ranked 26 spots behind Oscar Charleston,” who came in #67 on the TSN list.

Who the hell was Oscar freaking Charleston? Boswell had no idea. “I’m truly tempted to research Oscar Charleston,” he warned, as if in doing so he might dig up some kind of scandalous hoax. Now, I was a young man in 1999. As I recall, they had books then. Libraries full of them. Even had the Internet. A little research may not have been a bad idea.

But Boswell forged blindly ahead. The absurdly high ranking of Oscar had him in a contemptuous rage.

Was he a 19th century player? A Negro Leagues star? A legend in Antarctic sandlot ball? Who knows? But you know he’s got to be 20 or 30 spots ‘greater’ than such players as [Eddie] Murray, Kirby Puckett, Ozzie Smith, Dave Winfield, Wade Boggs, Dennis Eckersley, or Paul Molitor. . . .

Some of Boswell’s ignorance is understandable. Oscar Charleston has never been a household name, so we might forgive him his lack of familiarity there. And perhaps we can forgive him for not knowing that many of the 1990s stars were making ample use of advances in chemistry unavailable to the stars of previous eras.

But it’s that four-sentence question quoted above that gets me: “A Negro Leagues star?” Paired as it is with Boswell’s other two rhetorical queries, the clear implication is that the quality of black baseball was laughably inferior to today’s. To include a mere “Negro Leagues star” in a top-100 list such as TSN’s was silly, apparently, to a Modern Baseball Observer like Thomas Boswell.

Of course, Boswell got it completely wrong. The TSN list included just five players who made their careers in the Negro Leagues. That’s way too low, as is Oscar’s ranking. As Bill James would point out two years later, in the late 1940s and early 1950s the Negro Leagues produced Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Mays, Henry Aaron, and Ernie Banks in a span of just seven years. “If those leagues could produce five players like that in seven years, what about the previous forty?”

So was Oscar “20 or 30 spots” greater than guys like Eckersley and Molitor? Nah. The gap between the is a hell of a lot bigger than that. But Boswell was too busy fawning over Eddie Murray’s RBI totals to look into the matter.

Hey, when you’re a with-it, progressive sportswriter, you gotta stay away from that “ancestor worship” stuff.

Hank Greenberg on Charleston

17 Sunday Jul 2016

Posted by Jeremy Beer in Evaluation

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Dizzy Dean, Hank Greenberg, John McGraw, Oscar Charleston, Satchel Paige

In the literature of the Negro Leagues, it’s common to come across claims that so-and-so prominent white baseball player or manager said such-and-such about not-so-prominent black baseball player or manager. In the case of Oscar Charleston, Dizzy Dean and John McGraw are often said to have offered high praise for his abilities.

Usually, it’s really hard to find original, first-hand quotes from these white figures about the black player in question. The quotes are simply repeated, and inevitably garbled, by writer after writer, memoirist after memoirist. McGraw, especially, commented on about every Negro Leaguer there was, at one point or another, if the literature is to be believed.

I’ve hunted for years for a good McGraw-on-Charleston source, without success. But here, at least, is a pretty good, if second-hand, source providing the great Detroit Tigers slugger Hank Greenberg‘s thoughts on Charleston. It’s from 1940, when Charleston’s playing career was all but over and Greenberg was at his peak (he won the AL MVP in 1940). The source is Al Moses, a respected African American columnist.

Greenberg on Charleston

Just when Greenberg would have seen Charleston at the plate is unclear; he could have played against him in an exhibition, or he could have seen him play in New York, where Hank grew up.

Note the pairing of Oscar with Paige. Today we are often led to believe that during the Negro Leagues’ heyday Paige and Gibson towered over everyone else in the popular mind. This simply wasn’t the case. Paige was a uniquely powerful drawing card because of his charisma and theatrics, not to mention his ability, but Charleston was as popular and highly regarded among African American fans and sportswriters as anyone.

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.”

One scout’s opinion

24 Sunday Jan 2016

Posted by Jeremy Beer in Evaluation

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Bennie Borgin, Oscar Charleston, Quincy Trouppe

Some white scouts — not to mention players and managers — got a look at Charleston during his prime. They were usually blown away.

For example, in his memoirs, the former Negro Leaguer Quincy Trouppe writes that when he started scouting for the St. Louis Cardinals in 1953, he met a (white) Cardinals scout named Bennie Borgin. Borgin told him: “Quincy, in my opinion, the greatest ball player I’ve ever seen was Oscar Charleston. When I say this, I’m not overlooking Ruth, Cobb, Gehrig, and all of them.”

Trouppe memoirs

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.

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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