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Oscar Charleston: Life and Legend

Oscar Charleston: Life and Legend

Category Archives: Post-Career Reception

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.”

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 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.

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Oscar Charleston: Life and Legend

Oscar Charleston: Life and Legend

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