NOT YOUR AVERAGE RUBE
FOSTER’S FOUNDING OF NEGRO NATIONAL LEAGUE WAS SEMINAL EVENT FOR BLACK BALLPLAYERS AND CHICAGO
When historian and author Larry Lester summarized Rube Foster’s life, he referred to the driving force behind the Negro National League in almost messianic terms.
“I call Rube Foster the godfather of black baseball. I don’t say that lightly,” said Lester, the chairman of the Society for American Baseball Research’s Negro Leagues Research Committee. “He was the king among kings.”
At a time when black people in Chicago and across the country were confronted with violence, Foster leveraged his sizable baseball acumen and considerable determination to found the first successful league for black baseball players 100 years ago.
Foster, who not only served as president and treasurer of the fledgling league but also owned and managed its first dynasty, the Chicago American Giants, set in motion a historic change that has been seen by fans on the North and South sides for generations.
To convey the importance of the Negro National League, Raymond Doswell with the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum posited an alternative history in which Foster’s creation had failed.
“Imagine your World Series champion Cubs without a Jason Heyward or Aroldis Chapman. Or, historically, without an Ernie Banks. Or Billy Williams. Or the White Sox without Harold Baines or Tim Raines or the young kid, [Jose] Abreu, now,” said Doswell, the museum’s vice president of curatorial services.
He added of Negro National League players and owners: “Their success opened the eyes of many in the majority to see what was possible, both from the standpoint of obviously talented play and business acumen, but the fact that ultimately they were equals to others.”
In 1919, the year Jackie Robinson was born and 28 years before he integrated the major leagues, the United States was
marred by racist attacks on black citizens. A great deal of the violence was targeted at black veterans who recently had returned to the segregated United States after fighting for their country in World War I.
That summer, which is known as the Red Summer, there were about 25 race riots across the country, and the most severe took place in Chicago after a white man stoned a black teenager in Lake Michigan. The teenager drowned, and police didn’t arrest the perpetrator. Violence ensued, and in a week of lawlessness, 23 black people and 15 white people were killed. Another 537 were injured, two-thirds of whom were black.
“It certainly was not something that he was unaware of,” said Leslie Heaphy, an associate professor of history at Kent State at Stark and editor of “Black Baseball and Chicago.” “For Foster, it was all about providing opportunity and trying to make things better for people. And certainly, if you think about the issue of the race riots, those would be something he would want to improve. Those would be something he would be reacting against. So I would have to say they had to have been in his motivation.”
Foster, who was born in Texas in 1879 and called Chicago home as an adult, was not unique in that way, according to Lester. Like many black entrepreneurs, Foster sought to integrate society.
“You have to understand it from an African American’s point of view that sometimes white America says: ‘These things will happen. Good things will happen, but you have to be patient. Let’s wait,’” said Lester, who authored the books “Rube Foster in His Time” and “Black Baseball in Chicago.” “African Americans respond: ‘I’ve waited long enough. I want it now. I want equal rights now.’ And I think he had that type of attitude that, ‘I’m tired of waiting.’ ”
In a series of columns that he wrote for the Chicago Defender newspaper starting in 1919, Foster spelled out the challenges independent black baseball teams encountered and made his case for an organized league that would “keep Colored baseball from the control of whites [and] do something concrete for the loyalty of the Race.”
Foster acknowledged that players were
skeptical of a league, but he was prepared with a counterargument that drew a comparison to the major leagues.
“I said if you ever expect to really make any money out of baseball it will be done through organization,” Foster wrote. “There are several players playing ball that get more to play one season than the salary list of any three Colored clubs at the present time. They play under organization. Has it hurt them? Do you realize that if protection was given men, there would be money put into baseball, parks would be built, that it would offer inducements to players to try and develop, knowing there was some future attached to their profession?”
Foster also had to win over the owners of other teams whom he invited to the Paseo YMCA in Kansas City, Missouri, on Feb. 13, 1920, to discuss the formation of a league. Foster arrived with an official charter document for the Negro National League.
“I don’t think they expected him to come as prepared as he did,” Heaphy said.
Foster had a tentative playing schedule, according to Lester, and a business plan: He would earn 5 percent of revenue from most teams and in return, he would book their games at major- and minor-league stadiums. Most black baseball teams didn’t own their home stadium.
“To a novice owner or a new owner, you’re like: ‘Wow, this man is organized. He’s well-prepared. Perhaps this might work. Let me sign up. I’m ready to sign these incorporation papers and file them and make them official,’ ” Lester said.
There had been about five previous attempts to form a league for black baseball teams, according to Heaphy.
Each one had failed. None of the previous ventures had a leader of Foster’s caliber or experience, she said.
A burly right-hander who threw from various arm angles and also quickpitched, Foster had been among the premier hurlers of the deadball era. His record in 1905 with the Philadelphia Giants purportedly was 51-4; however, it is difficult to corroborate. Honus Wagner called Foster “one of the greatest pitchers of all time.”
Foster began his managerial career in 1907 as a player-manager with the Leland Giants in Chicago. He led the Giants to 110 wins and the city-league title in his first season. Using a small-ball style, Foster guided the American Giants to the first three titles in the Negro National League.
He also had hard-fought experience as an executive, stemming from his battle in 1910 with Leland Giants owner Frank Leland. Foster believed Leland was making money that his players didn’t see, according to Heaphy, and fought Leland to acquire the Giants team name. The
“He knew all the parts of the game and the business, and that’s what it seemed had been missing before.” Leslie Heaphy, on Rube Foster
battle went to court and Foster won. The following year, Foster changed the team name to the American Giants.
“He knew all the parts of the game and the business, and that’s what it seemed had been missing before,” Heaphy said.
Foster’s confident, some might call it cocky, attitude also was an asset. It was on full display when he ran into trouble while pitching.
“Do not worry. Try to appear jolly and unconcerned,” Foster has been quoted as saying. “I have smiled often with the bases full with two strikes and three balls on the batter. This seems to unnerve.”
Lester described Foster as narcissistic with a big ego and said, “If I had met Rube, I think I would have been somewhat offended by his personality.”
Lester added: “It’s an attitude that athletes have to have to be successful. They come across as being arrogant to the public, but in essence, it’s how their minds work to achieve greatness.”
One big benefit of an organized league was a regular schedule, which provided players with stability and income.
“Before, when teams were more independent, then there had to be a lot more hustle,” Doswell said. “You had to book games, and you booked games against white and black opponents. It was much more of a traveling circus kind of thing.”
Foster made the most of the Negro National League schedule. Teams often played five-game series, according to Lester, as opposed to the three- and fourgame series that are typical of today’s game to reduce travel costs.
He set the schedule, so Foster booked his American Giants and other top teams against marquee opponents on premium dates.
“This was one of the issues that some of the other owners had with him and, to a degree, rightly so,” Heaphy said with a small chuckle. “He got to schedule the games, so you’re not going to bring the Detroit Wolves to Chicago on the weekend, you’re going to bring the Kansas City Monarchs because you’re going to get the best crowd and then your team is going to make the most money.”
Foster also believed competitive balance was important. In 1919, Foster sent Pete Hill to Detroit to become the player-manager of the newly formed Stars.
Hill, who is enshrined in the Baseball Hall of Fame, was a standout outfielder who played under Foster with the Leland Giants and the American Giants.
“He wasn’t selfish enough to take all the players for himself,” Foster’s son, Earl, said in the transcript of an interview provided by the Baseball Hall of Fame. “His theory was, if I take all the players, when they get ready to play my team, if can’t nobody beat my team or give ’em a good game, then what are people coming to see?”
Foster’s ultimate goal was that the Negro National League would endure to a point. Heaphy and Lester said Foster hoped his league would be temporary and eventually all-black teams would be integrated into the majors.
He didn’t live to see the integration of baseball. In 1925, there was likely a gas leak through a heater at a hotel where the American Giants were staying and Foster became ill, according to Heaphy. His mental health deteriorated and during the 1926 season he was institutionalized at an asylum in Kankakee. He spent the remainder of his life there, dying in 1930. A year later, in the midst of the Depression, the Negro National League folded.
Foster was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1981.
“I don’t think you can overstate the importance of Foster,” Heaphy said. “When you refer to Foster as ‘The Father of the Negro Leagues,’ I think sometimes titles like that are sometimes overstated. But in this case, I don’t think it is because we saw so many previously failed attempts. And Foster was such a strong figure.”
The chocolate-brown leather couch in his Florida home was large enough to seat several people, but Ken ‘‘Hawk’’ Harrelson sat alone with his legs crossed. His iPhone rested on a table to his right, and his family and friends, who kept him company, waited in hushed tones in his living room.
Harrelson had been in this position before — three times, to be exact — so he was staying cautiously optimistic. Still, on that afternoon in December, he became more anxious the longer he waited for his phone to ring.
When the call finally came, Harrelson didn’t hesitate to answer it. ‘‘Hello?’’
On the other end was Tim Mead, the president of the Baseball Hall of Fame.
‘‘Hey, I just want to share some good news with you,’’ Mead said as Harrelson nervously grimaced and scanned the room. ‘‘You’ve been selected as the 2020 Ford C. Frick Award recipient, so congratulations and welcome to the club.’’
Harrelson, a man who always has something to say, didn’t at that moment. He was nearly speechless and stumbled to find the right words as he fought to hold back tears.
Even two months after he received the news, Harrelson struggled to describe what this honor means to him.
‘‘Wow,’’ the famed former White Sox broadcaster said. ‘‘I guess that says it all.
. . . It’s been a wild ride.’’
Harrelson never made it to Cooperstown as a player, but getting there as a broadcaster is just as meaningful to him. He’s one of only six former major-league players to receive the Frick award for excellence in broadcasting, joining Joe Garagiola, Bob Uecker, Jerry Coleman, Tony Kubek and Tim McCarver.
‘‘That’s something special,’’ Harrelson said.
There are two types of people in the world: the ones who love ‘‘Hawk’’ and the ones who don’t. If you’re a Cubs fan, you’re likely a member of the latter group.
Harrelson unapologetically rooted for the Sox and famously slammed Wrigley Field, saying, ‘‘You couldn’t give me a $5,000, $10,000 bill to put another foot in that place. I’m telling you what, that place sucks for the visiting team.’’
Harrelson spoke his mind and didn’t care what others thought of him.
‘‘When people called me a homer, it was a compliment,’’ Harrelson said.
His signature sayings — known as ‘‘Hawkisms’’ — became household expressions.
‘‘You can put it on the board . . . yes!’’ ‘‘He gone!’’
‘‘Grab some bench!’’
He repeated each of those lines thousands of times during his 33 seasons with the Sox.
Harrelson’s foundation in baseball made him a great broadcaster, but it was his colorful personality and natural storytelling ability that set him apart. And with a career in baseball spanning nearly 60 years, Harrelson had a story for every occasion.
He loves to share stories about Lou Piniella and all the times he got ejected for throwing bases or kicking dirt on umpires.
There was the time, Harrelson remembers, during Piniella’s rookie season in 1969 when he got so mad at an umpire’s call that he threw his helmet 15 feet in the air.
‘‘Of course, the guy threw him out,’’ Harrelson said, laughing as he pictured the scene in his head. ‘‘And I asked Lou, ‘What did he say to you?’ And he said, ‘Son, if that helmet comes down, your ass is out of here.’ ’’
Another guy Harrelson likes to talk about is his buddy Sam McDowell.
Harrelson never will forget the time that he and some buddies were at a Cleveland steakhouse the night before his Red Sox played the Indians. They thought they were the only ones there, but McDowell emerged from the back room.
The hard-throwing left-hander, who was scheduled to pitch the next day, stopped by Harrelson’s table to taunt him.
‘‘[McDowell] said, ‘I’m gonna throw you nothing but fastballs, and I’m gonna blow your ass away four times,’ ’’ Harrelson recalled. ‘‘So I said, ‘Sam, you better get your behind out of here, I’m in no mood to have any of your B.S.’ So he left.
‘‘At the game the next night, the first pitch he threw me was a fastball, and I hit it all the way out of the whole Cleveland stadium, but it was foul about 15 or 20 feet. Well, that’s the only fastball he threw me all night long, and he struck me out four times.’’
It seemed Harrelson had crossed paths with everyone in baseball at some point. And he thought it was important to incorporate those anecdotes into his broadcasts.
‘‘Every partner that I’ve had in the broadcasting booth, we would talk before the first game, and I would tell them, ‘Hey, this is like playing the game: You’ve gotta be ready,’ ’’ Harrelson said. ‘‘When you walked onto that field, you [had] to be ready. Every time I walked into that booth, I said, ‘OK, Hawk, let’s get it done.’ And by that, I meant let’s give the fans what they deserve out of that ballgame. . . .
‘‘If you’ve got a 7-0 game or a 9-0 game in the third or fourth inning, that’s where stories come in . . . and you have to learn how to eat bad ballgames.’’
That never seemed to be a problem with ‘‘Hawk’’ in the booth.
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Harrelson doesn’t have any regrets.
‘‘I played my ass off,’’ he said with his Southern drawl. ‘‘I’m proud of that. I wanted to win.’’
Harrelson said there is only one guy he crossed paths with that outdid him from a work-ethic standpoint, and that’s Pete Rose. The two played one season together in Caracas, Venezuela.
‘‘[He’s] the only guy I’ve ever seen or heard of that if you were losing 10-1 in the bottom of the ninth, two outs, nobody on, 0-2 count, he thought you could still win the game,’’ Harrelson said.
Harrelson was an all-around athlete.
In high school, he was one of the topranked basketball prospects and was offered a scholarship to the University of Kentucky. He also was an All-America football player and accepted a scholarship to play at the University of Georgia.
But with money tight for him and his mom, he decided to sign a professional baseball contract.
Though he thinks he could have gone pro in any sport he played, Harrelson thinks he made the right pick in choosing baseball.
He went on to have a successful nineyear career in the big leagues. His best season came in 1968, when he hit .275 with 35 home runs and a major-leagueleading 109 RBI with the Red Sox. Harrelson earned his only All-Star selection that season and finished third in MVP voting.
After an ankle injury ended his career at 29, Harrelson walked away with countless stories — all which made perfect back-pocket material for when he became a broadcaster in 1975.
‘‘I look back at it sometimes, and I say to myself, ‘Boy, did you really do all that stuff?’ ’’ Harrelson said.
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Harrelson doesn’t believe in retirement. If anything, his schedule has gotten more hectic since he stepped away from broadcasting after the 2018 season.
‘‘Retirement’s overrated, in my opinion, because I’ve worked all my life,’’ he said. ‘‘But watching your grandkids grow up is not overrated; it’s underrated.’’
Harrelson has become a frequent spectator at his grandchildren’s sporting events, especially those of his 6oe-yearold grandson, Hank, who also lives in Florida.
‘‘It’s just been fun watching him compete because he plays his ass off,’’ Harrelson said.
Hank’s passion for the game reminds Harrelson of himself.
‘‘I said, ‘Hank, I’m just so proud of you; you play hard,’ ’’ Harrelson recalled. ‘‘And he told me a few weeks ago, he says, ‘You played hard, didn’t you?’ And I said, ‘Yes, I did. . . . You play hard, too, and I’m proud of you for that.’
‘‘So that’s the only thing that’s saving me. If it weren’t for that, I would be going stir-crazy.’’
Between youth sporting events and speaking engagements, Harrelson routinely has been going to the doctor for the last two months. In January, he fell and suffered a head injury because of high blood pressure. He later learned he needed a pacemaker, which has made him feel ‘‘100 percent’’ better. He also has been undergoing five weeks of radiation therapy for skin cancer on his ear.
Because of this, Harrelson hasn’t had much time to start his Hall of Fame speech. He knows he’s limited to seven minutes or so, but it wouldn’t be surprising if he went over a minute or two. Harrelson asked Jeff Snook, the co-author of his autobiography, ‘‘Hawk: I Did It My Way,’’ for help.
Harrelson has a lot of people he wants to mention, including Uecker, who played mind games with Harrelson in spring training in 1969.
‘‘He’s a piece of work,’’ Harrelson said with a laugh.
More important, Harrelson surely will take the time to thank the two most influential women in his life.
First is his mother, who worked tirelessly to provide for him. She raised him alone after divorcing Harrelson’s father and did so despite earning only $56 a week.
‘‘We lived on the wrong side of town, so to speak, in Savannah, Georgia,’’ Harrelson recalled. ‘‘She taught me how to be tough, it’s just that simple. She said, ‘Don’t let anybody bully you. If somebody hits you, you hit them back harder. If they hit you once, you hit them twice.’ And then she used to drive to all my games, and she was just a wonderful mom.’’ Then there is his wife, Aris.
‘‘She changed my life,’’ Harrelson said. ‘‘She really did. She saved me. When I met her, I was going out at night, drinking and getting in fights and all that stuff. I knew if I didn’t stop, I was going to lose her, so I stopped. That was 46 years ago.”
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Harrelson has loved the game longer than most people alive. But the 78-yearold is worried about the direction Major League Baseball is headed.
Technology and analytics are tainting the game, Harrelson said. And he isn’t just referring to the Astros’ sign-stealing scandal.
Harrelson never has been a fan of umpires, especially as a broadcaster, but he couldn’t imagine the game without them. And he said he’s ‘‘vehemently’’ against the idea of implementing an automated strike zone or robot umpires.
‘‘Umpires are no different than players, they’re no different than lawyers, they’re no different than doctors,’’ Harrelson said. ‘‘You’ve got good ones, you’ve got mediocre ones and you’ve got bad ones. Why would they be any different?
‘‘[In terms of] baseball players, you’ve got great ones, you’ve got good ones, you’ve got mediocre guys and you have
bad players. And to take that element out of the game [would be a mistake].’’
While robo-umpires are a question for the future, Harrelson can’t fathom the obsession teams today have with analytics.
Don’t get him wrong, Harrelson sees some benefits to keeping basic statistics.
‘‘I do feel like there’s a place for numbers in baseball because that’s the connecting factor from the fan to the game,’’ Harrelson said. ‘‘People who loved the game and wanted to play it and just didn’t have the skills to play it, the way they connect is batting averages, home runs [and] RBIs.’’
But the increased emphasis on sabermetrics is ruining the game, Harrelson said.
‘‘The way they’re taking this thing in such a quick fashion . . . when you start thinking mechanics, when you’re talking about swing angles and launch angles and launch speed, exit velocity, what you’re doing, you’re getting these hitters [to think too much],’’ said Harrelson, who also believes players are too mediaconscious nowadays. ‘‘I never heard that term, swing angle, until they brought in this analytics.’’
In Harrelson’s day, they didn’t think, he said; they just played the game. And though players are better nowadays, he thinks his era was more competitive.
‘‘When I started baseball, the minimums were $6,000,’’ Harrelson said. ‘‘My first two years in the big leagues, I made more money playing golf, shooting pool and arm wrestling than I did playing Major League Baseball. . . . We had fun back in those days. We played our asses off, we had fun, we got in fights, we had fun. And we wanted to win. When you’re trying to get to a different income level, you play a little harder than if you’ve got $100 million in the bank.
‘‘And I don’t blame these players at all because this is the only thing they know. This is what they’ve been taught; this is what they’ve been brought up in.’’
Even though Harrelson doesn’t necessarily agree with the current trends, he said he could never fall out of love with the game that gave him so much joy.
‘‘Forty-two years of announcing, and
. . . I love the game today more than I ever had,’’ Harrelson said.