2021: Summer 10 Innings from History

Flipping through The New York Times Magazine this March, I was struck by one headline: “Justice for the Negro Leagues Will Mean More Than Just Stats.”

Ever since Major League Baseball decided, in 2020, to incorporate records from all-Black leagues into its standings, a discussion has intensified around acknowledging and atoning for decades of baseball segregation. The MLB had no Black players until 1947, when Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers.

If you are a baseball fan, the new stats, once made official, will radically refresh your sports trivia knowledge. Which pitcher, for instance, threw a no-hitter on opening day? The MLB answer won’t just be Bob Feller, but now also Leon Day. Who hit over .400 for a season? Not just Ted Williams, but Josh Gibson.

Yet what does this have to do with Amherst?

You’d guess nothing, but I spied a tantalizing clue in the Times story: Author Rowan Ricardo Phillips mentioned seeing memorabilia from games between the Cuban Giants—the first Black professional baseball club—and Wesleyan’s baseball team in the 1890s.

It hit me: Did the Cuban Giants challenge the other two of the Little Three?

Yes! The Amherst archives has proof. College archivist Christina Barber tracked down a poster advertising a game at Pratt Field on May 27, 1896, and an Amherst Student dispatch on the match.

The College lost, 7-6, in a 10-inning game. You can gloat at Amherst’s respectable showing: the next day, the Cuban Giants trounced Williams, 16-8.

But those game stats won’t funnel into MLB standings. Only play from 1920 to 1948 is being considered. The MLB holds that earlier games don’t count, labeling them as lower-quality, a run of loosely recorded exhibition games and barnstorming tours.

Negro League players and achievements matter on their own, not just because the MLB recognizes them, of course. And deciding what constitutes “low-quality” play is a debatable, even troubling, pretext for excluding the early days of all-Black teams.

While the MLB is dismissing stats before 1920, the National Baseball Hall of Fame has inducted several Black players from earlier years. Incredibly, two of them played at Pratt Field that day in 1896: Frank Grant and Solomon White. Negro League scholar Jerry Malloy named Grant the best player of the 19th century.

A word about the Cuban Giants: No player was Cuban. The team was based in Trenton, N.J., and the moniker is part of a pattern of concealing African American origins from white spectators.

The Amherst game is part of the history of segregation but also, in one way, of integration. The College’s lone Black player, James Francis Gregory ’98, was the first Black student to captain an Eastern college baseball team. He was the son of a Howard University professor, and his family tree includes both Charles Drew ’26, who pioneered methods for storing blood plasma, and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Roger Taney, who delivered the majority opinion in the 1857 Dred Scott decision.

Here’s the story of this game and these players.

1st Inning

Amherst Second Baseman Raymond Nelson Kellogg ’97

Game play: Kellogg flew out to Solomon White in the top of the first. Later, he pulled off a double play—which put out future Hall-of-Famer Frank Grant.

Kellogg is the only player from this game to break into the MLB. He played 50 games with the 1901 New York Giants, with a batting average of .276, and went on to a career as a teacher.

2nd Inning

Cuban Giants Shortstop Solomon White

Game play: White threw out Albert Montague ’96 in the second. He then hit two out of five, and “abounded in clever plays,” said The Boston Post.

White became the first historian of Negro League ball, publishing Sol White’s Official Base Ball Guide and digging up stats that subsequent chroniclers would rely upon. He played for and managed multiple teams and was a founder of the Philadelphia Giants. The same year he played at Amherst, he began attending Wilberforce University, the nation’s first historically Black college.

3rd Inning

Amherst Pitcher John Andrew Johnston ’97

Game play: “Johnston pitched a good game throughout,” said The Amherst Student, except for the “disastrous third inning,” when he walked four in a row, then recovered and struck out two.

After Amherst, he was a salesman and manager for the Chicago office of the Samuel Cupples Envelope Co.

4th Inning

Cuban Giants First Baseman John Frye

Game play: In the fourth, Frye got to first on a Kellogg error. In the 10th, he won the game with a sharp base hit.

Shortly before the Amherst game, a team slyly dubbed itself the Cuban X Giants, which incensed Cuban Giants manager John Bright. He vented in a letter to the Washington Evening Times: The X Giants “are getting most terribly defeated everywhere, and when defeated they send in their scores, calling themselves the Cuban Giants, thereby injuring the genuine Cuban Giants’ great reputation and fooling the public at large.” Bright then listed his players, including “Marvelous” John Frye. Frye seems to have started his own team, called Frye’s Nine.

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Amherst lost the game, 7–6, but the next day, the Cuban Giants trounced Williams, 16–8.

5th Inning

Amherst Shortstop Albert Ira Montague ’96

Game play: Montague put out the Cuban Giants’ Grant. “Played well at shortstop accepting nine chances out of 10,” said the Student.

Montague graduated with honors, and like many Amherst players, he became a teacher.

6th Inning

Cuban Giants Third Baseman John Patterson

Game play: Patterson snagged an Amherst foul ball to end the inning. He “played a fine game at third and did heavy stick work,” said The Boston Journal. As a player and player-manager for several teams, Patterson was known as brainy and shrewd. He became head coach of the Battle Creek (Mich.) High School baseball team, winning a state title in 1907. In 1909 he became the city’s first Black police officer.

7th Inning

Amherst Shortstop James Francis Gregory ’98

Game Play: Gregory hit one of “two pretty doubles” in the seventh, as per The Boston Journal. He batted “like a fiend,” added The Boston Post.

Gregory won the Kellogg, Ladd and Hogan oratorical prizes at Amherst. These honors, plus his selection as the first Black baseball captain at any Eastern college, merited much coverage in the Black press of the time, and the Springfield Republican called him “undoubtedly one of the finest fielders Amherst has ever had.” He was a son of Howard professor James Monroe Gregory, who wrote the book Frederick Douglass, The Orator. James Francis Gregory became a Presbyterian minister, school vice principal and Howard professor of public speaking. His grandson is NASA astronaut and former NASA deputy administrator Frederick Drew Gregory.

8th Inning

Cuban Giants Second Baseman Frank Grant

Game play: Both sides went down in the eighth. Grant got thrown out in the seventh, and went one for five at the plate. Like Solomon White, he “abounded in clever plays,” said The Boston Post.

When Grant got signed by the mostly white Buffalo Bisons, the local paper referred to him as a “Spaniard” to conceal his racial heritage, and several white players refused to sit with him for a team portrait. “In hitting he ranked with the best and his fielding bordered on the impossible,” wrote White. Grant retired from baseball in 1910 and worked as a waiter, porter and laborer. He died in 1937 and was given a pauper’s funeral. White was a pallbearer.

9th Inning

Amherst First Basemen Marshall Henry Tyler ’97

Game play: Tyler hit a fly ball to right field, which was dropped by the Cuban Giants’ John Trusty.

Tyler held the Amherst record for the high jump, won prizes in shot put and was a football captain. He has a building named for him at the University of Rhode Island and made URI’s Hall of Fame. He was a math professor there for 44 years and coached baseball for 16 years and football for 11. The 1914 URI yearbook is dedicated to Tyler. He was “endowed with kindness,” said the inscription.

10th Inning

Cuban Giants Center Fielder Frank Miller

Game play: Miller stuck out in the 10th. Earlier, he got one hit and made two errors.

Cuban Giants manager John Bright dubbed Miller “the Pittsburgh Cyclone” for his fabulous pitching arm. Miller was part of the Cuban Giants teams that won championships in 1887 and 1888. When he joined the Giants, a sportswriter said he was the best Black pitcher of the day.