Play Harder

INTRODUCTION

The Baseball That Black People Created

Play Harder is the story of Black Americans and baseball. For more than 150 years, Black people have played “the long game”: developing their skills as youngsters; mastering the trade as professionals; creating teams; constructing, against long odds, the business model of leagues or what is called organized baseball; promoting the game to their fans; and, finally, breaking the long-standing color barrier in the sport. The title of this book itself—Play Harder—was a phrase Black players used to motivate themselves when facing adversity. “Play harder” was an expression of aspiration, determination, willpower, and courage. It acknowledged the fierce demands of high-level athletic competition, as well as Black people’s difficult history in a racist America with an uneven playing field in all walks of life. The old saying among Black folks was that one had to be twice as good to get half as far as a white person. In this regard, “play harder” could be considered a sort of motto, a two-word pep talk for Black people.

Sportswriter Art Rust Jr.—who’s right to suggest that baseball is a sort of Camelot—became an ardent fan of the game as a youngster when his Jamaican father, who immigrated to the United States at nineteen, switched his sports allegiance from cricket to baseball. There was something mythical about Black baseball in the heyday of the Negro Leagues. Owners like Effa Manley, Cumberland Posey, Gus Greenlee, and J. B. Martin were like queens and kings. Their meetings and disagreements were fodder for Black newspapers. Managers and masterminds like Rube Foster, Buck O’Neil, C. I. Taylor, and Dave Malarcher were the princes and dukes, the shapers of players and plays. And, of course, the great players like Oscar Charleston, Josh Gibson, Satchel Paige, Willie Wells, Biz Mackey, Cool Papa Bell, and Buck Leonard were the knights, the Lancelots, Gawains, and Percivals of the realm. All of these people were larger than life, the subject of gossip, rumor, and Black newspaper columns, as if they were movie stars. For a certain period, Black baseball was a world, a cosmos unto itself. For its adherents, it had the power of a religion.

Not all Black people felt so positive about the game, however. The great Rube Foster told his half brother Bill not to play baseball. “That’s no life for you,” he said. At fifteen, and already a professional, Roy Campanella came home at two in the morning from a doubleheader with the Baltimore Elite Giants. His mother was incensed, distraught with worry. She hit him with a leather strap while berating him, “You’re getting to be a bum, just like the rest of those baseball bums!” She called him a “bum” over and over as she struck him several times before she began to cry. Campanella’s mother was not unusual as a Black parent perplexed by the attraction of a seemingly worthless game that produced no practical skills for employment—an itinerant job for which, as Campanella wrote, “[the] bus was our home, dressing room, dining room, and hotel”; a job that did not seem to advance the race, and, for the devout, violated the Sabbath. Why would Black people waste their time watching baseball? Why would a Black person want to make a living from something so frivolous? She wanted her son to finish high school. He never did. For her, baseball had bewitched him. For young Campanella, with the great Negro Leagues catcher Biz Mackey as his coach, baseball was the best school he could have. And it was labor. As he said, he wasn’t “just playing at catching, but working the position.” Labor that fulfilled him and not just labor for labor’s sake. Despite her misgivings and dislike of the game, Campanella’s mother let him play baseball. She realized, after a point, how much it meant to him.

Rust loved white baseball, too, although he knew that the white stars “were for the most part bigots,” and that they were “probably the sorriest idols I had.” But idols they were until his father finally took him to a Negro Leagues game in 1938 when he was ten. When he saw the Black players, he had new heroes. Rust, about to enter college, “nearly cried” when Jackie Robinson signed with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1945. On September 23, 1949, Fawcett Comics put out the first of six comic books devoted to “Jackie Robinson, Baseball Hero.” A Black man as a comic book hero! Robinson had become the biggest crossover Black hero in American popular culture at the time.

Play Harder is about what it means to be a Black baseball hero—and what it costs. Many think that Robinson’s early death in 1972 at the age of fifty-three was the price he paid for his heroism. Moses Fleetwood Walker, who played on an integrated team at Oberlin College in the 1880s, was the last Black man to play white major league baseball until Robinson. Walker struggled after his baseball career ended—he moved from occupation to occupation and went to prison for a year for mail theft, a charge he fought bitterly. Houston Astros phenom flamethrower J. R. Richard had a stroke on the field in 1980. At the time, his record was 10 wins, 4 losses, 4 shutouts, and a 1.90 ERA. He was one of the greatest pitchers of his generation. He would never pitch for the Astros again. He lost his money, his family through divorces, his bearings through depression, and wound up homeless, living under a bridge for several months. Often, to understand what the game means to Black people is to learn not what it feels like to win but what it feels like to lose.