Just last night, I finished reading Roger Kahn's
The Boys of Summer for the first time. A great read, even if good portions of it haven't aged all that well. One of the titular boys is, of course,
Joe Black, who comes across as having been a fine gentleman indeed both on and off the diamond.
I certainly can't sum up Joe's career any better than this sublime passage from
TBoS:
"Irony ringed Joe Black's life in baseball. He appeared without acclaim, determined and fearless, and quickly became the strongest pitcher on the team. Then, with success, came dread. These afternoons as hero might vanish as suddenly as they had come. He had longed to succeed. Now nightmares warned of a sudden end. All of Joe Black's dreams came true, the good ones and the bad. Five years after his brilliant Dodger season, he was dropped by the Washington Senators, a last-place ball club. His baseball skill was spent. At thirty-three, he would have to make a new life and find another dream."
A lot of the cause for this precipitous decline from such an incandescent start to his major league career - which began in 1952 after five WW2-interrupted seasons almost exclusively with the Elite Giants in the Negro National League, followed by a couple of seasons that I'm confused about, namely 1949 and 1950, which BBRef Bullpen makes reference to and yet for neither of which any stats are provided by either that site or SH - comes down to meddling. Dodgers manager Charlie Dressen, convinced Joe needed a third pitch to survive in the bigs, forced upon him the responsibility of learning a change-up. This completely messed up both Joe's mechanics and confidence, and he was never the same pitcher again, fading out as per Kahn's description above.
Nevertheless, a superb and history-making 1952 season can never be taken away from Joe. In an epic matchup against the nemesis Yankees, Joe Black became the first black pitcher to ever win a World Series game, and he went on to be named the NL's RoY.
After baseball, Joe - a highly intelligent and well-educated man - gained his masters degree at Seton Hall and then, after a short stint as a teacher, went on to a long and successful career as an executive with the Greyhound Corporation. He passed away in 2002 at the age of 78.
As was his main role throughout his MLB career, Joe is operating from the BP for the Monarchs, who chose him with their 8th pick (159th overall) in that 1968 Draft. After a couple rough early seasons, he has improved mightily in '70 to currently be 6-4 / 3.03 (134 ERA+) with 1 save.
The game has him having a third pitch, so he will most likely see some future action in a rotation, either KC's or elsewhere. I'm going to leave that as is, given he started 44 of his 71 NeL games.
As with all these featured players, I'll keep tabs on Joe over the course of his EL career.