SHORT HOP - My Career In Baseball by David Driscoll

[Rasmuth]

very nice!

[majorjello]

I just finished putting all the chapters in a word doc, so I can read it again easier. 265 pages so far.

A Brilliant read, TiB!

[blubbla]

Definitely 265 pages worthy of someone slapping a price tag on it!

[majorjello]

I'll try to keep it up to date.

http://www.majorjello.com/files/shorthop.zip

It's nothing fancy, I just cut and paste into a word doc.

[Tib]

As promised, here's another installment of the History of Pro Baseball, taking us to 1957. I realize you are probably all waiting for Chapter 51 of Short Hop, but there are some very good reasons why I need to impart a little history here.

Of course, when I started to write about integration it became quite complicated and I soon realized it was going to take awhile to say everything I needed to say. I also realized I needed to tell this part of the tale now, before Cliff gets much older. Anyway, you'll see what I mean.

Ch. 51 is on it's way, as soon as I finish preparing for the end of the ABF in '65 and the birth of the CBA a year later.

[Tib]

SHORT HOP: Interlude #6

The History of Pro Baseball

PART FIVE: Integration

“A Social Affair”

The Birth of Negro Baseball, 1938-1945

In 1938, the league that was to become known as the Black Baseball Association was a loose gathering of teams from the Atlanta area. The league began like its white predecessor; teams assembled for weekly contests of 9 to 18 innings (depending on the weather and the players’ endurance) between chosen sides of anywhere from 8 to 14 players. They played in open park spaces, using flour for foul lines and a heavy pentagon of wood for a plate. They had no uniforms, no spikes, no professional equipment to speak of; players brought what they had. Teams shared bats and gloves. During long hot afternoons, players were bolstered by picnic lunches brought to the park by spectators, who sat in the grass along the lines or ringed the outfield with blankets.

Baseball for black America in 1938 was, as Hamilton Collerton described in A Separate Game, “essentially and necessarily a social affair”. There were no team names, no sponsors, no statistics, only results published in black newspapers and on church bulletin boards. Players typically switched teams, in effect trading themselves, whenever they wanted. At first, games were played on Saturdays, but games after Sunday church services soon became more popular. Weekend baseball among Atlanta’s black community continued to grow, and in 1941 the six most prominent team managers met in Atlanta’s Holy Grace church to form an official league. With the backing of local black-owned businesses and the support of a loyal core of fans, the Negro Baseball League was born ready to walk.

But the new league didn’t walk, it ran. In baseball terms, it ran through the sign and took third. By 1945, players played for established, sponsored teams – teams with names like the Negro Knights, the Dixie Travelers, the Farm Kings, the Sharecroppers and the All-Americans. There were uniforms, equipment, fields with grandstands, and concessions. Attendance grew slowly, but steadily. As the black population moved from the south to more promising jobs in the north, especially in Kansas City, Chicago and Detroit, the Negro Baseball League followed. The interest was there, both from the mobile population and from the local business owners who knew an opportunity when they saw it. Soon the NBL had twelve teams and two divisions.

By 1946 professional Negro baseball was in eight states. This expansion of professional baseball did not go unnoticed by the ABF owners, who supported it publicly but complained to each other in private. As a whole, white baseball adopted a paternal stance toward the NBL, staying close enough to remind everyone who invented the game, but far enough away to appear benevolent.

“A League in Earnest”

The Negro Baseball League, 1946-1948

From 1938 to 1945, through the last grips of a Great Depression which affected blacks far longer than it did whites, through the heartbreak and triumph of a World War, and through a new prosperity that required uprooting over one hundred years of agrarian history for industrial jobs in the northern Mid-West, the NBL survived, lasted, even prospered. It grew teams with the seasons, cut them back when the soil wouldn’t support them, managed the talent crop like any good farmer – with knowledge and patience – and sowed the seeds of future success.

But starting in 1946, and in spite of all its accomplishments, a feeling began among fans and owners that something in the NBL was missing. They felt, as reflected by pioneering Black baseball writer Danford Harrison in Nine Ounces of Cotton, that some essential element was missing, that there was “a hole in the soul of the league”.

“What a passing fever came upon them,” he wrote. “What a strange and wonderful possession took hold among the Folks who came to see the young men play! It was like a warm wind, a wind that made you squint your eyes and tilt your head into it as if you were looking for the future. It was an intangible alchemy of hope, pride, and the sense of having something as a group that you couldn’t possibly have on your own. This was our game. And that powerful, almost divine sense, the sense of it being our game, just for us, was the same sense that told the Folks it was time to move on to a mysterious new future, an unknown future that was waiting around the corner in the darkness, tempting you in the same quick breath to both retreat and advance. It quickened their blood and it scared them and they didn’t know why.”

The roots of these feelings go down deep into Black American history, deeper than the Delta’s waters and back more than one hundred years. When the summer of 1948 came around, the NBL had 16 teams in four divisions from Atlanta to Kansas City to Chicago to Milwaukee to Pittsburgh to Raleigh. By that time teams were celebrating their tenth anniversary in the league. Perhaps it was reaching the decade mark that stirred these unusual feelings among fans and owners. It may never be known, but something started people talking in the spring of ’48. Something, they said, needed to change.

At first it wasn’t apparent what that thing was, just that folks felt it was time to “move on”. People weren’t even sure if something needed to be added or taken away. As Michael Coleman wrote in the Atlanta Star (a Black newspaper of the day), “A dimly perceptible cloud is in the air, a knowing of something, something that puts smoke before your eyes just enough so you can see something beyond, but not what it is. That’s where we are with the NBL. There’s something on the horizon for us, something we have to move to, and there’s a cloud right in front of us – probably been hanging there for years – keeping us from knowing how to get there, how to become a league in earnest.”

But one man did know.

“I Am No Negro”

The Black Baseball Association, 1949-1954

Velman Oliver (V.O.) Tratt was both a sharecropper’s son and a Sharecropper. Born in Luscota, Alabama in 1910, Tratt picked cotton from the time he was old enough to walk. In his late teens he joined his friends and played baseball on Saturday afternoons when there was no work. He excelled at the game and in his early twenties he began to play baseball on Sundays for Seraphim Baptist Church in Atlanta. Soon he was regarded as the best player around. In 1930 he joined the NBL’s Montgomery Sharecroppers. His playing career ended early after an automobile accident, but not before the game instilled a fever in him that would be quenched only by his death in 2011 at the age of 101.

The car that took his left foot in 1932 did not take away his desire to be around the game he loved. Though his missing foot made it nearly impossible for him to find work, Tratt was determined not to give up. If he could not work with his friends during the week, then he would work with them on weekends. He got a job as an assistant to Lawrence Hibbert, helping him manage the affairs of the fledgling NBL’s Atlanta Racers. He quickly showed an aptitude for numbers and people and Hibbert began trusting him with more and more responsibility, teaching him to run his farm supply company.

Soon he became the Racers’ general manager. Then, with Hibbert’s death in 1946, he became the Racers owner outright. In two short seasons he became NBL president. During his time with the Racers Tratt learned to value the people he worked with, who played for him, who came to see his team. He never forgot those lessons. What’s more, he learned the lessons of the ABF, following the league conflicts and economics as closely as possible, in particular the trials of the Atlanta Generals. He followed social issues as well, and keenly followed and believed in the burgeoning effort for racial equality.

He fostered a close relationship with everyone from delivery clerks to team owners. Loyalty toward others served him well as he rose in influence. They knew him, knew what he was about. They trusted him. When he stood before the assembled owners in the winter meeting of 1948 and announced his plan to change the league’s identity, they listened. When he said he heard a voice telling him it was time “not just to change our league, but ourselves”, they nodded. When he declared that baseball had lifted him “from sharecropper to shareholder”, they applauded. When he challenged them to look around at each other and then asked them: “Are there any slaves in this room?” they understood.

On January 1, 1949 the Negro Baseball League became the Black Baseball Association. At the press conference (the first in Black sports history to be attended by the white press) a reporter asked Tratt, “Why call it the Black Baseball Association? Why not just keep calling it the Negro Baseball League?”
Tratt leveled an unblinking stare at the man. “Because,” he said, “I am no Negro.”

Among the other changes Tratt made: all uniforms were to sport the BBA logo. Players’ names (or nicknames) appeared on the fronts of jerseys (they were moved to the back in 1950 when sponsors complained). Player trades had to be examined by the league for equity; no one trade was allowed to so damage a team that they would be unable to draw fans. Used equipment was donated to black schools to foster new talent. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, there was no Release Clause in the BBA.

Baseball in black America continued to grow through the Fifties. Stars came and went, just like the ABF. Teams won and lost, just like the ABF. Money was made, just like the ABF. The BBA, through Tratt’s inspired guidance, became a world unto itself, insulated from white baseball, protected from economic shortfall, with its own traditions and legends. But even Tratt could not protect his beloved league from the lessons it was teaching. As sound and good as the BBA model was, the independence and strength it gave its players was its very undoing, for in 1956 the most famous black player of all signed to play baseball for a white team.


For next time: "The Richmond Rifle" and the integration of the ABF

[magnet]

I finally got around to reading this. Great work, Tib!

[wrestlerjrh]

This is amazing Tib, I have read every chapter you have posted several times and have been impatiently waiting for more. You are certainly better than many writers I have read. One comment though, you have the name change player (Otis Pahrik or something like that) explained twice with two different names that he started with, is this two different players in an amazing coincidence or is that a mistake? (chapter 42 part 2 and then again in chapter 46_

[Tib]

Originally Posted by wrestlerjrh

This is amazing Tib, I have read every chapter you have posted several times and have been impatiently waiting for more. You are certainly better than many writers I have read. One comment though, you have the name change player (Otis Pahrik or something like that) explained twice with two different names that he started with, is this two different players in an amazing coincidence or is that a mistake? (chapter 42 part 2 and then again in chapter 46_

You're absolutely right, wrestlejrh. I didn't catch that I had already written about Otis once and did it again. That's why I need an editor!

The second explanation is the one you should pay attention to. I'll have to delete the other one somehow. It can be tough to keep facts straight when your writing time is so broken up.

Thanks for the comment.

[jaxmagicman]

You mean this isn't a true story!!!! I want my money back. No, I want to sue you for lying to me.

[Tib]

Originally Posted by jaxmagicman

You mean this isn't a true story!!!! I want my money back. No, I want to sue you for lying to me.

Apparently, I forgot that part of the disclaimer as well...

[wrestlerjrh]

Just wanted to to say that there are people waiting on the next chapter with great anticipation, well at least I am, and I don't want you to sacrifice your life or the quality of writing to get it in, I just want to let you know the fans are still out there and love your work Tib, and there wouldn't be any complaints if we inspired a surge of writing

[wrestlerjrh]

Tib are you still out there? would love to hear from you, even even just to know that you haven't given up on Short Hop

[Tib]

Originally Posted by wrestlerjrh

Tib are you still out there? would love to hear from you, even even just to know that you haven't given up on Short Hop

I haven't! I have been very busy with some real life stuff and haven't had a lot of time to write. We bought a new house and school started, etc. etc.

My hope is not to delay much longer with a new chapter or two, perhaps by first of Nov.

Thanks again for the support. I am aware how long it's taking and I'll try not to make you wait much longer.

[wrestlerjrh]

great to hear from you Tib, glad to hear that your life is going well, and I wait with great anticipation for the next installment, you are an amazing writer, but I fully understand and support you taking care of real life commitments first

[Vris]

Not that this needs a bump or anything, but I noticed it's been a few weeks.

[Vris]

Originally Posted by Vris

Not that this needs a bump or anything, but I noticed it's been a few weeks.

"

[wrestlerjrh]

there is so much more that needs to be told about old short hop

[WWBL Commissioner]

Hey Tib,
Hope all is well. Hoping for some holiday chapter's but no rush, hope all is well, I know I speak for alot of people when i say the story is missed

[Tib]

Thanks, and a Merry Christmas to everyone. Everything is fine here, but I have been extremely busy with some real life stuff. I very much appreciate your continued support even though I haven't found the time to write like I thought I would. There is good news, though.

As many of you know, I sort of re-dedicated myself to my family, especially my two boys (8 and 10), so I've been away from Short Hop for awhile. Well, I talked to my wife about how much I miss writing all the time and she gave me lots of support for continuing the story. In short, I'll be dark for the Holidays, but Short Hop will start up again in January.

And I mean it this time. No distractions, no excuses. I'm most of the way through this saga and I have been making notes and planning the next few chapters. I can see the light at the end of the tunnel so I'm going on a big push to finish it by my 41st birthday (April 4). Wish me luck.

God Bless to all the faithful who've stuck by me and Dave and best wishes for a healthy New Year.