Mexico Life Cool Papa Bell slides into third during a game in Washington D.C. on Negro League opening day in May 1943. He was renowned for his speed.
US Negro League stars found better pay, integration and fame in Mexico New James Bell biography discusses his years playing baseball for teams in Mexico
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In 1940, Mexican League baseball player James “Cool Papa” Bell had a season to remember.
Playing for the champion Azules of Veracruz, Bell became the first player in league history to achieve a feat called the Triple Crown leading all players in three separate statistical categories: batting average, home runs and runs batted in (RBIs).
Book World: The best audiobooks to listen to this month
Katherine A. Powers, The Washington Post
March 8, 2021
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The Nature of Fragile Things
Susan Meissner s latest novel is an absorbing, cleverly plotted historical tale of perfidy and pluck. Set chiefly in the first decade of the 20th century, it encompasses the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906 and the subsequent inferno, linked catastrophes that are horrifyingly conjured. At the center is Sophie Whalen, an immigrant from Northern Ireland who has answered an ad placed by a widower seeking a wife and mother for his 5-year-old daughter. The book begins ominously with a transcript of Sophie, 22, being questioned by a U.S. marshal about her husband s whereabouts and activities. Jason Culp narrates this and a later section, bringing an authoritative approach to a tale that is filled with formidable twists, duplicity and stunning revelations. Alana Kerr Collins, herself a native of Northern Ireland, narrate
Terry Pluto: A painful yet revealing memory of when I encountered Hank Aaron
Updated Jan 31, 2021;
Posted Jan 31, 2021
The Braves Hank Aaron (44) stretches on the field with teammate Davey Johnson (6) at the team s spring training camp in West Palm Beach, Fla, March 16, 1974.
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CLEVELAND, Ohio – There was so much I didn’t know.
That’s what I think when looking back in the rearview mirror of my life and seeing the image of Hank Aaron, who died recently at the age of 86.
The year was 1978. I was a rookie baseball writer for the Savannah Morning News, covering the Braves’ Class AA team in that Georgia seacoast town.
National View: Hank Aaron hit everything life threw at him
From the column: Note legendary broadcaster Vin Scully’s astute call that Monday night in 1974 when Aaron went immortal with historic No. 715: A Black man is getting a standing ovation in the Deep South for breaking a record of an all-time baseball idol. ”
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Gregory Clay | ×
Much of the universal reverence attached to Henry Aaron’s name is related to figures. You know, something about home runs.
Several years ago, one of his telephone numbers contained a conspicuous set of figures: 7-5-5. Aaron, who died a week ago at age 86 and whose funeral was held this week, once told me, “I didn’t ask for it. The phone company just did it.”
on Friday. Slate is republishing this 2007 story on the media’s treatment of the former home run king.
This baseball season, it fell to the sporting press to drag a reluctant Hank Aaron once more into public view, the occasion being Barry Bonds’ slow-motion pursuit of a stationary number. Now, any time an old baseball personage hobbles back into frame, he is invariably described in awed, petrifying language better suited to, say, the Archbishop of Canterbury. The treatment of Aaron hasn’t been any different. A spin through the sports pages over the past few months reveals that he is a man of “cool dignity,” “quiet dignity,” “innate dignity,” “immense dignity,” “eternal dignity,” “unfettered dignity,” “unimpeachable dignity,” the very “picture of dignity” who “brought so much dignity to baseball” and who, “having exuded dignity his entire life,” continues to this day “exud[ing] class and dignity.” Aaron, proclaimed the inevitable