Mohawk Giants brought Hall of Fame-level talent to Schenectady
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Walter Johnson, one of the greatest pitchers of all time, had one of his greatest seasons in 1913, going 36-7.
But that fall, the Mohawk Colored Giants, a Black baseball team in Schenectady, added an unofficial loss to Johnson’s tally when he and an all-white team of major leaguers came to the city as part of a barnstorming tour.
Facing Johnson was Giants’ pitcher Frank Wickware, who possessed “one of the fastest fastballs of the era,” according to Steven Rice, a member of the Society for American Baseball Research.
Wickware was so confident that he would frequently belittle his opponents’ efforts by calling in his outfielders, reported a 1961 Schenectady Gazette article, “and there is no record that this bit of show-boating ever backfired.”
The women of the Negro Leagues
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Photo Reproduction by Transcendental Graphics/Getty Images
Recounting the history of the Negro Leagues is an incomplete exercise without also including the women who were part of the many stories. The Negro Leagues were the first place that a woman could own and run a baseball team and it was the first professional baseball league where a woman took the field alongside men. But as the Negro Leagues were the result of MLB’s exclusionary practice, so too did the Negro Leagues exclude and diminish the impact of the women who were a part of them.
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Late last year, Major League Baseball announced its intention to declare several Negro Leagues as official big leagues.
Last week, a committee of the Society for American Baseball Research recommended that 7 leagues be recognized: the Negro National League I (1920-31), Negro National League II (1933-48), Negro American League (1937-48), Eastern Colored League (1923-28), American Negro League (1929), East-West League (1932) and Negro Southern League (1932).
MLB also said it would incorporate team and player statistics from the Negro Leagues into the existing records, which include data from the American and National leagues, American Association (1882-91), Union Association (1884), Players League (1890) and Federal League (1914-15).