The Giants and the Color Barrier

By David Marasco

"Get that nigger off the field!" With that statement Cap Anson set down the Color Barrier that would last for 60 years. Anson was one of the most popular baseball players of the 1800's, and he was also quite a bigot. His infamous statement was uttered in 1887 when he found that the International League team he was facing in an exhibition featured George Stovey and Fleet Walker, two black men. Stovey and Walker were removed from play, and that same day the owners of the International League decided not to hire any more black players. This "Gentleman's Agreement" spread throughout white organized baseball. While African- Americans could not play in either the major or minor leagues, they still played baseball. The relationship between the New York Giants and the Negro Leagues has a very interesting history. It involves the Giants' greatest manager, riots, no-hitters and Hall of Famers.

For thirty years at the start of this century the words John McGraw and New York Giants were synonymous. He led them from 1902 until 1932, winning ten pennants and three world titles. He was one of the first to try to break the Color Barrier. He did this not as a member of the Giants, but as manager of the Baltimore Orioles in 1901. Charlie Grant was a light-skinned second baseman. He worked as a bellboy and played baseball at the Eastland Hotel. McGraw, seeing Grant's talent, hatched a plan where Grant would be known as "Chief Tokahoma" and be passed off as a Native American. The plot soon failed, as Grant had played with the Columbia Giants in Chicago in 1900. Because of this he was known to Charles Comiskey, owner of the White Sox. Grant returned to the Columbia Giants for the 1901 season. When John McGraw joined the New York Giants the next year he had Hall of Famers Christy Mathewson and Iron Man McGinnity in his rotation. In their first year under McGraw, they had 14 and 8 wins respectively. In the Spring of 1903 McGraw hired Rube Foster, the father of the Negro Leagues, to help out with his pitchers. Foster taught them his screwball, which Mathewson dubbed as his "fadeaway." In 1903 Mathewson won 34 and McGinnity 30.

One of the uglier incidents between the Giants and Negro Leaguers occurred in 1912. The headlines read quite ominously - "Giants Play Negro Team, Ends in Riot." The Giants sent several of their players to New Jersey to face a team known as the Smart Sets. When the Giants arrived they discovered that the Smart Sets were not a white team. Seeing as there was a crowd of 8,000, they felt it would be best to play the game. One thing to note is that this was just a small squad of players, and not the full team. Because of that, they were being managed by Wilbert Robinson rather than John McGraw, who may have had more control of the situation. The first problem came when the Giants' only pitcher refused to take the mound. According to the New York Times, "The only pitcher taken along was Louis Drucke, who comes from Texas. Drucke flatly refused to play against the colored team. All sorts of arguments were brought to bear, and Drucke finally consented to pitch if he was announced as 'Pitcher O'Brien' instead of Drucke." After that, things went smoothly until the 7th inning. Harry McCormick of the Giants disagreed with a call by the umpire, and it came to blows. A fellow Giants player by the name of Fletcher intervened, but McCormick refused to leave the field after he was tossed from the game. The Chief of Police had to come and remove him. With the game tied in the bottom of the ninth, the umpire handed Drucke a new ball. Drucke took some dirt and began to darken the ball, in order that the opposing players not be able to easily target a new white ball. Members of the Smart Set objected, and Drucke was forced to pitch with a new ball. The game progressed to the top of the tenth. McClellan of the Smart Sets took the mound to pitch, and instead of using the white ball, he used an older, darkened ball. Giants players Fletcher and Snodgrass (who would earn infamy later in the year) protested to the umpire, feeling that if the Smart Sets were able to bat against a pitcher with a clean ball, the Giants should have the same right. The umpire disagreed and the Giants left the field. The crowd degenerated into a mob and assailed the Giants bus with sticks and stones. The Chief of Police intervened and was able to get the Giants out of town, and they were happy to be gone. To put this incident into its proper historical perspective, this game occurred roughly a week after Ty Cobb went up into the stand to beat up a fan who had no hands. Cobb brutalized the man and was suspended by the American League. The Detroit Tigers went on a strike in support of Cobb and the American League lifted the suspension. The fan's sin? He had called Ty Cobb a "half-nigger."

Most exhibition games went much better than that. In fact, the Giants would play games against Negro League teams almost every year. They often played the Lincoln Giants, formerly of Nebraska, at the time based in Harlem. The influence of the New York Giants on baseball can be seen by the fact that many teams in the Negro Leagues were labeled as "Giants." The list includes: the Bacharach Giants, Chicago American Giants, Cuban X-Giants, Lincoln Giants, Philadelphia Giants, St. Louis Giants, Nashville Elite Giants and the Brooklyn Royal Giants. Of course, the most successful Japanese franchise is the Tokyo Giants. Negro Leaguer Buck O'Neil offers an explanation on why this was in his book "I Was Born Right On Time." After the success of early black teams such as the Lincoln Giants, Giants became a code word for black teams. Newspapers of the day wouldn't print pictures of black men, but if a reader saw a team named the Giants coming to town, then he or she would know that if was a black team. In any case, the natural team for the New York Giants to face was the Lincolns, and at the time the Lincoln Giants had Smoky Joe Williams, perhaps the greatest pitcher ever to take the mound. In 1912 Smoky Joe shutout the Giants twice, 2-0 and 6- 0. In 1914 the Giants and Williams faced off again, this time Rube Marquard and Smoky Joe tossed matching three-hitters, with a 1-1 tie resulting. Williams scored 12 strikeouts to Marquard's 14. The next year the Giants got the better of the Lincolns when big Jeff Tesreau whiffed 17 as he beat the Lincolns by a score of 4-2. The Giants were the National League champions in 1917 when Smoky Joe lost a 1-0 marathon. He pitched ten innings with 20 strikeouts, and threw a no-hitter despite losing the game. Eventually Commissioner Kennesaw Mountain Landis grew weary of seeing white teams getting beaten by their black competition. He ruled that when major leaguers played in exhibitions, no more than three players from one team may play. In this way black teams could not claim that they had defeated an intact major league franchise.

All of American, black and white, struggled through the Great Depression. For the Negro Leagues this meant the collapse of the original Negro National League and the rise of the second organization bearing that name. Insight to the economic troubles of the time might be drawn from the nickname of Carl Hubbell, New York's best pitcher. He was known as "The Giant's Meal Ticket." Both the Negro Leagues and the Major Leagues instituted All-Star games in order to generate interest. The Giants and the Negro Leagues entered a symbiotic relationship in New York. The Giants would rent out the Polo Grounds for big Negro League games, taking a cut of the gate. Both sides profitted, the Negro Leagues would be able to play in a larger venue and associate themselves with the major league tradition of the Polo Grounds. The Giants made a tidy sum of cash. The Yankees, who would do the same thing with the much more attractive Yankee Stadium, were making roughly $100,000 a year from such arrangements. In those times $100,000 could pay for several players, so the Negro Leagues were a good source of income for the owners of white baseball. However, in New York one team was being shut out. The Yankees for the most part dealt with the New York Black Yankees, and the Giants the New York Cubans. The Dodgers had no contracts with Negro League teams, and hence were at a competative disadvantage with both the Giants and the Yankees. Branch Rickey soon realized that there was an even better way to tap the wallets of the African-American baseball fan, but it would take courage that the rest of white baseball did not have. In 1947 Jackie Robinson donned the uniform of the Brooklyn Dodgers and baseball and America changed forever.

Integration came slowly to baseball. Outside of a short tryout of Hank Thompson and Willie Brown by St. Louis, only the maverick franchises of Brooklyn and Cleveland had signed African-American players. Jackie Robinson first played for Brooklyn in 1947, and it was not until 1949 that the Giants became the second team in the National League to integrate. The players picked were Thompson and Monte Irvin. In his book "Nice Guys Finish First," Irvin gives manager Leo Durocher credit for how well integration worked on the Giants,

	...after everybody got dressed, 
	[Durocher] called a meeting.  Leo 
	said, "About race, I'm going to say 
	this.  If you're green or purple or 
	whatever color, you can play for 
	me if I think you can help this ballclub.  
	That's all I'm going to say about race."
	...I know that Jackie had some trouble 
	with the Dodgers, but we never had any 
	problem on the Giants.  I was happy about 
	that and I think Leo Durocher was 
	responsible because of the way he handled 
	it.

While African-Americans proved themselves on the field, they were not given many chances to prove themselves on the bench. This was changed in 1975 when Frank Robinson was named manager of the Cleveland Indians. He became manager of the San Francisco Giants in 1981, won manager of the year in 1982, and was fired in 1984. In 1993 Dusty Baker became the Giant's second African-American manager was later replaced by Felipe Alou, another man of African descent.