CHET BREWER

To this day many baseball fans know only a handful of the major stars of the Negro Leagues. Had giants like Turkey Stearnes or Smoky Joe Williams been allowed in the majors, their names would be as familiar as Jimmie Foxx or Dizzy Dean.

As would Chet Brewer's. Intensifying the recognition factor for this great hurler of the '20s and '30s is that at the beginning of his career with the K.C. Monarchs, he was overshadowed by the fireballing Bullet Rogan, while in his later days in K.C., all eyes were on Satchel Paige. He spent most of his later career in Latin America. A measure of the regard in which he was held is that in 1933 and 1934, the first two years of the Negro Leagues East-West All-Star game, Brewer was selected and when he returned to the States, he was again selected for the 1947 team, holding opponents to three scoreless innings. In October of 1936, barnstorming in North Dakota, he pitched against a team that had future HOFers Jimmie Foxx, Heinnie Manush and Ted Lyons, as well as Pinkie Higgins and Doc Cramer, and beat them 11-0. In his peak five years with the Monarchs he had a 52-28 record (bearing in mind that Negro League seasons were much shorter and not all game records have been preserved).

If the Hall of Fame Veteran's Committee continues to pluck greats from the Negro Leagues, Brewer one day will get his ticket punched. A tall, stately man who carried himself with great dignity, he commanded respect wherever he went and after his playing career, was selected by the Monarchs to manage the club.

One of the few people who didn't think too highly of Brewer was the frolicsome Satchel Paige. One year Brewer was assigned to ride with the lanky right hander in his car to make sure Paige made it to the ballpark, for he was the big drawing card. Chet told of finding Satch shooting dice - for pennies - when they had 200 miles to go to get to the ballpark, with only two hours to do it. After Brewer finally got Paige in the car, Satchel told him, "If the red lights are going to make us late, I won't stop at any more" - and he didn't. They arrived in the fifth inning, with many fans leaving the park, demanding a refund. Satch constantly got them in trouble, driving the wrong way down one way streets, speeding, and once even leading the Highway Patrol on a chase from Bakersfield to Oakland (about 200 miles). He told the cops, "I wanted to see how fast I could go before you caught me." Brewer ended the experiment by telling the Monarch's owner, "Now instead of having one pitcher being late, you got two late."

But from K.C. to D.C., from Mexico to Los Angeles, Chet Brewer was highly regarded as both a pitcher and a man. After his career, he retired to L.A., where he and his wife began a boys baseball program in Watts to keep youngsters out of trouble. The teenagers liked and listened to the old man, because he told them that as a youngster he had been "a little so-and-so" himself, but his parents and others had turned him around. The program was highly successful, not only helping dozens of young men find themselves, but also producing future major leaguers Doc Ellis, Reggie Smith, Lyman Bostock, Enos Cabell, Bob Watson and George Hendricks.