Suggested soundtrack: “Birds of a Feather,” 6-19-19, Cuyahoga Falls, OH
Numbers are a baseball fan’s best friend and if you read last week’s newsletter, you know there were some crazy numbers: 20 games in one day, 52 games in a weekend, and more doubleheaders to come. And, if you can believe it, those 20 games in a day isn’t even the record.
No, that would be on September 7, 1970 when there were 21 games played — and that was when there were only 24 teams! There were 9 — NINE!!!! — doubleheaders played that day. According to a Reddit post (I know, I know), it looks like these were the old-time scheduled doubleheaders as part of a Labor Day extravaganza.
Those 52 games across three days last weekend, though? That’s a record. And there are 49 more games coming this weekend. Even crazier is that the St. Louis Cardinals will play 23 games over the season’s last 18 days — that’s 5 doubleheaders — with no days off.
And, just for fun, how about the Braves dropping 29 runs on the poor Miami Marlins in a 29-9 game? Imagine scoring 9 runs and STILL losing by 20 runs? This game was so bonkers it took all the oxygen from coverage of the Brewers lighting up the Tigers 19-0.
One more number? We had 6 straight days with no postponements until a key Orioles-Yankees game was rained out last night.
I could go about numbers from this week, like Roberto Clemente’s 21 which was worn by players across the league to honor the legend on Wednesday…
Instead, I’m looking back to a different number, an anniversary that happened back on August 16: the 100th anniversary of the Negro Leagues. The celebration has been going on all year long, pandemic or no, including the outstanding #TipYourCap campaign.
And it was a story that was part of this celebration that got my attention. On an episode of the R2C2 podcast — a baseball podcast on The Ringer network hosted by Ryan Ruocco and former star CC Sabathia — the pair talked to Negro Leagues Baseball Museum president Bob Kendrick and former player Curtis Granderson to commemorate that 100th anniversary. It’s a terrific episode but it was a brief discussion of John Donaldson that caught me.
If you were to look Donaldson up on Baseball Reference, you would find evidence of what seems to be an unimpressive career: a 23-20 record, 106 walks, and 211 strikeouts scattered across 6 seasons on the mound. But like so many Negro Leagues players, this only scratches the surface of Donaldson’s career.
Unlike many of those players, though, there’s a growing treasure trove of Donaldson information.
Take the great Satchel Paige for instance. Paige high-tailed it all over the place, jumping from team to team in the middle of a season, barn-storming, and playing all sorts of games for so long so far away from the eyes of any interested record keepers that we will only ever know a fraction of it.
With Donaldson, we’re learning more about the player’s career courtesy of uncovered stats, verified by the John Donaldson Network, a network of people (led by Peter Gorton) dedicated to preserving every piece of evidence that can be found, from newspaper clippings to microfilm, of Donaldson’s career. It’s an incredible feat and here’s what they’ve found so far:
413 verified wins
5,091 verified strikeouts
14 no-hitters
2 perfect games
30 K’s in a single game — twice
30 consecutive no-hit innings
That is ludicrous.
Compare Donaldson’s total (that we KNOW of) to Cy Young (511) and Walter Johnson (417), both players from the same era as Donaldson.
And those 5,091 strikeouts? Consider the top two MLB all-time K collectors, Nolan Ryan (5,714) and Randy Johnson (4,875).
Oh, and there are dozens of games from Donaldson’s career still completely unaccounted for.
This comes with some caveats. Yes, baseball was a chaotic, wild mess back then with more teams than we can ever know that existed and very little organization. It was a whole hell of a lot easier for any player to travel the country and throw thousands of innings for multiple teams each year versus the 200 or so innings most MLB pitchers throw each season for (usually) just one.
The stats collected by the Network include every game he threw at any level. And plenty of statheads would argue that some of those games, played in small towns across the country against local thrown-together teams, is hardly the same thing as the way we usually view a player’s career stats (i.e., usually only their MLB tally).
But those counter-arguments miss the point.
It’s not really about comparing Donaldson to Ryan or Johnson or whoever. It’s about acknowledging Donaldson’s career as a whole while giving him and every Negro Leagues player their due for their roles in the game’s history.
It’s about acknowledging not just their accomplishments but their sheer PRESENCE as participants of the game, particularly during an era where they were denied the opportunity to play in the Major Leagues (besides, obviously, other rights) simply because of the color of their skin.
It’s about filling out that context of the game’s FULL history, not just cherry-picking parts of it. When we talk about Satchel Paige, we should talk about his time in Pittsburgh, Bismark, and the time he fronted a team backed by the brutal dictator of the Dominican Republic (it’s wild) instead of limiting the conversation to his time in MLB, which started in 1948 when he was already in his 40s.
We know Jackie Robinson played in the Negro Leagues before he played for the Brooklyn Dodgers. We know that Ernie Banks, Hank Aaron, and Willie Mays all played in the Negro Leagues before making the jump to MLB. And we know about players like “Cool” Papa Bell and Josh Gibson, Negro Leagues legend who, like Paige, reside in the Hall of Fame, a belated effort by MLB that started in the 1970s to recognize the Negro Leagues greats.
(Of course, even that happened with a few, uh, missteps, like the Hall of Fame’s original plan to put Paige in a “separate-but-equal” wing of the Hall. The Hall was blasted for the idea and Paige went in alongside all the other greats of the game where he belonged, a detail conveniently left out of the Hall’s official entry about Paige.)
But there’s still so much more we don’t know, especially about this era, these players. We realize the well of talent that was contained within the Negro Leagues was far deeper than we’ll ever truly understand. Some of the best baseball players to ever grace a diamond weren’t just denied opportunities in MLB but might forever live in the shadows of their white counterparts.
The way in which baseball fans still cherish and debate records and performances by “official” MLB players of that same era (for example, Donaldson’s career ran concurrent to Babe Ruth’s) show how important it is to include players like Donaldson — all of those Negro Leagues players who toiled in obscurity for no other reason than the racist policy of baseball’s color barrier — in these conversations. Without them, you have an incomplete picture of the game’s history.
I admit I’ve been woefully lax on these players, this era myself. Hell, I’m 41 years old and have been watching and following baseball for nearly that long and so much of it is still a mystery. I’ve cycled in books and stories about these Negro Leagues stars into my baseball diet, like a handful about Paige, several books about the Negro Leagues in general, and I’m now looking forward to taking in books on greats Oscar Charleston and the aforementioned Bell. And, yet, I still have an incredibly long way to go.
And, now, I know about Donaldson. I’m learning about his story and I’m following this project to document his career. And hopefully, now, so will you.
Bringing things full circle, on September 4, Johnson was honored with a statue in his hometown of Glasgow, Missouri. It’s a well-deserved, if overdue, tribute to a baseball legend. If we made a new rule to replace every Confederate statue with one of a Negro League player, I'd be all for it.
KMBC/KC
The big lingering downer?
Donaldson is still not in the Hall of Fame and, given that career, he damn well should be.
As pointed out in this recent, excellent Times op-ed promoting a Hall pick for Donaldson, the Early Baseball Committee (dedicated to players from before 1950) has their turn in the rotation for the Hall’s committee selections coming up.
If you’re unfamiliar with these committees, they’re designed to basically fill in the gaps in the Hall, whether it’s non-player baseball figures who deserve to be enshrined (like Marvin Miller, the man who built the players union) or players whose career pre-dated the Hall or were overlooked upon their original eligibility (like Harold Baines). They’re divided up by eras and rotate from year-to-year.
The Early Baseball committee will nominate 10 players from the pre-1950 era for inclusion and every player that receives 75% of the vote will make it in. It could be 10, it could be 0. And if Donaldson doesn’t make it in this time, it’ll be another 10 years before this committee meets again for selection.
(One note: The Times story says the vote will be in December while the Hall site says December 2021; it’s possible the Hall moved the date due to the ongoing pandemic.)
So here’s hoping the committee chooses Donaldson. To leave him still in the shadows of the Hall of Fame would be worse than a damn shame. It’d be a baseball travesty.