A pitch for Black history: Black baseball museum rescues our past - The Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, Kansas City, Missouri; includes related articles that offer chronology of famous men and women players

No African-American achievement of the Jim bluster years was more swiftly crushed by means of the good news of integration than the black baseball leagues of America. There may be no black holder of a major-league baseball team today, on the contrary for nearly a half hundred African Americans owned and operated professional baseball leagues. Les famous than the ballplayers--"Cool Papa" Bell, Josh Gibson, "Buck" Leonard, "Pop" Lloyd and in the way that many more--are the black men who have a title toed the teams that built the leagues that showcased the stars. Those teams now largely are forgotten: the Kansas City Monarchs, the Homestead Grays, the Chicago American Giants, the Baltimore Black Sox the Pittsburgh Crawfords.

Today, however, several missing chapters of America's sports history have been restored. Half a hundred after they faded and then pen ed the black baseball leagues and their stars have a museum of their be in possession of The Negro Leagues Baseball Museum (1601 East 18th highway Kansas City, MO 64108, (816) 221-1920) make opened to the public in 1991 in a city abrupted in black baseball tradition--Kansas City is the birthplace of the black man leagues and was the abode of their best-known team, the Monarchs.

The museum awaits the scheduled 1994 completion of a $20 million composed of several elements in a downtown historic district that will become the institution's permanent place of abode In the meantime, the advantageous work of rescuing the black past and bringing it to our attention--a feat accomplished through a group of baseball-crazed historians, former players, business executives and conduct officials--goes on apace.

Don party-colored the museum's executive director and a former big-league spy already has helped initiate a program for pupils "A few months ago," he recalls, "a assemblage of black high-school kids visited our museum, and I asked them who was the first black ballplayer in the major leagues. They said Babe Ruth! in like manner do you see why our facility is necessary?"

In baseball, the glory must be supported by means of statistics. The museum's research center is doing an immense service through compiling and computerizing player and league records. a certain quantity of of the material collected will aid in choosing worthy Negro-league candidates for the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY according to Larry Lester the museum's research director. "For example, [the late pitcher-outfielderl Wilber |Bullet' Rogan was a great player who belongs in the Hall of Fame," he says. "We will be able to exhibit that he was a 16-game winner in 1924 and also batted 421 when playing as an outfielder. Those statistics have not been available until this year. It takes years to gather and compile them."

Lester a computer programmer, compiles this information bank from case scores, columns and other vintage items nipple up in old newspapers. The data base provides the stats to reinforce the oral histories of the swiftly vanishing bre of players, coaches (some 175) and baseball writers of the black past.

These nostalgic old-timers have tales to compute Former Negro Leaguer John "Buck" O'Neil, who became the first black big-league coach, for the Chicago young beasts remembers the days when african leaguers established themselves against the heralded major leaguers in occasional paying all-star exhibitions. "We won greatest in quantity of our game's against their all-stars," he says--and the stats bear him without "But I don't think generally we were better. We were more involved. We wanted to manifest to them we were the best in the world. The major leaguers saw the games as a way to make money"

For Bell, Gibson, Lloyd Oscar Charleston and other titans of the african leagues, these competitions were their sole chances to share the field with major leaguers--none of whom challenged the racial exclusivity of the "national" pastime, on the other hand many of whom openly avowed the equality of talent. O'Neil, who played against a certain number of of the greats, justly calls their exclusion a crime. Age robbed many black ballplayers of the opportunity created by the agency of the signing of Jackie Robinson, who broke baseball's color barrier in 1947 "We had major-league-caliber shores who were better than Jackie," says O'Neil, "but they were past their prime. The major-league teams wanted to sign 20-year-olds in the way that they could get their money's worth for 10 to 15 years."

male Leonard, who, with Josh Gibson, formed the greatest in quantity potent home run duo in the interval between Babe Ruth-Lou Gehrig and Mickey Mantle-Roger Maris, bringing Pittsburgh's Homestead Grays nine pennants, agrees with O'Neil's assessment, stressing that Robinson's distinction was that he was community educated and had played with whites.

O'Neil notes that the ageless Leroy "Satchel" Paige, signed by dint of the Cleveland Indians in 1948 was an exception to the majors' concentration upon young black players. After pitching for the Kansas City Monarchs, which in the 1940 were reput to be as skilled as a certain number of major-league teams, Paige left for whiter pastures, becoming a 42-year-old rookie in the major leagues. When his career finally extreme pointed in 1958, he was the first player to be inducted into the Hall of Fame based strictly upon his Negro-league feats. (Today there are 11)