Bhen he met the Pope last week in the Vatican, the 78-year-old American president was totally into small talk. For example, towards the end of the audience, Joe Biden – from Catholic to Catholic – offered Francis, six years his senior, a little anecdote from the history of sports in his home country. The main character: the African-American baseball pitcher Satchel Paige, who had an astonishingly long career.
Mo. – Fr. at 4 pm; Sa. – So. at 6 p.m.
“Usually, pitchers lose their limb strength at 35,” said Biden, referring to the stately age of the two officials. “But he even won on his 47th birthday.” The baseball professional returned questions from reporters in view of the unusual performance with a memorable sentence: For him, age is just a number.
Paige isn’t the only black baseball player to have achieved such legendary status. However, only a few of the others are so firmly anchored in the public consciousness. One of them is Jackie Robinson, who in 1947 was the first African American to receive a contract with the Brooklyn Dodgers in the then all-white major league called Major League Baseball (MLB). Or the two home run specialists Willie Mays and Hank Aaron, who in the 1950s helped gradually erase the traces of decades of racial segregation in American sport.
Separate existence
In fact, there were already exceptional talent like the sprinting and catching strong Oscar Charleston, whose talent was recognized by very respected white contemporaries like Honus Wagner: “In the many years I’ve been there, I’ve seen the best players, but no one better than Charleston yet. “
The reason for the lack of appreciation: Charleston played in the course of his professional career between 1920 and 1941 for several teams in Indianapolis, Pittsburgh, Harrisburg and Toledo, among others. But these teams, for which a total of more than 3,000 baseball professionals were in action, inevitably existed in their own universe: in the so-called Negro Leagues. White America practiced racial segregation in all areas of society. Even in sports.
It was decades before an attempt was made to correct the crooked picture at least a little in 2006 with the admission of a group of well-known black players to the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, a museum and semi-official repository for the history of the sport. Until then, this had only been the concern of the Negro Leagues Museum in Kansas City, a privately funded facility set up in 1990 by former Kansas City Monarchs players.
Last year they even went one step further: The professional league upgraded the seven Negro Leagues and subsequently gave them the status of “Major League”. What part of it was to take over the statistical information about their encounters between 1920 and 1948 in the total directory. “It’s extremely important historically,” said Bob Kendrick, head of the Negro Leagues Museum, who has become an influential steward behind the scenes. “For us it is additional proof of how important the Negro Leagues were, both on and off the field.”
To keep the stories about the life and the sporting achievements of the black players in memory is “still important”. After all, they cannot be conveyed using statistics. His museum is not a sport-oriented institution either, but conveys a social context, which includes the description of the poor economic conditions under which the leagues had to work.
For F +’s birthday, you can read all the articles on FAZ.NET for just 3 euros a month.
The white owners of American banks rarely gave team managers credit to finance their operations, much less to build their own stadiums. At best, you could rent existing systems. Such as the Yankee Stadium, where from 1933 several teams fought their encounters when the home side were on their way to away games.
.
