that we focus on the cream of the crop.
We assume that the top talent today, at
least in the Western Hemisphere, will for
the most part manage to register on the
radar of MLB scouts and be signed as
free agents or drafted. Once ushered into
the byzantine network of minor-league
clubs here in the United States, players
will rise through the ranks if they’re good
enough. Only 5 to 10 percent will ascend
as far as The Show. Of those, only a frac-
tion will stick around for longer than a cup
ofcoffee. For much of baseball history,
though, that cursus honorumwas, with
few exceptions, closed even to the most
talented athletes unless they were white
citizens of the United States.
The best player never to play in the
major leagues was Oscar Charleston, in
the judgment of Bill James, a dean of
baseball historians, who ranks him
fourth all-time, behind Babe Ruth, Willie
Mays, Honus Wagner, and no one else.
Charleston made his professional debut in
1915, for the ABCs, a black team in
Indianapolis, his hometown. He was 18. A
five-tool (if you count his arm, said to be
merely adequate) left-handed center field-
er, he was bouncing around black baseball
in the Midwest when the first of the Negro
Leagues (there would be seven, all told)
was formed in 1920; he was a charter
member. The bulk of the approximately
30-year existence of the Negro Leagues
overlapped with the bulk of his 26-year
playing career, which included nine sea-
sons of winter ball in Cuba. The literary
critic Roberto González Echevarría writesthat his Cuban uncle and grandfather con-
sidered Charleston a baseball god to
whom subsequent generations of superstar
ballplayers never quite compared.
Charleston in his day was known as the
black Ty Cobb, the black Tris Speaker, and
the black Ruth. (Ironies: Some researchers
think that Cobb and Speaker might have
belonged to the Ku Klux Klan, and some
of Ruth’s contemporaries thought he must
have been part black himself.) A speaker at
Charleston’s posthumous induction cere-
mony into the Baseball Hall of Fame, in
1976, referred to him as “the Willie Mays
of his day.” Buck O’Neil said that Mays
was the best major-league player he’d ever
seen and that Charleston was better.
In recorded 321 plate appearances for
the Harrisburg Giants in 1925, his career
year and second season as a player-
manager, Charleston batted .427, with 20
home runs; his on-base percentage was
.523. His 20-season managerial career
includes a Negro National League cham-
pionship, in 1935. As manager of the
Brooklyn Brown Dodgers for a few
months in 1945, he informally scouted
black players for Branch Rickey, who two
years later would sign Jackie Robinson to
a major-league contract, thereby breaking
both “the color barrier” at the highest
level of professional baseball and the rai-
son d’être of the Negro Leagues, which by
the time of Charleston’s death, in 1954, had
for all practical purposes faded away.
The preceding three paragraphs are
my attempt at a thumbnail sketch of
Oscar Charleston. Jeremy Beer providesN
EGROLEAGUEbaseball em -
barrasses the average fan
who fancies himself a student
of the national pastime. We
may know Major League Baseball well
enough. It provides most of the material
for the lore that sportswriters have been
shaping since Reconstruction and that we
tend to think of as the history of baseball
proper. Out of the corner of our eye we see
the tangle of teams, players, and traditions
sprawling outside the foul lines of MLB.
We dread the work we would need to do to
comprehend the bigger picture, so we
exclude from our mental map of the game
the Pacific Coast League, for example,
and the various leagues that have gone by
the name “American Association.” And
the rest of the minor leagues, high and low,
in podunks from Puget Sound to the
Florida Keys? Professional baseball as
it’s been played for nearly a century in
Japan? Since the 19th century in Latin
America? In the Negro Leagues, which
were American but neither major nor, with
some complicating exceptions, minor?
Please. What a lot of ground to cover that
would be.
We might try to justify the narrowness
of our baseball knowledge by arguing
SPONSORED BYNational Review Institute 49Oscar Charleston: The Life and Legend of Baseball’s
Greatest Forgotten Player, by Jeremy Beer
(University of Nebraska Press, 456 pp.,
$29.95)Baseball
History’s
Invisible
Man
NICHOLAS FRANKOVICHFull half a life ago, my better half,
We turned our backs, no more to make one beast,
And strode or shuffled, each his darkling path,
You to the West, and I to time-worn East.
What of it now? What difference does it make,
When soon our years are quaintly writ in stone?
What difference, whether wisdom or mistake,
When we are laid alike, though each alone?
If memory serves, it serves but to conceal,
Distort, dissolve, deny the life we shared,
Detritus of a dream we took for real,
That evermore we would, as once we cared.
This too will pass. And we, we too will pass.
We too will pass, we two. All flesh is grass.—ERIC CHEVLEN
Author ofTriple CrownMY BETTER HALF
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