Another of the early black stars was Joe Williams. In 1917, he bested Walter Johnson, the greatest pitcher in white baseball, by a score of 1-0. During his career, he also beat Grover Cleveland Alexander and five other Hall of Famers. In the fall of 1917, Williams struck out twenty of John McGraw’s New York Giants in ten innings, while giving them only one hit. A Giant player approached Williams after the game and told him, That was a hell of a game, Smoky; from then on, the pitcher was known as Smoky Joe.

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Oscar Charleston, another renowned black player, was a tough ex-soldier who hit with Babe Ruth’s power, ran with Ty Cobb’s slashing speed, and played a tremendous center field. Twice he led the Negro National League in both home runs and stolen bases. Reportedly strong enough to loosen a baseball’s cover with one hand, and fearless enough to snatch the hood from the head of a Ku Klux Klansman, Charleston was sometimes called the black Cobb. But those who saw both men disagreed. Cobb, they said, was the white Charleston.

Because accurate statistics are often lacking, it is difficult to say how good many of these black players were, but based on their exhibition play against their professional white counterparts during the pre-Robinson years, it is clear that they were exceptional. Black teams opposed white professional teams in more than four hundred barnstorming games between the 1890s and 1947, and came away winners sixty percent of the time. White stars like Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Bob Feller, Honus Wagner, Jimmie Foxx, and Christy Mathewson were glad to make extra money in games against blacks, and their testimony attests to the considerable skills of their opponents.

Cuba had formed a professional baseball league as early as 1879, and American big-league teams eventually began to schedule exhibition games against black and Cuban teams each October. In the fall of 1910, the Detroit Tigers, led by Cobb, traveled to the island for a series with the Havana Stars, who had borrowed John Henry Lloyd from the Leland Giants. Cobb sat in the dugout before one of the games, ostentatiously filing his spikes and pointing to Lloyd as if to say, This is for you. The first chance he got, Cobb dashed for second on a steal attempt, but Lloyd, who was wearing a pair of cast-iron shin guards under his socks for protection, simply knocked the surprised Tiger aside. In five games, the frustrated Cobb was held without a stolen base.

By 1924, Rube Foster’s Negro National League was being challenged by the new Eastern Colored League, and black baseball was enjoying huge success. That year, the Philadelphia Hilldales and Kansas City Monarchs met in the first Negro Leagues World Series. But by 1930, the Great Depression that followed the stock market crash of the previous year threatened to kill the Negro Leagues, and perhaps the white minors as well. In desperation, the Kansas City Monarchs’ owner, a gentle, kindly white man named J. L. Wilkinson, sank his life savings into a set of revolutionary portable lights. On April 6, five years before the first major-league night game, Wilkinson, to the delight of a crowd in Enid, Oklahoma, set up his lights, and the umpire yelled Play ball!

Three months later, under the lights at Pittsburgh’s Forbes Field, the Homestead Grays’ catcher suffered a broken finger when he lost a pitch in the shadows. A teenager named Josh Gibson, famous locally for his mammoth home runs on the sandlots, was asked by Grays’ owner Cum Posey to fill in for the injured catcher, and thus a star was born. Over the next 17 seasons, the powerful Gibson built a reputation as the Negro Leagues’ most feared slugger.

During his rookie campaign, Gibson smashed a ball over Forbes Field’s center field fence, 457 feet away. Only three other men–Oscar Charleston, Mickey Mantle, and Dick Stuart–ever duplicated that feat. Later, in New York’s cavernous Yankee Stadium, Gibson blasted a five-hundred-foot line drive off the back of the left field bullpen between the grandstand and the bleachers. The pulverized ball came within two feet of being the only fair ball ever hit out of the house that Ruth built.

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