By Wil ShaneLyon College News Bureau
Photos by Eric Stewart
The stories Byron Motley grew up hearing his father tell about his days as an umpire in Negro Baseball Leagues used to bore him as a child, but now those stories have become his life’s passion.
Motley, son of Negro Leagues chief umpire Bob Motley, stepped up to the plate Tuesday in Nucor Auditorium on the Lyon College campus and presented his lecture, “The Negro Baseball Leagues: An American Legacy.” Film clips from Motley's upcoming television documentary “Oh, How They Lived - Stories of the Negro Leagues,” accompanied anecdotes about the history of the Negro Leagues and the men and women who made that history.
The program was part of Lyon College’s Diversity Week celebration, held in conjunction with the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Wearing a replica jersey from the Negro Leagues’ most dominant team, the Kansas City Monarchs, Motley, a singer, filmmaker, lecturer and photographer, said his father is the only living umpire from the Negro Leagues.
“I remember as a child every six months or so my father would start in with his stories,” Motley said. “My mother and sister and I would roll our eyes and say, ‘Here he goes again.’ He loves telling those stories. And now I love hearing them.”
At a time when black players were banned from the Major Leagues, the Negro Leagues embraced ethnic diversity, Motley said. The leagues featured teams of Latino players such as the New York Cubans, and even an all-white team, the House of David. That group was a religious sect, the members of which all wore long robes, long hair and flowing beards.
Arkansas had at least two Negro League teams, the Arkansas Travelers and the Arkansas Claybrook Tigers. Both teams played on the barnstorming circuit.
During the Negro Leagues’ 40-year run, from 1920 –1960, almost 300 teams entertained crowds of both black and white spectators. Only about 200 former players are still alive, Motley said.
The Negro Leagues were the first to introduce many innovations that are commonplace in today’s game, including:
• In 1931, the Kansas City Monarchs were the first team to host a night game. During its existence, Kansas City won 27 out of 40 world championships;
• The use of batting helmets originated when a Negro League player, tired of being thumped by errant pitches, donned a coal miner’s helmet before stepping to the plate;
• The use of shin guards began in the Negro Leagues as a way to combat base runners’ tendencies to use their sharpened metal cleats as weapons as they slid into the bag;
• In 1922, Negro League teams were the first to take baseball exhibitions to Japan, a year before Babe Ruth and the Major Leagues made the trip;
• Three women – Toni Stone, Connie Morgan and Mamie “Peanut” Johnson – all played in the Negro Leagues for the Indianapolis Clowns. Stone later played for the Kansas City Monarchs as well. Peanut Johnson is the only surviving one of the three pioneering women athletes.
The Negro leagues came to life when Andrew “Rube” Foster – the “Father of the Negro Leagues” – organized the Negro National Baseball Association in 1920. That original league consisted of eight teams.
Many Hall of Fame legends played in the leagues, one of the most famous being Jackie Robinson. Before he shattered the color barrier in Major League baseball by joining the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947, Robinson played a year for the Monarchs.
But Motley said relatively few know that Robinson was not the first black man to play baseball in the Major Leagues. In 1886, Moses “Fleetwood” Walker, a catcher who played barehanded, played for the Toledo, Ohio, club of the American Association, which later became the American League. He played for only one year before color lines forced him out of the game he loved.
The great Leroy “Satchel” Paige played for “any team that would pay him,” Motley said.
“In the ’30s and ’40s, he was the highest paid athlete in America, black or white,” he told the near-capacity audience.
Motley said he asked his dad what it was like to watch one of Satchel’s pitches coming in across the plate, and he said, “the ball danced the jitterbug.”
“Dad said sometimes, if the batter didn’t swing, he’d just call it a strike because neither one of them saw the ball cross the plate,” Motley said.
When Paige made it to the Major Leagues in 1949 at the age of about 42 – no one really ever knew how old Paige was – the league banned all his pitches but his fast ball because no one could hit them. That year, he won six games and lost one, helping the Cleveland Indians win the World Series, Motley said.
At the age of 63, the league invited him back to pitch three innings of a game so he could qualify for a MLB baseball pension, and the aged legend pitched three perfect shutout innings.
“If he could do that at 63 in the Major Leagues, imagine what he could have done in his 20s or 30s,” Motley said.
Other Negro League legends include:
• Josh Gibson, the only player to ever hit a ball out of Yankee Stadium, he totaled over 900 homeruns, with more than 90 of those coming in a single season.
• James “Cool Papa” Bell was the fastest player of his time and was once clocked running the bases in 12 seconds. Even Jesse Owens refused to race him in an exhibition one time.
• Effie Manley was the first women, black or white, to own a sports franchise. Owner of the Newark Eagles, Manley was a white woman who lived as a black woman. Her mother had been married to two black men and Manley had several half brothers from those marriages.
Motley said the Negro Leagues had an effect on American society that went farther than the baseball diamond. They helped shape and mold the nation, helping fling open doors of opportunity to people of color from all walks of life.
“We don’t know what might have been if they’d been allowed to play ball in the Major Leagues, but I’m sure they would’ve had to rewrite the record books,” Motley said. “What we do know is that they changed history.”