Big-time Negro League Baseball in a Minor-League City
Willie Mays’ death last week at age 93, more than 70 years after he impressed the crowds at Knoxville’s Caswell Park, brings up an interesting if barely remembered period in Knoxville’s sports history. Caswell Park, which many of us remember as the site of Bill Meyer Stadium, was an exciting venue during the most famous era of the Negro Leagues, as the site of regular-season games between the most famous big-city teams.
One of Knoxville’s first large public parks, Caswell Park had a baseball diamond since 1917. By 1921, it was hosting pro baseball, both major-league exhibition games and local minor-league games. It was considered the home field for the Knoxville Pioneers—who in 1925 became known as the Knoxville Smokies, in honor of the new national-park project.
As the first big park controlled by the city, Caswell Park sometimes hosted events for Black people, including high-school sports and musical concerts. But its big Smithson Stadium was built to be the Home of the Smokies, who were an all-white team.
Some local Black teams, like the Giants and the Grays, flourished in town, but they were never national contenders, and except for a couple of seasons when they were big audience draws at Caswell Park, they most often played at smaller, cheaper fields, especially the Leslie Street Field near Mechanicsville.
The Smokies, in the respected Southern League, were the main attraction for baseball fans in prewar Knoxville. But during World War II, Army recruitment gutted the demographic that includes young athletes. Knoxville pro baseball suffered a more devastating setback in early 1944, when the owner abruptly moved the Smokies to Mobile. It left the custodians of the city’s 14-year-old Smithson Stadium in a crisis. Although the city management affirmed that they preferred white teams to play at the city’s premier stadium, Black teams were courted to fill the stands and help pay the bills.
The Birmingham Black Barons had been regulars in Knoxville, back in the 1920s and early ‘30s, playing against Knoxville’s Black Giants at small fields with bleachers. By the 1940s, the Birmingham team had earned a national profile, and was playing against the famous big-city teams, and played some of those games in Knoxville.
The Barons returned to Knoxville on May 11, 1944, not to play a local team, but to challenge the St. Louis Stars. Smithson Stadium had floodlights, and that game was declared to be the first night game in the history of Black baseball in Knoxville. Birmingham’s 1910 Rickwood Field, shared with white teams, is today the oldest intact baseball field in the nation, and has gotten a lot of attention lately for its association with Negro League baseball.
Because all the Major League teams who’d ever played at Caswell Park were playing exhibition games—that Birmingham-St. Louis game was arguably the first regular-season big-league game ever played in Knoxville. Helmed by Piper Davis, and featuring Jimmy “Schoolboy” Newberry as pitcher, the Barons won handily before a crowd of over 4,200.
“Arrangements have been made to take care of both white and colored fans at Caswell Park,” reported the News-Sentinel. “Approximately half the grandstand and half the bleachers will be divided between the white and colored fans.” The audience was segregated half and half; white attendees were requested to use the right-field bleachers entrance, while Black attendees used the main entrance.
Although some local reports claimed that game to be a “championship,” it was at best a sort of half-season title, and got only a little attention on sports pages outside of Knoxville, mostly by way of a short AP story. But here, it was the beginning of something remarkable.
At that time, Willie Mays was a kid in Alabama, just turning 13. Son of a baseball player named Cat Mays, who lived in a small town near Birmingham, Willie Mays surely heard about his favorite team’s triumph in Knoxville.
For the next decade—the last and maybe best era of the Negro Leagues—perhaps a dozen big-city teams would come to Knoxville to play games at Caswell Park, bringing with them some of the biggest names in Black baseball. Sportswriters sometimes called them “Negro Loop” games. Caswell Park did host some white Major League exhibition games in the 1940s, but much more frequently the old ballpark hosted Negro League games. Unlike exhibition games, they counted.
Josh Gibson, who sometimes played with the Homestead Grays at Caswell Park, is remembered as one of the greatest hitters in baseball history. He died at age 35, just before the integration of baseball. (Wikipedia)
Occasionally a local Black team got to play against a famous team at Caswell’s stadium. In early April, 1945, as the war was coming to a close, the newly formed Knoxville Grays played against a famous team that may have inspired their name: the Homestead Grays, who claimed both Washington and Pittsburgh as their homes. Although it was an exhibition game, it was claimed to be “the first time Knoxville has been represented in Negro organized ball.” The floodlit night games featured the Homestead slugger Josh Gibson, known as “the Babe Ruth of the Negro game,” who hit two homers at Caswell. His Homestead visitors won, 19-0. Gibson, already suffering from a brain tumor for which he had declined surgery, which would have been risky at best. He had two more seasons in him, and kept playing, hailed as the Negro Leagues’ greatest player. Gibson died 21 months after he wowed 5,000 fans in Knoxville.
Perhaps encouraged by the crowds, Caswell Park invited the Knoxville Grays back to play some regular-season games within its own league at the city’s biggest and best park against the Black teams of Charlotte, Mobile, and Athens, Ga., as well as more exhibition games against big-league teams, sometimes holding their own. The Grays were a brilliant surprise of the 1945 season, but in 1946, they yielded to another Black organization, the Knoxville Giants, another impressive but apparently short-lived team.
A version of the Smokies returned in 1946, but their new incarnation was in the Class B Tri-State League. They had their fans, but home-team Knoxville baseball was not quite the marquee attraction it had been before the war. The most exciting baseball seen in Knoxville in the 1940s and early ‘50s was the series of Negro League games that had begun while the Smokies were absent, and developed a momentum of their own.
There was a lot of it. The Kansas City Monarchs, Cleveland Buckeyes, the Homestead Grays, the Chicago American Giants, the Pittsburgh Crawfords, the Newark Eagles, the Baltimore Elite Giants, the Atlanta Black Crackers, the Memphis Red Sox, the Detroit Stars: all of those Negro League teams played at least once, most of them several times, at Knoxville’s Caswell Park. Some of them had names that evoked another country that played baseball: New York fielded a Negro League team called the Cubans and the Havana LaPalomas, reportedly from Cuba, played against the Indianapolis Clowns in Knoxville in 1947. (The Cuban influence crossed the color line; the Smokies’ Oscar Fernandez, was described as a “Havana resident,” still a citizen of Cuba when he was a power hitter for Knoxville.)
Frequent performers in Knoxville, the Cincinnati Clowns eventually became the Indianapolis Clowns. It may seem a disparaging name for a baseball team, but “Clowns” often implied an entertaining show, with players going to remarkable lengths, on and off the field, to bring not just cheers but guffaws from the audience. One Cincinnati Clowns catcher preferred to sit in a rocking chair while covering home base. The Indianapolis Clowns featured Goose Tatum, later better known as standout in the Harlem Globetrotters’ basketball extravaganzas, but then an able first baseman whose loony stunts both entertained the audience while distracting the other team. “His is a big, loose-joined fellow whose mannerisms around first base are hilariously entertaining,” remarked the News-Sentinel.
In most cases, their stunts didn’t seem to hurt their statistics.
Often lacking a reliably available stadium of their own, teams traveled hundreds of miles by bus or train to play in Knoxville against another team that were also, technically, Visitors. The Kansas City Monarchs were famous for their pitcher, Satchel Paige, considered by some sportswriters to be the best pitcher in all of baseball, regardless of race. Paige at least suited up for a game at Caswell Park, but it’s not clear whether he ever pitched there—until much later in his long career, which his appearance at Caswell served as a sort of anticlimactic coda for an era.
All these teams played each other before biracial crowds at Caswell Park, in most cases as part of their regular season. And they brought with them some of the greatest players in baseball. This was a rare opportunity to see them play.
It was an exciting time for baseball fans. By the time big-city Negro League ball came to Caswell Park, most sportswriters knew it was just a matter of time before the nation’s best Black players would be joining the Major Leagues: people like Sam Jethroe, who played here with the Cleveland Buckeyes, but later for the Boston Braves where he topped the National League for stolen bases. Infielder Ernie Banks played in Knoxville with the Monarchs, but was later the first Black member of the Chicago Cubs, and a National League all-star.
The Monarch’s Buck O’Neil appeared several times at Caswell Park as both player and longtime manager of that club. He was never in the Majors, but became well known as a historian of the game, quoted in books and prominently featured on Ken Burns’ 1994 PBS documentary series, Baseball.
Knoxville News-Sentinel, July 30, 1944.
For a Birmingham vs. Chicago Giants game in August, 1944, a News-Sentinel sportswriter remarked, “It should be a game worth walking from the carline to the ball park to see.”
The carline was the streetcar route. If you were free on a Tuesday afternoon, you could buy tickets, usually for one dollar, at Blaufeld’s cigar and sandwich shop on Gay Street, then jump on a streetcar for the short ride to Caswell to watch a few innings of world-class baseball. It was a different city.
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Willie Mays, from a small town just outside of Birmingham, began playing pro ball early, when he was only 16, and still in high school. His Black high school cut a deal with Mays and his baseball-pro father, that he could play with the famous Birmingham Black Barons during the 1948 season, but only home games, mainly at Rickwood. The Black Barons often played games in Knoxville during his early seasons, but apparently without Mays.
Willie Mays, 1952. (Wikipedia)
He was here with the Barons late in the 1950 season, though, playing an exhibition game at Caswell Park against Luke Easter’s All Stars. Originally from Mississippi, Easter was a Homestead Grays star sometimes compared to Babe Ruth. He was transitioning to play first base for the Major League Cleveland Indians when he was sidelined by a series of injuries. During his convalescence, he put together an all-star team to play exhibition games. His team was well-named, with several famous players like Hank Thompson and Monte Irvin, but the regular Birmingham team featured 19-year-old center fielder Willie Mays, playing what must have been one of his final games for a team associated with the Negro Leagues. Unfortunately, that exhibition game wasn’t described in detail, but Birmingham won it handily perhaps an upset.
Willie Mays left the Negro Leagues to begin playing in the formerly all-white pro-baseball circuit when he signed with the New York Giants organization, first playing with its affiliated minor-league teams. He was here again on April 15, 1951, with the Minneapolis Millers, sometimes described as the best minor-league team in the nation, playing three days’ worth of games with the Smokies. Perhaps not recalling that he’d played at Caswell Park before, the News-Sentinel identified him as “a young Negro, up from Trenton.” He had previously been playing with the Trenton, N.J., Giants. That first Major League farm team to enlist Mays was led by Chick Genovese, who had been manager for the Smokies for the 1949 season before he was bumped up to the Trenton club. Mays would later credit him as an important influence, especially in fielding technique. Rising fast, Mays moved from there to Minneapolis.
Mays played center field. As the News-Sentinel’s sportswriter Bob Wilson remarked, “Terrific batting power supplied mainly by old Jake Early [a 36-year-old white catcher who formerly played in the Majors] and young Willie Mays” was a deciding factor in the Millers’ decisive win on Saturday night. A later account stated that he hit a homer in Knoxville, as well as a double.
By the end of May, when he was barely 20 years old, Mays was already playing with Leo Durocher’s New York Giants, hailed that July by the News-Sentinel’s much-admired sportswriter Tom Siler as “the New Hero of Harlem” (the location of the Giant’s Polo Grounds), calling Mays “a combination of [Tris] Speaker and [Joe] Dimaggio.”
We may not habitually think of sportswriters as civil-rights activists. But during this era, the Knoxville press frequently proved they were mainly interested in good baseball.
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The Negro Leagues dwindled by degrees with desegregation, as all the best Black players opted to go with the better financial rewards and national recognition that came with the Major Leagues. With its best and brightest picked away, Negro League ball became less impressive, relying more and more on spectacles, from the relatively subtle, like Memphis Red Sox pitcher known for his unusual “submarine” underhand pitch to the outrageous. The 1950s Indianapolis Clowns had a catcher listed in the roster as Fatso Pigg, and sideline performers like former first baseman King Tut, cavorting with a comic dwarf known as Spec Bebop. Paul Blackman’s one-man band, described as “the colored Spike Jones,” provided musical parody.
When they visited Caswell Park in May, 1952, the same Clowns had a teenager on their roster, starting at shortstop, named Henry Aaron. He played only a few months with the Clowns before finding a better job with the Boston Braves.
When they returned in September, the Indianapolis team also brought a relief pitcher named Jim Tugerson. The following year, as no one could have guessed, Tugerson would pitch for several weeks for the previously all-white Knoxville Smokies. (Although he drew crowds and seems to have been valued as one of the team’s best players, when he moved up in the minors, the Smokies were as white as they’d ever been.)
Sometimes the Clowns’ wacky stunts seem significant in hindsight. In 1953, perhaps just as a curiosity to bring in crowds, the Monarchs started a female ballplayer at second base, a 31-year-old Black woman from West Virginia named Toni Stone, whose local debut was at Alcoa’s Hunt Field in May, 1953. She was the first woman ever to play major-league baseball in America, and that was one of her first games. The Clowns, who had actually introduced Stone, replaced her with another female infielder named Connie Morgan. The following year, when the Monarchs played the Indianapolis Clowns at Caswell Park on August 18, 1954, both teams had women at second base. Some observers claimed they played as well as any seasoned ballplayer.
Knoxville saw at least a few Negro League games each year, though they were declining in both frequency and attention from the local sports press. By then, many of the great Black players were vaulting straight into the regular farm teams for the Major Leagues without doing time in the Negro Leagues, which were seeming more and more like a relic of another era.
It’s hard to tell exactly when the Negro League era ended. The excitement in these exotic visiting teams playing each other at Caswell seems to have faded away by degrees. But in June, 1962, the city was in the midst of desegregation—UT, the Civic Coliseum, buses, libraries, and a few lunch counters were integrated, but movie theaters and schools remained mostly segregated—there was a remarkable event at Bill Meyer Stadium at Caswell Park. It’s unclear whether the Negro League’s biggest pitching star, Satchel Paige, ever threw a pitch at Caswell in his prime, when his Kansas City Monarchs sometimes played here. But in June, 1962, just a few days before turning 56—Paige suited up again with his new exhibition team, the Harlem Stars, a reworking of the old Detroit Stars managed by Harlem Globetrotters star Goose Tatum, who was apparently still playing baseball on occasion. The Stars came to Caswell to play what remained of Paige’s old team, the Monarchs. By then, the Monarchs were based in Grand Rapids, Mich., but kept the Kansas City in their famous name. No longer in the Negro Leagues, exactly, they called themselves “independent.”
Before a crowd of 1,200, Paige’s Harlem Stars beat the Monarchs, 7-4. The crowd was much smaller than Negro League games here in the 1940s heyday, and the sportswriters didn’t take it seriously enough to describe the game in detail as they used to. In fact, even the brief reports in the two dailies disagree about what scant details they provided. One reported that Paige pitched for the Monarchs. He had promised to pitch three innings, at Bill Meyer Stadium, he allowed either one hit or none. Paige was a has-been, remembered fondly by fans of a certain age, but perhaps not yet a legend.
Bill Meyer Stadium was the most durable of three stadiums built at Caswell Park. When Knoxville lost its baseball team in the mid-1960s, the stadium suffered some neglect before minor-league baseball returned in 1972. Satchel Paige’s last performance was in Knoxville was in this stadium.
Bill Meyer Stadium remained there at the same ball park where the Negro Leagues of the 1940s and early ‘50s had drawn large biracial crowds to see world-class baseball. The Knoxville Smokies kept playing in what had been built as a segregated municipal stadium until they moved to Sevier County after the 1999 season. That stadium, which was in 1954 the modern concrete replacement for old Smithson Stadium, was torn down in 2003.
At the northern end of Jessamine Street, between First Creek and the ruins of Standard Knitting Mills, you can still see the ground where thousands once gathered to see Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Ernie Banks, Josh Gibson, and hundreds of others play. This fabled corner of Caswell Park has been quieter in recent years, but sometimes hosts a lively community-league baseball game, drawing crowds in the dozens. Some recent redevelopment plans have called for paving it over for parking.
By Jack Neely
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