Southpaw: The Ballgame Between the States (Archangel Michael, Georgepatton, Gryphon)

A Wikibox Micro-TL
by Georgepatton, Archangel Michael, Gryphon

This is a timeline about baseball, and a world that happens to exist around baseball. In this world, the Civil War ended differently, and the Confederate States still exist. There surely would be massive changes wrought to the world of baseball should this have occurred- the very rules the modern game is played by were largely a result of the Civil War spreading the Knickerbocker code around the country, for instance- but these effects have been ignored, because we'd prefer to tell you a different story- a story about baseball in a pair of Americas.

Your hosts for this timeline will be:

Mel Ott (Archangel Michael): Mel Ott is an associate professor of political science at the University of Alabama and the president of the Tuscaloosa chapter of the Confederate Citizen's Council. He played minor league baseball in northern Mississippi for four years in the early 1980s.

Tris Speaker (Georgepatton): Tris Speaker is an editorial fellow at The Liberator whose work has appeared in No Gods No Kings and San Francisco's Freedmen Gazette. Speaker is also currently attending grad school in San Francisco to obtain a degree in historical studies with a focus on race relations. Hobbies include biking and working on Chinese proficiency, and you can find Speaker's Followr account at net:followr.usa.ProgressAndPronouns.

Bob Feller (Gryphon): Bob Feller is a member of the BBWAA and regularly contributes to sports pages in newspapers around the United States, and is currently employed by NBC Sports as a baseball data analyst and historical factchecker.

Book review, Bob Feller




The Old Ball Game is a fantastic history of the developing relationship of the United States and the Confederate States, and a fantastic history of baseball in the two countries. It offers new insight into the role baseball- particularly the Exhibition Games- led to a general loosening of travel restrictions on citizens of both countries, and in its more historical chapters, paints a vivid picture of how the baseball is part of the common cultural heritage that binds the two states together.

As a book about baseball, it is certainly a well-studied work, giving a good look at the inner workings of the major leagues on both sides of the border, and biographies of key players in both countries.

However, the book misses a vital part of the history of baseball in the CSA- while its treatment of the northern Negro Leagues leaves something to be desired, the near invisibility of the Southpaw Leagues is a terrible oversight in an otherwise fantastic history. The Southpaw Leagues were a major development in baseball as a spectator sport in the South, and arguably the white major leagues owe their popularity to the slave games. To simply ignore such a rich history is to ignore a fundamental, albeit dark side of the most popular sport in North America.

Book review, Mel Ott

Gryphon said:

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The Old Ball Game is a very interesting book, and in places, it's a phenomenal academic and historical work. The chapters regarding the early years of the game in both the Union and the Confederacy are exemplary, and it's very clear that Collins and Young have a deep love for the game. In fact, I'd say that a good portion of the book is quite good, that is, the parts that deal with the Union leagues and the free Confederate leagues. To go even further, I'd say the history of the Union negro leagues is far better than anything Confederate historians have produced. However, the book stumbles whenever the authors decide to discuss the southpaw leagues.

It's almost unconscionable how Collins and Young were able to skip over such an important part of not only baseball history, but Confederate history. Early owners were agrarian planters like John Sidney McCain and Harry F. Byrd who owned large plantations in the southast, but by the middle of the 20th century, they'd been replaced by Texan oil men like Lamar Hunt and Clint Murchison. In fact, the major southpaw owners are a microcosm of Confederate society as a whole, as many states shifted away from the plantation economy to petroleum-based economy. These owners and their impacts on the game are prime candidates to explore just how the game affected Confederate society as a whole, and to miss that is a grave mistake made by the authors of this work.

Book Review, Tris Speaker

Gryphon said:

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The Old Ball Game (Collins, Young - 2008 - Putnam & Sons) is a pathetic attempt to white-wash the blood-soaked history of North American slavery with a text-book fairy-tale morality play about reconciliation. The welter of statistics about US and CS players cannot compensate for the writers' frank refusal to engage with the subject resting at the heart of the entire rotten system: slavery. Fittingly, this book about the so-called national pastime whiles away chapter after chapter in meaningless nonsense, hitting a succession of softballs lobbed lovingly over a field of chained, silent corpses. The more the authors attempt to avoid the ugly truth with euphemisms like 'Southpaw' and 'Negro League', the more they reveal their utter indifference to the plight of those enslaved human beings made to dance and jape for the amusement of Confederate whites. One must eventually question whether or not such supreme neglect crosses over into open hostility by declining to stand on the right side of history. To have written no book at all would have been better than to have propagated this racist mess of half-truths and outright trash.

This. Looks. Awesome.

Keep it up, guys!

You guys have chosen a fascinating way to tell this alternate history through the eyes of three very different "experts" from within the timeline. In addition to being an interesting topic, this project will help demonstrate that there is never one "true" history for anything, but only a series of interpretations based on how events are perceived within the cultural and moral mindset of the historian.

1908 World Series, Bob Feller



These are the saddest of possible words: “Tinker to Evers to Chance.”

That precise 6-4-3 double play occurred thrice during the six game set, contributing significantly to the Chicago victories.

The Cubs won the 1908 Series- the second Series to be played under the DH rule- in spite of a solid effort by the Detroit Tigers, and in spite of the delays caused by protests linked to Dynamite Bill Bryan and the Populists that postponed Game 3 by nearly four hours.

This was also the last Chicago Cubs victory in the World Series, and their last NL pennant.

Last NL Pennant? Geez the Cubs get even worse ITTL?

Also, DH? In 1908? I am intrigued.

1908 World Series, Tris Speaker



No Saint, but No Ordinary Sinner
William J. Bryan, better known by his nom de guerre, 'Dynamite Bill', was one of the most courageous and morally upstanding statesmen of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Well, I should qualify that appellation - to borrow what Bryan would probably have called an apt metaphor, "In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king." The turn of the century was absolutely a time of prevailing, undisguised racism, and as much as Bryan was a product of this era and its attitudes, he still stands head and shoulders above the rest. He was the leading figure of the People's Party, and was their candidate in every election from 1896 to 1916. The Populists' antipathy for the Confederacy was rooted deeply in poisonous nationalist sentiment, which we must not pretend Dynamite Bill did not abet and encourage, but he had his own, higher motivation - his deeply held Christian faith. Religious demagoguery was rife in contemporary politics (for an example, see Confederate President John Sharp Williams' 1910 inaugural address, which contained 47 separate references to 'God', 'our Heavenly Master', and other similar terms), but Dynamite Bill transcended mere Bible thumping, being a man wholly consumed by his beliefs. He brought his belief in God and Christian Charity into everything he did, from the House of Representatives, to the Senate, and on the immensely popular Chautauqua circuit, preaching God and the income tax to the Midwest in equal measure. He was a fierce opponent of Confederate slavery, introducing almost 50 resolutions in Congress to condemn particular outrages, and the practice in general. However, he was willing to turn a blind eye to the numerous other injustices of the period, particular the penal labor practices of the border states, and especially Chinese exclusion in the West, both vital battlegrounds in any Presidential election. Still, he was a vigorous proponent of his ideology, and when his 1908 presidential campaign swept through Chicago in October of that year, the streets were jammed with crowds, whipped into a frenzy by his magnificent, explosive oratory, and the huge protests against 'Rebel-owned' or investing businesses lasted for days afterwards.

(OOC)

Zek Sora said:

This. Looks. Awesome.

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zoomar said:

You guys have chosen a fascinating way to tell this alternate history through the eyes of three very different "experts" from within the timeline.

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Thanks.

packmanwiscy said:

Also, DH? In 1908? I am intrigued.

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Connie Mack proposed the idea in 1906, and was apparently not the first to do so- and for the exact same reasons as later proponents; he was tired of watching his pitchers go out there and promptly fail to hit anything.

"Dynamite Bill", Mel Ott

Georgepatton said:

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William Jennings Bryan is one of the great historical enemies of the Confederacy after Abe Lincoln himself. The Union Populists of the late 19th and early 20th century were nothing better than anarchistic socialists who agitated for an illegal war of aggression against the Confederacy--not that such a war would be without precedence thanks to "Honest" Abe. Confederates have had to live with such threats their whole lives, but what makes Dynamite Bill and his band of radicals all the more dangerous was their desire to execute the Confederate ruling class (at this time, it was still the plantation-owning agrarians, but towards the end of his life, Jennings turned his ire towards Texan oil men and Atlantic businessmen) and seize their property. Jennings created a political ideology centered around murder, theft and bigotry of Southerners like myself.

But on another level, one that's far more personal for me as a baseball player and historian, is what Dynamite Bill Bryan and his band of thugs did to the 1908 Union World Series between the Chicago Cubs and the Detroit Tigers. Bryan held a series of pre-election rallies in Chicago that year as he made his fourth attempt at the White House, and a rally he held on October 12 (the day of Game 3) grew so out of hand, that it caused the game to be delayed for almost 4 hours! Bryan had a silver tongue worthy of the Great Serpent himself if he could enthrall a crowd such as that. What upsets me the most is when sports broadcasters speak about the so-called "Curse of Dynamite Bill" to explain why the Cubs haven't won a World Series since then. We should not make light of history's monsters in such a way.

I don't give a shit about sports, but I kind of like baseball and I do love anything to do with Bryan and the Populists. I award you my interest and my good fortunes.

(On a slightly related note, a few weeks back I was thinking of doing a TL-191 based wikibox series with Bryan as the anti-Confederate POTUS who wrecked their shit in the third war, reclaiming the last bit's of the US after a successful 1880 war. Kind weird how this popped up soon afterwards.)

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Top Ten Southpaw Players: 10-7, Bob Feller

The pre-1983 Southpaw Leagues are sorely underrepresented in historical accounts of baseball in the CSA, in part because few people desire to research them, and in part because in many cases data is scarce- often little more than a box score tucked away in the bottom corner of a sports page in a local newspaper, sometimes not even that much.

However, the data- and the stories- that have survived have given us an indication of a baseball history as deep and rich as any other league.

Many tall tales are attached to Southpaw league players- hosts of picking-field stories, names and teams varying depending on the location, of twelve-foot-tall batters who swung whole tree trunks as bats, players who hit a dozen home runs in a game, a home run launched so high and so far it wasn't caught until the next day's game in another park- "You're out," yells the apocryphal umpire, "yesterday in ----!"

At the same time, real players like Luther White and Sylvester Meaher did have great accomplishments, with at least some documentation to back them up. So in 2008, for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Brown v. Atlanta Black Crackers ruling that ended the Southpaw era, the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown took what information they had and came up with the Top Ten Southpaw Leaguers.

Of course, any top ten list will be subjective, this more than most; readers were encouraged to visit and contribute to databases of stories and statistics.


#10: MARCHAND STRONG



Marchand Strong was most famous as the catcher for the Monroe Monarchs for the 1960s, and one of the best power-hitting catchers in baseball history. He was the first catcher ever in the LCCB to regularly bat cleanup, and his batting average, home run count, and RBI total all remain catcher records in the LCCB.

Unlike later power-hitting catchers, Strong was just as good behind the batter's box as inside it, with a confirmed fielding percentage of .988 across his career- another LCCB catcher record. Pithcers adored him as a batterymate for his ability to pluck the ball out of nowhere while barely even moving.

Strong's 16-year career ended with the final playoff game of the 1972 LCCB Divisional Playoffs, against his old team the Monarchs. The Monroe homefield crowd gave him a standing ovation with every at-bat, and his solo home run in the 6th was met with cheers as loud as when the Monarchs eventually won the game to go on to play for (and eventually win) the LCCB Championship.


#9: NORBERT MARCELLE



Norbert Marcelle was the King of the Three True Outcomes- the strikeout, the walk, and the home run. It was said his fastball was so powerful it once went right through the webbing of a catcher's glove, his changeup so slow you could swing three times before it got to the plate, and one time his curveball turned all the way around and he caught his own pitch, but his otherworldly pitches came at a cost- it was also said he could tell the ball where to go or what to do, but not both. While he was easily a strikeout king, his walk rate was abysmal, and it seemed like a batter who got even a tiny piece of his fastballs would send them flying so far out of the park they'd be found, days later, in orange groves half a mile away.

For years where his statistics were available (1922-1926), he issued 1755 strikeouts in 1490 innings- but also, 844 base-on-balls, 82 hit-by-pitches (the largest known number in baseball history over a five year span), and 264 of the 690 hits against him were for home runs (the highest known HR/H rate for any pitcher with more than 600 innings). His two no-hitters in June 1925 are also the third closest pair of no-hitters recorded by a single pitcher (after Dom Correia for the New York Yankees in 1978 and Peter Franklin for the minor league Fargo Freedom in 1960).

His longevity and consistency- approximated statistics suggest he retained a 10 K/9, 5 BB/9 ratio until his retirement- fuelled a legendary status amongst the Florida baseball fan community, not hurt by his career overlap with other legendary greats like Arthur Blackburn, Davis Macon, and Marchand Strong, with whom Marcelle was batterymate in 1959.


#8: THOMAS GATEWOOD



No one was as lightning-fast on the basepaths as Thomas Gatewood, and few had his skill at the bat, either. The quick-footed shortstop was also capable of making plays in the field that no one else could match- his glove stabbing upward to steal a line drive from the air robbed many a player of a base hit, and his ability to turn a ground ball into the first half of a double play killed dozens of offensive rallies.

He was widely regarded as the next prospective 3000-hit-club member and soon to be the first person on either side of the border to reach 1000 stolen bases across all leagues in the liveball era, but his career was unfairly cut short before we could have known the full extent of his achievements.


#7: ALLEN DIXON



Allen Dixon was a rare case in the Southpaw leagues- he was one of the few slaves of the era who knew how to read and write in spite of never acquiring an education waiver, a fact he apparently kept well-hidden from his owners.

His journal has proven invaluable to baseball researchers, because he kept detailed logs of every game he played in or witnessed- with a playing career lasting nearly two decades and a career as a talent scout afterwards, we have detailed game logs for thousands of games in otherwise under-reported leagues.

His off-field work would have surely earned him a place in the annals of Southpaw baseball, but his on-field career was tremendous as well- he was part of the most vicious infield in the Cotton States League, and in addition to racking up well over 2000 hits, he got on base at a 42% clip.

Thomas Gatewood, Tris Speaker

Gryphon said:

#8: THOMAS GATEWOOD

No one was as lightning-fast on the basepaths as Thomas Gatewood, and few had his skill at the bat, either. The quick-footed shortstop was also capable of making plays in the field that no one else could match- his glove stabbing upward to steal a line drive from the air robbed many a player of a base hit, and his ability to turn a ground ball into the first half of a double play killed dozens of offensive rallies.

He was widely regarded as the next prospective 3000-hit-club member and soon to be the first person on either side of the border to reach 1000 stolen bases across all leagues in the liveball era, but his career was unfairly cut short before we could have known the full extent of his achievements.

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Let's get one thing straight here - Thomas Gatewood's death is not 'unknown.' He was murdered, lynched by an eager crowd of white Mississippi baseball fans. Unprovoked, unjustified, unreasoning death at the hands of a mob.

Not that it was simply a random event, of course. The deflationary effects of the booming Confederate oil sector in the mid 20th century were driving the rural farmers of northern Mississippi deeper and deeper into economic deprivation - in a deflationary economy, as the supply of money decreases, the effective value of debts increases. Squeezed between falling crop prices and vastly more profitable oil business driving up the price of everything, the population Tallahatchie County was 66% below the poverty line in 1959, according to the rudimentary statistics gathered by the Mississippi state government. The plutocratic masters of the Confederacy were profiting handsomely from all of this, and so not only was nothing done to alleviate the crushing poverty, it was in fact actively encouraged with regressive sales taxes. So it is probably no surprise that when the Tallahatchie Tugs, the local slave baseball team into which locals had invested as a point of personal pride, suffered a crushing 23-0 defeat on July 17, 1959, drunken fans rampaged onto the field, stealing equipment, defacing signs, assaulting the players, and trashing the clubhouse. However, that sort of slave-directed-violence was relatively common, as, shocking and ugly as it was, it rarely advanced beyond administering a beating to the losing players. It is difficult to parse what, exactly, drove this particular instance beyond the 'normal' bounds, but we do know that the entire lineup of the Tugs was found hanging from a grove of trees just outside the town of Webb, along with the white team-owner, the umpire, and two other local whites, whose injuries were non-fatal.

The extent to which modern 'scholars' of baseball seek to diminish or simply ignore these vicious race riots to avoid staining their perfect game with the hideous truth of Confederate slavery and the violence supporting it is morally outrageous, and if we lived in a just society it would be prosecuted as hate speech.

I'd have thought they would lynch the other team; but I guess I shouldn't apply logic to mob violence.

(OOC)

Stuyvesant said:

I'd have thought they would lynch the other team; but I guess I shouldn't apply logic to mob violence.

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They probably had the good sense to get on their bus and head back to Mudville. The home team's got no where to go.

Union Propaganda against Confederate Business Owners, Mel Ott

Georgepatton said:

Let's get one thing straight here - Thomas Gatewood's death is not 'unknown.' He was murdered, lynched by an eager crowd of white Mississippi baseball fans. Unprovoked, unjustified, unreasoning death at the hands of a mob.

Not that it was simply a random event, of course. The deflationary effects of the booming Confederate oil sector in the mid 20th century were driving the rural farmers of northern Mississippi deeper and deeper into economic deprivation - in a deflationary economy, as the supply of money decreases, the effective value of debts increases. Squeezed between falling crop prices and vastly more profitable oil business driving up the price of everything, the population Tallahatchie County was 66% below the poverty line in 1959, according to the rudimentary statistics gathered by the Mississippi state government. The plutocratic masters of the Confederacy were profiting handsomely from all of this, and so not only was nothing done to alleviate the crushing poverty, it was in fact actively encouraged with regressive sales taxes. So it is probably no surprise that when the Tallahatchie Tugs, the local slave baseball team into which locals had invested as a point of personal pride, suffered a crushing 23-0 defeat on July 17, 1959, drunken fans rampaged onto the field, stealing equipment, defacing signs, assaulting the players, and trashing the clubhouse. However, that sort of slave-directed-violence was relatively common, as, shocking and ugly as it was, it rarely advanced beyond administering a beating to the losing players. It is difficult to parse what, exactly, drove this particular instance beyond the 'normal' bounds, but we do know that the entire lineup of the Tugs was found hanging from a grove of trees just outside the town of Webb, along with the white team-owner, the umpire, and two other local whites, whose injuries were non-fatal.

The extent to which modern 'scholars' of baseball seek to diminish or simply ignore these vicious race riots to avoid staining their perfect game with the hideous truth of Confederate slavery and the violence supporting it is morally outrageous, and if we lived in a just society it would be prosecuted as hate speech.

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Certainly the death of such a star player like Thomas Gatewood was a tragedy, but let's not make mountains out of molehills with this. Contemporary records from that time only mention the death of Gatewood and one other player, Donald Alexander. Nowhere does it mention the death of the entire starting nine from that day. Tallahatchie Tug team owner Slew McCain was very distraught at the loss of his star player. He folded the team shortly after the incident, and records from his plantation show that fifteen un-named slaves were sold by the McCain family in July and August, 1959. Most Confederate historians believe that after folding the team, McCain sold the players to other, less-well documented leagues which explains the lack of player records. Furthermore, he helped emancipate Gatewood's and Alexander's surviving family members and arranged for their emigration to Liberia. This incident is frequently blown out of proportion by Northerners who look for any scrap to pillory the Confederacy and its society, but the facts on the ground don't back up the Northern propaganda.

Exhibition Game, Bob Feller




The 59th Exhibition Game between the US and CS major leagues was held on March 10, 1984. It was noteworthy for being the first exhibition held after the series of cases in 1983 that marked a sea change in the rights of slaves in the CSA, and the loosening of restrictions on travel that allowed, for the first time, northern black players to join their teams in traveling south.

The restrictions were lifted just days before the Minneapolis Millers were set to travel to Augusta, and manager Raymond R. McCullough personally went to Marcellus Franklin and Louie Allred, the two black players on the team's active roster at the time, to tell them the news and ask if they wanted to join the team.

"I had an irrational fear that it might be a ploy to kidnap them," McCullough said years later. "I knew about Brown v. ABC and the other cases, of course, but all I could think of was Patty Cannon and Solomon Northup. So I asked them if they wanted to join the team."

"Of course, we were ecstatic," Allred recalled. "Nervous, but excited- we were going to be the first free US blacks ever to play in the CSA."

Franklin, who unfortunately died of a heart attack earlier this year, was first off the bus in Augusta, and met the jeers he faced with his characteristic wide grin. While he was a left-handed third baseman, and the Giants starter Lloyd Farnsworth was also left-handed, the right-handed third baseman Gregory Travington asked McCullough to place Franklin in the lineup in his place.

Franklin later recalled: "I was so grateful to Travington and McCullough for putting me in. This was a once-in-a-lifetime chance."

While Franklin never got a hit, he did manage to draw a walk that turned into a run in the top of the 6th. Allred was luckier, with a single in the first and a three run homer that sent Franklin home.

The Millers, firing on all cylinders, won the game 9 to 4.

Exhibition Game, Mel ott

Gryphon said:

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This is one game that still elicits controversy within the Confederate States, and there is a wide beliefe in Southern baseball circles that it should not have been played at all. It game on the heel of the monumental Brown vs. Atlanta Black Crackers Supreme Court decision which completely changed the face of southpaw baseball as we knew it. I was playing on a white minor league team in Mississippi at that time as a farmhand for the New Orleans Saints, and we were all watching the drama unfold. There was significant public support to have the game postponed or even canceled, and the administration seemed divided on it. President Jimmy Carter (I always knew you could never trust a gosh darned Peachtree Democrat) wanted to keep pressing forward with the game, while Secretary of State Bo Callaway called for the game to be postponed (Vice President John G. Crommelin seemed all too interested in chasing Negress tail). Fellow Peachtree Democrat Sam Nunn was the Director of the Negro Regulatory Agency at the time, and Carter used him as a puppet to let the game go on.

Ultimately, this game should not have been played, and it's surprising that it was as close as it was. While the conditions of Brown v. Atlanta Black Crackers didn't apply to the all-white Augusta Giants, it still weighed heavily on their minds as they prepared for the game against the Minneapolis Millers. Team owner and friend chicken mogul S. Truett Cathy also had significant holdings in various southpaw leagues and teams, and the team's player-manager Archie Manning was hounded by the press. All this meant that the Augusta Giants were woefully unprepared for the game. Many years later, Cathy has said that he regretted the decision to go ahead with the game (he and many other historians claim that he'd been forced into it by members of the Carter administration), and Manning has has said that certainly mistakes were made.

Mistakes were definitely made by the Giants, and it was obvious to anyone watching that their heads simply weren't in the game. Nobody's was--not the players, not the fans at the game and not the Confederate audience at home. The face of Confederate baseball was about to change forever and nobody knew what form it would take. The Minneapolis Millers had two Negro players (Marcellus Franklin and Louie Allred) on its roster for the game, and many were left wondering if Negro players could be playing along-side white players in the top Confederate leagues. Such a thing was unimaginable in Confederate society, and everyone knew that this was the beginning of the last great gasp of southpaw baseball as we knew it, and everyone south of the Mason-Dixon Line realized this. No longer would players and managers work as closely as they had, and players and owners would no longer be able to trust each other. Contracts, arbitration and potentially even free agency would make all these relationships unnecessarily adversarial.