Philadelphia Baseball History

Original thinking is not necessarily the hallmark of sports reporting these days.   It’s more like a pack mentality.   Here we are at the beginning of Spring Training.   No games have been played, and the roster has not been set.   Indeed, for the Phillies, this is a year of major transitions.   Yet, before anyone truly knows who is going to be on the major league club, all of the major outlets are simply assuming that the Phils will be as bad, if not worse, than last year. Quite frankly, I find this nothing more than lazy reporting.   Certainly, the theme for the Phillies this year is that of change; long awaited change.   Thankfully, the new guard has chosen to build through youth.   What this means is that the major league roster will be full of players with a limited track record from which to judge.   For those who make a living off of prognostication, the Phillies present a particularly difficult problem, that of uncertainty.   Faced with uncertainty, most are simply falli

While searing the Internet and browsing through social media to find topics to highlight during African-American History Month, I came across a tweet claiming that the Philadelphia Dolly Vardens, a team of all African-American women, became the first professional baseball team in 1867, a full two years before the formation of the Cincinnati Red Stockings.   Intrigued, but also skeptical, I wanted to find out more about the Dolly Vardens. The first thing I noticed is that the statement that the Dolly Vardens were the first professional baseball team, or the first team to be paid to play baseball, is repeated on numerous websites, tweets, and Instagram posts without any citation or reference to an original source.   One Facebook page, entitled “The Dolly Varden Project,” even posts a photo of an all-female African-American team claiming it to be of the Dolly Vardens.   Further research, however, reveals the photo to be of a team organized by a YMCA in the 1920s.   Nonetheless, this

    “Big Bertha” was the nickname given to large German artillery guns used during the First World War.   It was also the nickname given to a 6’ 4” tall, 240 pound navy veteran hailing from Tyler, Texas named Louis Napoleon Santop. Gifted with explosive power both behind the plate and at the plate, Santop was the premiere catcher and power hitter in African-American baseball in the pre- and early negro league era. In pre-game warm-ups, Santop entertained the crowd with an exhibition of his arm strength, throwing a baseball over the centerfield fence, and then randomly throwing to each of the bases, all while in the crouched position behind the plate. At the plate, Santop hit massive line-drives in the dead ball era.   It has been said that he could call his shots long before Babe Ruth did it in the 1932 World Series, and even hit one home run about 500 feet. At age twenty, Santop made-up half of the “kid battery” of the 1910 Philadelphia Giants, along with twenty

In the first decade of the 20th Century, a Philadelphia team dominated African-American baseball, claiming the title of World's Colored Champions from1904-1910. The team included such Hall of Famers as Sol White, Rube Foster, Pete Hill, Frank Grant and John Henry "Pop"Lloyd. By: William J. Kovatch, Jr.

In 1869, two years after Octavius Catto and the Philadelphia Pythians were denied entry into the National Association Base Ball Players because of the color of their skin, fully professional teams emerged. Disappointingly, in the age of professionalism, segregation continued to plague the sport. As professional baseball grew, Philadelphia played a key role in the development of African-American teams.  The Athletic Base Ball Club of Philadelphia captured the first pennant of a fully professional league in 1871, and then played the first game of the National League in 1876.  But the professional major leagues were an exclusive club of all-white teams. In 1884, brothers Moses Fleetwood Walker and Weldy Walker discovered just how exclusive that club was.  The Walker brothers were African-Americans who played for the Toledo Blue Stockings of the American Association, a major league that rivaled the National League in the 19th Century. Teams from the American Association and the

            Tanking.             Really?             Let me get this straight.   The Phillies front office neglected its minor league system to a point where it was one of the worst in baseball.   The skill and talent from the team that once dominated the National League East got old, got injured, and the talent pool from the minor leagues was not able to replace it.   And now that the Phillies are doing what they can to fix their minor league system, they get lumped into a discussion about tanking?             Let’s take a step back and talk about tanking.   It is an allegation that a team is not working to put together a staff that could be competitive on the major league level specifically for the purpose of taking advantage of higher draft picks and the “slot money” that comes with it.   What is slot money?   It was former Commissioner Bud Selig’s attempt to limit the amount of signing bonuses a club could offer a new draftee.   Each “slot” in the draft was assigned

Those who have seen Ken Burns' documentary, Baseball, are familiar with the Philadelphia Pythians. Led by prominent educators Octavius Catto and Jacobs White,  the Pythians were a team of African-American players who pushed for greater racial equality. They frequently spoke about civil rights with the other African-American teams they played when socializing after the game. In 1867, the Pythians first applied for entrance in the Pennsylvania Association of Base Ball Players, but were asked to withdraw their request because of race. They went on to apply for membership in the National Association of Base Ball Players.  They were denied entrance based on the shameful view that by keeping the races separate, there could be no hard feelings. The Pythians faded after their star shortstop, Catto, was murdered on election day by an Irish Democrat who wanted to prevent Catto from encouraging more African-Americans to go to the polls and vote for the more progressive Republican Party. 

            In the business of baseball, Colonel John Rogers and Benjamin Shibe were not allies.   To the contrary, Shibe was the largest owner of the Philadelphia Athletics who played in the upstart American League.   The A’s had signed away one of the stars of Rogers’ Philadelphia Phillies, Nap Lajoie, in the premier season of 1901.   Many of Lajoie’s teammates also jumped leagues, which prompted Rogers to seek an injunction preventing former Phillies from playing in American League games in the state of Pennsylvania.             But on the gridiron, Rogers and Shibe became unlikely compatriots.   In 1902, football was becoming more popular in the United States.   Rogers and Shibe saw an opportunity to benefit from the rising popularity of the sport, and formed the first professional football league: the National Football League.   The league, which is unrelated to the current NFL, had modest beginnings.   When it formed in 1902, it had only three teams.   Rogers called his team