By Joe Marren
Buffalo, NY – In case this lesson has escaped you, life isn't fair. If it were, only politicians and control board members would get parking tickets in Buffalo, and the Bills would have won at least two Super Bowls - the two they were winning at halftime.
Baseball is a prime example of pitchers' inhumanity to hitters and voters' inhumanity to Hall of Fame candidates. Let me explain: Late last month the Hall selectors anointed two Buffalo players - yes, I said two - and cast aside two others like corked bats at an umpires' parley.
I suppose as talkin' proud Buffalonians we should see the white smoke wafting up from Cooperstown and proclaim "Habemus inductees," pardon the mix of Vatican Latin and a called third strike on my linguistic prowess. But I'm not happy. The result reminded of that old Vaudeville tagline: "A little song, a little dance, a little seltzer down the pants." In short, we wuz robbed and we likely can't "wait'll next year" to see justice done.
To put this in context: In a belated effort to level the playing field, a committee of baseball historians elected 17 people out of a field of 39 Negro and pre-Negro Leagues candidates to the Hall of Fame. From Buffalo came Frank Grant and Pete Hill. On the ballot, yet missing the cut, was Grant "Home Run" Johnson. But not even making the traveling squad was Ted Page.
Those men not only played the so-called forgotten innings of baseball, they played them for a while in Buffalo. I don't mean to be glib or self-deprecating, I'm paraphrasing what James Riley wrote in The Biographical Encyclopedia of the Negro Baseball Leagues. He called three area squads - The Pittsburgh Stars of Buffalo, The Buffalo Giants and the Buffalo Red Caps - teams of "lesser status." Well, thanks, Jim, call us sometime when you're snowed in in your driveway. Despite Jim's assessment, my research tells me that all four should be in the Hall.
Here's why, and I'll start with the two who made it:
Frank Grant played the infield for the International League Buffalo Bisons from July 1886 to the end of the 1888 season. In 1887 he batted .340, the best on the team and third-best in the league. The next season his batting average was .346, fifth-best in the I-L. That's when a Sporting Life magazine correspondent said Grant was the best all-around player Buffalo ever had. So he was respected by his teammates, right? Hardly. His last year here they refused to sit with him for the team photo. In 1889, the league closed its doors to African-American players. Grant still played in the pre-Negro Leagues until 1903. After his retirement he was a waiter in New York City and died in 1937.
Left fielder Joseph Preston "Pete" Hill played or helped manage eight teams for 26 years, from 1899 to 1925. I said years instead of seasons because a baseball year for a barnstorming team included tough playing on hard fields that were more dirt than grass. A team that wasn't playing wasn't making money so it meant a game almost every day. And then came winter ball in Central or South America. A ballplayer got old before his time in those days. But Hill kept on playing and he formed the Buffalo Red Caps in the late '20s. He died in Buffalo on Nov. 26, 1951. In 1952 the Pittsburgh Courier, a major African-American newspaper, named him to its Second Team All-Time All-Star squad behind Monte Irvin.
Slighted by Hall voters was Grant Home Run Johnson, one of the best-hitting shortstops of his day. Johnson earned his nickname not for compiling Ruthian stats, but for hitting the ball over the fences at crucial times during the dead ball era of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He and Pete Hill were teammates from 1903-1906 with the Philadelphia Giants. Like Hill, he didn't seem to know when to quit playing, staying in the game until he was 58 with the Buffalo Giants. After he left baseball he worked for the New York Central Railroad and died in Buffalo on Sept. 4, 1963. He was 89.
Ted Page was a right-fielder for probably two of the most famous Negro Leagues teams, and likely overshadowed by teammates. He played with Josh Gibson on the 1931 Homestead Grays, which had a 136-17 record. And then he played with Gibson, Satchel Paige and Cool Papa Bell on the 1932 Pittsburgh Crawfords. But he never would have gotten on those teams without the help of Home Run Johnson and the Buffalo Giants. Page hooked on with the Giants in 1924-1925. As he told John Holway in "Voices From the Great Black Baseball Leagues": "Grant had a good ball team in Buffalo -- players came from all over to play with him." (Take that, Riley.) Page retied in 1937 with a .335 Negro Leagues batting average and a .429 average versus white players in exhibitions. After retirement he owned a bowling alley in Pittsburgh and wrote a bowling column for an area newspaper. He died Dec. 1, 1984, beaten to death with a baseball bat during a burglary in his apartment.
And pages 47-53 of Hank Aaron's autobiography, "I Had a Hammer," details his Buffalo playing days. That's right, Buffalo. But Aaron is already in the Hall. Too bad Page and Johnson won't be joining him some day.
Listener-Commentator Joe Marren is an assistant professor of communications at Buffalo State.
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