The Negro Leagues were usually different in several respects from the Major Leagues. They brought many things to baseball, from the clothing worn on the field to the relationship of the players with the management.
MLB will be celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Negro Leagues so we take the opportunity to review some innovative factors that years later would be adopted in the majors.
1. Night baseball
Five years before any Major League team will play under artificial lights, Negro Leagues used to play at night. After the Great Depression devastated baseball teams in the United States – particularly the Negro Leagues – the owner of the Kansas City Monarchs, JL Wilkinson bet everything he had, mortgaging his properties in 1929 to a commission in Omaha. to build portable light generators. The Monarchs had their first night game on April 28, 1930, and soon the towers of 50 allowed Wilkinson to allow his team to play double rounds at night, both at home and on the road.
“To be honest, Wilkinson didn’t do it to innovate,” Negro Leagues Museum president Bob Kendrick said in an interview with MLB Network. “He did it for survival. He was looking for a way that the working class could attend the games. The nightly meetings were the answer ”.
Wilkinson needed a $ 50,000 loan to buy the lights, but the night games were so popular that he was able to recoup the investment in just one year. The Monarchs’ evening engagements were even more popular than Sunday games – important, considering that local churches adjusted their Sunday service hours so that they did not coincide with matinee games. Kansas City rented lighting equipment for some of its rivals, distributing nighttime baseball for the Negro Leagues. The minor leagues began playing night games in 1930, but the majors did not do so until the Reds hosted the Phillies at Crosley Field on May 24, 1935.
2) Transfer of players
The infamous Major League Baseball reserve clause tied players back to their original clubs until the mid-1970s, but the flexibility in Negro Leagues contracts created an environment of mobility that was unprecedented for the time. The biggest stars of the Negro Leagues changed their uniforms regularly, going to the team that wanted it the most, be it within the Negro Leagues, or in Mexico or the Dominican Republic. Satchel Paige took advantage of that like no other, pitching with the team that paid him the most or with the one that attracted the largest possible audience. Paige once said that he had pitched for 250 teams in his baseball life.
3) Base runs
The Negro Leagues did not invent being aggressive on the bases: Wilbert Robinson in the 1890s with the Orioles, for example, usually participated in run-and-bat plays, suicidal squeezes plays, and bunts. But when the majors turned to long-range hitting, with Babe Ruth popularizing the home run, Negro Leagues became the focus of creative small-ball plays. Cool Papa Bell was known as the fastest player in the world, but he was not the only one who ran the bases aggressively. Buck O’Neil used to say that fans couldn’t get out of their seats during their games “because you might miss something you haven’t seen before.”
“They had guys who could hit home runs,” Kendrick said in 2014, “but there were more guys stealing 40, 50 bases in one season.”
Running backs were constantly on the move in Negro League games, taking an extra base at every opportunity. You don’t have to look far to see what Jackie Robinson did in the majors, distracting opposing pitchers with his movements on the bases.
4) Batting helmets
Willie Wells of the Negro Leagues is considered by many historians to be the first professional player to use a helmet when batting. Opposing pitchers used to hit the Newark Eagles star close to the body, but when Well was knocked unconscious from a pitch, he played the next day (ignoring medics’ advice) wearing a construction helmet. Neither the concussion nor the helmet limited Wells’s bat, he was a steady .300 hitter for the rest of the decade. Helmets on hitters weren’t seen in the majors until Brooklyn Dodgers general manager Larry MacPhail had the entire team wear helmets in 1941.
5) Shinguards for receivers
Hall of Fame Roger Bresnahan is credited with popularizing shin guards in 1907, but he was not the first to do so in organized baseball. In fact, receiver John “Bud” Fowler was the pioneer in using them for very different reasons than today.
Fowler was the first African-American baseball player to use pieces of wood to cover his shins to protect himself from the hooks of opposing players. But catcher Chappie Johnson started using them in 1902, three years before JJ Clarke made it to the majors. A decade later, Negro Leagues star Pop Loyd wore iron shin guards underneath his socks in an exhibition game against Ty Cobb, helping protect him from Cobb’s sweeps. (GG) (TAKEN MLB.COM)