Update: On February 18, 2020, the Nathaniel Conklin House in Babylon village invited me to present on the Cuban Giants. This is the Conklin House announcement and link to their video:
In celebration of Black History Month, Trustee Robyn Silvestri and the Conklin House committee, together with the Babylon Village Historical Society, were proud to host Town of Babylon Historian Mary Cascone for a presentation on The Cuban Giants, America’s first professional black baseball team. While they were in fact neither Cuban, nor giants, this famous team did get their start here in Babylon Village at the Argyle Hotel.
Learn more about these famous baseball legends by clicking the link below or by visiting the Conklin House YouTube channel (33:28).
https://youtu.be/sqzbB_TcP7o
The Legendary CUBAN GIANTS Opened in 1882, the Argyle Hotel was the largest and most expensive hotel in Babylon; however, it was the least successful and was torn down after just 22 years. (Check out this blog post.) However, that short-lived hotel has a longer lasting legacy as the birthplace of the Cuban Giants, the First Professional Black Baseball Team.
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| South Side Signal, August 22, 1885, p. 3 |
In the summer
of 1885, Babylon village was a vacation destination, for those who stayed at
local hotels – Argyle Hotel, Watson House, Surf Hotel, Sherman House, Boyne’s Manhattan
House, East End Hotel – or had one of the many summer homes and country estates
in the area. Most visitors from New York City arrived by railroad (the railroad
first arrived in Babylon in 1869), and vacationers were transported to their
home and hotels by carriages and horsecars (a trolley-type wagon pulled on street
railed by horses).
It has been
opined whether the “Athletics turned Cuban Giants” were a group of hotel
employees that just happened to be really good athletes or whether a group of skilled
athletes decided to work at the same hotel. The latter is more likely. Frank P.
Thompson, head waiter at the Argyle Hotel, and is said to have organized the
group of men to work at the hotel and form a ball club to entertain the hotel
guests. Regardless of race, earning a living as an athlete was uncommon in the
late 1800s and athletes needed to have “day jobs” to support themselves. Although
it may have been a burden on the employees, it was probably a good combination
for resort hotels to have employees that could perform hotel tasks and provide
entertainment – athletes who could be waiters and play baseball, musicians who
could drive carriages and play in a band, artists who could work at the front
desk and teach art classes to hotel patrons.
Cuban Giants – a team of neither
Cubans nor Giants, they were just regular sized, Talented, people
Folklore about
the team has claimed that the team name was chosen to imply that the ball club was
made up of foreign athletes, rather than Black Americans. Supposedly, this was
to combat societal racism and make the team more acceptable to White spectators
and promoters of the time. It has also been claimed that the players spoke “gibberish”
to one another in an attempt to sound like they were speaking Spanish.
It is not heartening
for this historian to have to describe a famous group of talented athletes who
had to pretend to be someone other than themselves. The history of American
society has no shortage of examples of racism and xenophobia – whether perpetuated
against Black Americans or immigrants, like that against the Irish in the
1800s. I just accepted the “ethnic ruse” story … until I read “The Birth of the
Cuban Giants,” by baseball historian Jerry Malloy.[i]
The Society of American Baseball Research sponsors a yearly conference in his
honor – the Jerry Malloy Negro League Conference.[ii]
Malloy described that “Those familiar with the Cuban Giants at all probably have two vivid
images of them … the ball-playing waiters from Babylon, NY … [and] … these
players jabbering inarticulate gibberish, hoping it sounded enough like Spanish
to convince white that they were Cubans, not Black Americans.” But he pondered whether
the “ball-playing
waiters in linguistic and ethic disguise” was accurate.
Really? … His questioning of the “ethic
disguise” was a surprise! It is the usually the second thing that people talk
about – first: they were the First Professional Black Baseball Team, and,
second: the team was so named because they pretended to be Cubans.
Delightfully, for this historian, Malloy
footnoted his Cuban Giants essay, which led to an interesting journey of the team’s
early years, starting in Babylon.
Going back to that first South Side Signal article (see above), the first known news clipping
about the team. Described only as ball players and hotel employees, it is
interesting to note that there was no mention of the players’ racial identities.
In this historian’s experience, it seems unusual for the time period.
Just 40 days
after that first news clipping in August 1885, the New York Times
announced an upcoming game between the Metropolitans and the Cuban Giants. Leading
up to the October 5th game, the New York Times published
these notices of the game, each of which make reference to the Cuban Giants as
Black ball players. Please note that the term “colored” was the commonly
used term for Black people, at that time, as seen in this and other news
clippings.
Next, the Cuban Giants played the
Athletic, in Philadelphia, October 10th. On October 7, The
Sporting Life newspaper announced the upcoming game with no reference to
the players’ race and, on October 14, reported the game results with reference
to the Cuban Giants as a team of Black players.
Reading these
snippets of the first few months of the team’s existence … Where was the “ethnic
ruse”? The naming-myth would lead us to believe that the team would be
described as “foreigners.” Game announcements and news from 1885 to 1889 either
described the team as Black or gave no racial description.
Getting back
to Mr. Malloy. He asserted that euphemisms such as “Cuban,” “Spanish” and
“Arabian” had been used by sporting news to describe Black players, and that
could be the reason that the name Cuban was chosen. Whether or not the team
players or promoters had a connection to the island nation of Cuba before the
1885 naming is unknown, but they played a winter tour of Cuba in 1886, which
was a good way to play all-year-round.
As for
pretending to speak Spanish, Mr. Malloy cries “foul”! He found no mention of
the “linguistic camouflage” prior to a 1938 article published in Esquire
magazine.[iii]
The claim is attributed to Sol White – the ballplayer, journalist and historian who literally wrote the book
“History of Colored Base Ball.” But White did not play for the Cuban Giants
until the 1890s, well after the name was chosen.
Sol White claimed that “the version which came
to him is that when that first team began playing away from home, they passed
as foreigners – Cubans, as they finally decided – hoping to conceal the fact
that they were just American Negro hotel waiters, and talked a gibberish to
each other on the field which, they hoped, sounded like Spanish.” If that is the
story that Mr. White believed, no contemporaneous record of that “concealment”
version has been found.
It appears that the “ruse” of ethic
concealment was a ruse.
Babylon and the Ball
Players
The Historian’s Office is often asked about the
original players of the Cuban Giants team that formed in Babylon. There has
been an assumption that the players lived in Babylon, either before the team’s
formation or in the years after, but I have yet to identify any of the players
as growing up on Long Island or even New York City.
Like most
resort towns, seasonal employees came from elsewhere. Many of those original
players came from Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. They got
their professional start in Babylon, but no evidence has been found that they
returned to Babylon after they became nationally and internationally famous.
In 2010, the
Village of Babylon dedicated a wonderful monument to the Cuban Giants, at the
northwest corner of Argyle Park. The monument was placed near the site of the
old Argyle Hotel, where the team is likely to have played. The monument is a
stone with an engraved plaque and a home plate sitting in front.
Cuban Giants – Major
League Baseball and the Hall of Fame
Members of
the Cuban Giants were not the first Black baseball players. There were amateur
teams of Black players and there were some Black players that played on
professional and predominantly White teams. What sets the Cuban Giants apart is
that they were a whole team of Black athletes and they were PAID, making them
the first PROFESSIONAL BLACK Baseball Team.
In December 2020, Major League Baseball
announced that they would now incorporate players and teams from the seven Negro
Major Leagues, 1920 to 1948, into MLB.[iv]
Many have asked if this means that the
Cuban Giants are now part of Major League Baseball. In short … No.
It is easy
to lump historical facts into one heap, but you have to break this down … A
25-year-old player in the 1885 Cuban Giants, would have been 60-years-old when
the Negro Major Leagues started in 1920. The Cuban Giants are easily two
generations before those Negro Leagues.
When the Cuban Giants started in 1885, they played White teams, as
well as Black teams. In the regional news clippings that I have been able to
compile from 1885 to 1886, just one early sports writer gave a racist
description of the team’s complexion and called the game a “minstrel
performance,” but the writer did not assert that Black and White players
shouldn’t play together. The other news clippings from those first years either
described the team as Black or gave no description of race, at all.
In the fall
of 1887, the St. Louis Browns refused to play the Cuban Giants on the basis of
race. The Sporting Life[v]
described that several teams “had trouble from their white players over the
colored men” and “at the last International League meeting a resolution was
passed prohibiting the employment of colored players in the future.” That year
brought the first attempt to create a league for Black baseball teams – the
National Colored Base Ball League. It lasted two weeks. Several attempts to form leagues occurred
until 1920.
Around 1896,
circumstances led to a fracture in the Cuban Giants team. Some players became
part of an offshoot team known as the Cuban X-Giants, a reference to literally
being “ex-players” of the Cuban Giants. The remaining team used the names Original
Cuban Giants or Genuine Cuban Giants.
The National
Baseball Hall of Fame website has a Hall of Fame Explorer where you can search by player or team names. The only
Hall of Famer whose primary team was the Cuban Giants is Frank Grant.
Inducted in 2006, Grant was a 2nd Baseman who started with the Cuban
Giants in 1887. Sol White who played for the Cuban Giants (1890-1891, 1893-1894, 1896) and the
Cuban X-Giants (1896-1899, 1901), was also inducted into the Hall of Fame in
2006, but his primary team is listed as the Philadelphia Giants and his primary
position is as an Executive.
Locally, the
Cuban Giants were posthumously inducted into the Suffolk Sports Hall of Fame, in 2019. Among the photographs on the SSHF website, is
one where the plaque was presented to the late Mayor Ralph Scordino and Village
Historian Jackie Marsden at the Cuban Giants monument, in Argyle Park. The
Hall of Fame plaque is now resides with the Village of Babylon
Historical & Preservation Society.
Celebrating the Legends But
Not the Myths
Exploring the early history of the Cuban
Giants has been interesting. Despite the long-standing myth that the Cuban
Giants baseball players concealed their racial identities as Black Americans by
pretending to be Cubans, baseball historians and local historians have found no
evidence of that “ethic disguise.”
Not unlike other Black Americans and
marginalized groups the baseball players experienced a mixture of acceptance
and racism from opposing teams, journalists and spectators. The Cuban Giants –
and other Black teams – started out playing White teams (and many Black players
were part of predominantly-White teams) but were eventually denied access and
consigned to playing exhibition games and other Black teams. There were offshoots
of the Cuban Giants, but the Cuban Giants that started playing in Babylon, in
1885, were part of what is known as the “Pre-Negro Leagues Era.”
The Cuban Giants were in Babylon for just one summer in 1885, but they left an indelible and proud mark on our local history. We take great pride in seeing the names “Cuban Giants” and “Babylon” on the first page of most books about Black baseball. The Cuban Giants were the First Professional Team of Black Baseball Players, and they were celebrated for their athletic talents, on Long Island and around the World, not just now but during their own time.
[i] Malloy, Jerry. “Birth of
the Cuban Giants.” Out of the Shadows: African American Baseball from the
Cuban Giants to Jackie Robinson, edited by Bill Kirwin, University of
Nebraska Press, 2005.
Among
his many works, Mr. Malloy also wrote the introduction to the reprint of Sol
White's History of Colored Base Ball with Other Documents on the Early Black
Game, 1886-1936. University of Nebraska Press, 1996.
[ii] Society of American Baseball Research, Jerry Malloy Negro League Conference: https://sabr.org/malloy. Jerry Malloy Negro League Conference, Wikipedia page:.
[iii] Harlow, A.F., “Unrecognized Stars,” Esquire Magazine, September 1938, 75.
[iv] “MLB's press release names the following leagues as those being elevated: [1] the Negro National League (I) (1920–1931); [2] the Eastern Colored League (1923–1928); [3] the American Negro League (1929); [4] the East-West League (1932); [5] the Negro Southern League (1932); [6] the Negro National League (II) (1933–1948); and [7] the Negro American League (1937–1948).” < https://www.cbssports.com/mlb/news/mlb-roundtable-trevor-bauer-is-the-best-free-agent-left-on-the-market-where-will-he-land/ ; Accessed January 28, 2021.>
[v] “The Browns’ Strike – Why They Refused to Play and Exhibition Game Last Sunday – The Color Question,” The Sporting Life, September 21, 1887, p. 4.