Happy Birthday “Cool Papa Bell”

“Cool Papa” Bell, (Hall of Famer), was born in 1903 in Mississippi and his life spanned almost the entire century. He witnessed it all. He played in the Negro Leagues from 1922 to 1950, an incredible run, and is often said to be the fastest man to ever play the game. (There’s a famous story, mentioned in every piece about him, first related by Satchel Paige: Bell was so fast that at bedtime he would flip the light-switch in his room and be in bed before the light actually went off.) In 1974, he finally made it into the Hall of Fame. (At least he was alive to experience that.) His lifetime batting average in the Negro Leagues was .377.

Perhaps the saddest part of his story is that after he retired from baseball, he tried for many years to get a coaching gig in Major League baseball but no one would hire him. Shameful. He did get work as a scout. When they were kids, his brothers played baseball, too, and Bell had no interest in anything other than getting himself in the game. He signed with one semi-pro black ball club (the pay was so dismal he kept a day job at a packing company), and then another, and then another. He started out as a pitcher before moving to the outfield. He was a switch-hitter. He was so fast that when he batted left-handed, the players in the outfield experienced the dread of anxiety because he was a step or two closer to first base. That’s how fast he was. Nobody wanted to walk him, because if he was on first, he would usually steal second. Then he would steal third. Then he would steal home. So a Cool Papa Bell base hit was as treacherous as three separate men on each base and a power-hitter up at bat. If Bell was on first base, he had “I’m headed for home plate” written all over him. He shows up in Ken Burns Baseball where the story is related that he was on first-base and he ended up making it to home plate on a sacrifice bunt, for God’s sake.

He and Satchel Paige and a couple of others played for a while in the Dominican Republic and then Mexico. (Baseball was integrated in Mexico.) This was in the late 1930s. Cool Papa Bell won the Triple Crown in the Mexican League. He was well-liked by everyone. A good man, who didn’t go for the hard-living hard-drinking hard-womanizing lifestyle of many ballplayers.

Cool Papa Bell was #66 on The Sporting News’ list of greatest ballplayers of all time.

Author Donald Honig worked in many genres. He wrote mystery novels, Civil War books, books for kids, as well as baseball books. Honig read Lawrence Ritter’s classic The Glory of Their Times: The Story of the Early Days of Baseball Told by the Men Who Played It, Honig was inspired to follow suit and pick up the story. The result was his 1975 book Baseball When the Grass Was Real: Baseball from the Twenties to the Forties, Told by the Men Who Played It. It’s an unofficial sequel to Ritter’s book, picking up where Ritter left off.

Ritter interviewed ballplayers whose heyday was in the late 1800s, early decades of 20th century. Honig focused on the 20 years between the two World Wars. He set out on his own lengthy journey around America, tracking down these old-timers and getting them on tape. Honig interviewed Wes Ferrell, Pete Reiser, Lefty Grove. Since it’s an oral history, you get the voices untouched, and they feel unedited, too. Memories lead to other memories, or asides, or thoughtful statements of philosophy, nostalgia, a “damn things have changed” exclamation. Baseball When the Grass Was Real came out in 1975, and brings back an earlier time, not necessarily more innocent (baseball lost its innocence in 1920, when the revelations about the 1919 Chicago White Sox broke), but simpler. Salaries were lower. Ticket prices were low. A simple and happy national pastime for all. But, as the excerpt below illuminates, the “happiness” of the pastime included an ugly truth. African-American players were shut out of major-league baseball. It’s a stain on the sport’s history, on the culture, and many ball clubs were disgracefully late in integrating (hello to my team, the Red Sox). The Negro Leagues had the same set-up as the major leagues, and drew the same audiences – white and black – because who can ever get enough of baseball? – but was sidelined culturally and financially. Some of those guys were among the best players to ever play the game, in any league.

The Negro Leagues faced similar challenges to those of African-American musicians in the same era, who may have been “allowed” to sing in white night-clubs in the South, but could not drive into town without being pulled over, could not rent a room in a hotel, could not stop for gas. Since African-American baseball players were barred from the major leagues, they organized themselves into their own teams, and would “barnstorm” around the country, playing anyone who wanted to play, in empty fields on the outside of town, wherever.

In 1920, this world shifted when a couple of former players and managers created the Negro National League. With the Negro League came an official structure for all of the talented African-American ballplayers out there. Once the National League was formed, other Leagues formed in other regions, so now, whaddya know, you got a national pastime, albeit on a completely alternate track from the mainstream. Whites, who may have had all manner of racial prejudices politically and socially, loved baseball, no matter the race of the players, and flooded the stands. It was a messed-up situation, unfair, outrageous, but from the players’ point of view: they just wanted to play. Once the Negro Leagues were set up, the level of play improved, due to more incentive, more competition. That’s always the way it is. Baseball was good economics for African-American communities, too – similar to what happens in any town that has a ball club. Jobs are created. Entire offshoots of business enterprise based on baseball spring into being. Newspapers, radio stations devoted to the Negro Leagues blossomed everywhere. Black-owned radio stations (not white-owned with black “talent”, an important distinction: the first black-owned black-run radio station started up in Memphis, no surprise there) started to make their mark. As one African-American DJ from Memphis at the time observed: you couldn’t segregate the air waves. The decades between the two world wars also saw the explosion of radio, the technology getting more and more sophisticated, until WWII helped develop radio technology that could reach the entire nation, making a national conversation possible. You could be sitting in Alaska and listening to a New York Yankees game on the radio.

Segregated baseball continued for decades until 1945 when the Brooklyn Dodgers recruited Jackie Robinson. A triumph. But Jackie Robinson, and the opportunity he represented (it was just a matter of time before other ball clubs followed) also meant the Negro Leagues went into eclipse, as African-American players started gunning for the Majors. Change was slow, and so many Negro League ballplayers found themselves job-less, forgotten, still hustling the barnstorming circuit, but with less official focus on their efforts. It would be another 20 years before the Negro Leagues folded. A lot of players were lost in that shuffle, their names forgotten to history, until finally the Baseball Hall of Fame started to perform long overdue acts of redress, entering players from those old Negro Leagues into the pantheon where they belonged. All of those guys with famous names and stats – Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, “Pop” Lloyd (Babe Ruth said that “Pop” Lloyd was not the best black ballplayer he had ever seen, Lloyd was the best ballplayer he had ever seen PERIOD), Ray Dandridge, and “Cool Papa” Bell to name just a few, would have crushed in the Major Leagues. Only the color barrier kept them out.

Donald Honig tracked Cool Papa Bell down in St. Louis, where he lived. The stories he tells are great (entire games remain clear in his memory, who’s on first, etc., from some game in 1921), and also tremendously sad. But he finishes up his interview saying he does not like to hold onto anger, he does not like to dwell on the bad things: “I’m not mad at Mississippi or any place else. That’s the way it was in those days. I pray that we all can live in peace together.”

Bell died in 1991 and there’s a street in St. Louis named in his honor.

Excerpt from the James “Cool Papa” Bell interview from Baseball When the Grass Was Real, by Donald Honig

We went into a lot of small towns where they’d never seen a colored person. In some of those places we couldn’t find anyplace to sleep, so we slept on the bus. If we had to, we could convert the seats into beds. We’d just pull over to the side of the road, in a cornfield or someplace, and sleep until the break of day, and then we’d go on into the next town, hoping we’d find a restaurant that would be willing to serve colored people.

All those things we experienced, today people wouldn’t believe it. The conditions and the salaries, and what we had to go through. Lots of time for months and months I played on percentage – all of us did – and we’d be lucky to make $5 a game.

But I had a lot of fun in baseball. Saw a lot of great ballplayers. Guys you probably never heard of. Pitcher named Theodore Trent. He’d beat Paige an awful lot of the time. And he never lost a game to a big-league team barnstorming. When we played Max Carey’s all-stars, Trent struck those guys out again and again, with that great curveball he had. One game he struck Bill Terry out four times.

Trent was a great pitcher, but he got TB and died young.

Satchel was the fastest, though. I never saw a pitcher throw harder; you could hardly time him. I’ve seen Walter Johnson, I’ve seen Dizzy Dean, Bob Feller, Lefty Grove, all of them. Also Dick Redding and Smokey Joe Williams among our boys. None of them threw as hard as Paige at the time I saw them. All he threw for years was that fastball; it’d be by you so fast you could hardly turn. And he had control. He could throw that ball right by your knees all day.