During the first decade of the 20th century, Chicago boasted a robust city baseball league. Chicago had harbored an intra-city league in the waning years of the 19th century, but the league had disbanded by 1895. Re-forming a few years after some of the best teams absconded for the greener financial pastures of independent barnstorming, the city league captured the rooting favor of enough Chicagoans to gain daily coverage in the Tribune, and the league’s top teams won quite a bit of local popularity. The Logan Squares gained a reputation as a renegade squad of organized baseball outcasts, and frequently bested the Cubs and White Sox in exhibition play. Anson’s Colts were the brainchild of the financially-strapped Cap Anson, former star of the Chicago White Stockings. The Gunthers, the West Ends, Rogers Park—all these clubs had significant local followings, and their local popularity was bolstered by their tendency to name their teams after the neighborhoods or parks in which they played.
The league housed another popular team however, that was unique. With a home at Auburn Park, the Leland Giants fielded a team of black ballplayers, making them the only black team in an otherwise all-white league. The park was located at the southern tip of Chicago’s Black Belt, the narrow strip of land stretching from roughly 12th Street to 79th Street along the State Street corridor that housed a majority of the city’s black population due to the fierce nature of Chicago’s neighborhood restrictive covenants and city-wide housing policies that barred blacks from moving to other parts of the city.
Officially constituted in 1901 by Frank Leland after a merger of his long-time amateur Union Giants with the rival Columbia Giants, the Giants were the preeminent black baseball club in the Midwest for the duration of their life. Leland gathered a team of all-stars, including future Hall of Famer Rube Foster (who struggled in his brief first tenure in Chicago), and propelled the Giants to local prominence. The Giants were part of the city’s many black cultural institutions formed prior to World War One: sports teams, local YMCAs, movie theaters, and beauty shops complemented a variety of political and civic organizations that pushed back against the hardening of white political and economic supremacy in the city. [1] Like those institutions, the Giants were formed as a result of exclusion from white organizations. In this milieu, the club gained a symbolic and tangible importance, competing against, and defeating, white teams while making space, albeit a small one, for black athletes and fans to participate.
The Giants were good, too. They regularly faced off versus other national and international teams of black players. The New York Cuban Giants, the Philadelphia Giants, and teams from Cuba all scheduled games against the Leland club, and the series were often imbued with World Series-like pomp. A 1904 series between the Giants and the Cuban Giants was billed as the “Colored Championship,” an indication of both teams’ superiority and cultural significance. [2] The Giants played exhibition games versus white pros and former pros, too. [3] Many of these matches, and many league games, snagged ink in the Tribune right next to major-league games. Perhaps more than their white city league counterparts, the Giants were popular and famous: William Howard Taft’s brother, Charles, attended a Giants game in 1908 during his brother’s campaign for president—fellow Republican National Convention attendees went to the White Sox-Senators game—and the newspapers covered it with fervor, as Taft attempted to smooth over relations with the black community after Theodore Roosevelt expelled black soldiers from the military. [4] With Rube Foster’s return to the club in 1907 as a player-manager, the Giants’ brief golden era had begun.
Following a championship 1909 season, [5] the Giants prepared to square off with the Chicago Cubs, the National League’s premier club. The Giants were coming off postseason victories versus the Gunthers and the Colts, [6] and, as was common for the city league teams, scheduled a postseason affair with the 104-win Cubs, who had placed second in the NL. Neither team saw the trio of contests as mere exhibition games. Mordecai “Three-Finger” Brown hurled for the Cubs, fresh off a season in which he led the league in starts, wins, and complete games, and placed second in ERA behind Christy Mathewson. Brown won game one 4-1, but the Giants showed their seriousness when their center fielder, Joe Green, attempted to score on a broken leg he had suffered sliding into third base. A few key errors and a lack of timely hitting sunk the club in the first game.
In game two, the Giants teed off versus Ed Reulbach in the third inning, and held their lead until the bottom of the ninth. It was then that the Cubs’ bats awakened, knocking Rube Foster “to the four winds of heaven.” [7] There wasn’t merely a rally, however: Foster slowed his pace to a near halt, and, as he conferred with his fellow pitcher to decide who would attempt to get the last outs. With the Cubs and the umpire growing tired, Wildfire Schulte, the Cubs’ right fielder, broke for home from third base. In the confusion, he scored, and a great furor broke out. The umpire was escorted from the field, and the Giants’ fans became irate. The club could not lodge a protest, for the arbiters of the game had left the field.
The close 6-5 affair set up a surely tense final match. Unfortunately for the Giants, Mordecai Brown again took the bump, and he never erred. The righty twirled seven shutout innings, as his own club plated one run, and the umpire called the game due to darkness. The Tribune relayed the uncertainty that the series culled, noting, “The city champions [Cubs] didn’t have any picnic with the champions of the City league.” [8] According to the paper, Pat Daugherty, the Giants’ lefty hurler, sat down the Cubs’ hitters in the first with three strikeouts on nine pitches. The teams totaled only seven hits between them, but the Cubs came away with a series sweep.
Following the 1909 season, the Giants suffered a somewhat major controversy, as their former manager, Frank Leland, attempted to reform a club under the Leland Giants moniker. He was blocked from doing so, and the 1910 season featured a Leland Giants without Leland and a Union Giants club with him. One more year of success for the Leland club followed, with tours of Cuba and piles of victories against teams of all abilities and from all locations. Following the 1910 season, the club renamed themselves the Chicago American Giants, in part to differentiate from Leland’s club, and in part to prepare for their next step: as a participant in Rube Foster’s Negro National League, the first successful attempt at an organized league of black teams. Foster’s club would go on to become the most successful in that iteration of the league, and Foster himself padded an already impressive resumé, but the days of the Giants’ league competition versus white teams in the city league was over.
By the 1880s, all organized professional leagues in the United States had expunged black players from their ranks in an effort to “legitimize” their industry. To the white men staking out careers in professional ball, whiteness and traditional masculinity were valued as key tenets their “free labor” ideology—the rallying cry of many in the wake of Reconstruction. Black players formed their own teams, as chronicled in Sol White’s 1907 History of Colored Baseball, and teams like the Giants became common throughout the U.S. These teams often played independently, free of league structures; they barnstormed across the country and internationally, and they scheduled contests with local clubs and high-profile teams of major-league players.
The Chicago city league was somewhat unique in its inclusion of an all-black club; the Leland Giants were perhaps more unique in their participation in such a league, at a time when few black teams played in formal organizations. The Giants’ inclusion in the city league, especially with the presence of Anson—a virulent racist during his playing days, who, on at least two occasions, refused to play against teams with black players—is somewhat remarkable, then. On the other hand, it put the Giants in a perilous position: the league could, conceivably, terminate their inclusion at any moment, should they decide to exclude black players. Their quick exeunt from the city league following 1910 now appears a bit foreboding with such knowledge, and the color line in the professional ranks hardened, with limited inclusion only beginning with Jackie Robinson’s 1947 debut. The Giants forged their own legacy by becoming inaugural members of the Negro National League, but they had already made their mark on baseball history with their exploits in the Chicago city league.
Notes
1. Davarian Baldwin, Chicago’s New Negroes: Modernity, the Great Migration, and Black Urban Life (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).
2. “For ‘Colored’ Championship: Cuban Giants of New York and Union Giants of Chicago to Play a Game This Afternoon,” Chicago Daily Tribune, Sep. 11, 1904.
3. “Strong Semi-Pro Card Today: Leland Giants to Play a Picked Team of Former Big League Professionals,” Chicago Daily Tribune, July 10, 1907.
4. “Leland Giants Favor Taft,” Chicago Daily Tribune, June 7, 1908.
5. “Batting Bees in Chicago League: Leland Giants Clinch Pennant by Swamping Gunthers by 17 to 4 Score,” Chicago Daily Tribune, Sep. 6, 1909; and “Double Victory for the Giants,” Chicago Daily Tribune, Sep. 7, 1909.
6. “Giants Win Double Header; Ansons and Gunthers Lose,” Chicago Daily Tribune, Oct. 3, 1909.
7. “Cubs’ Rally Beats Leland Giants 6-5,” Chicago Daily Tribune, Oct. 22, 1909.
8. “Cubs Trim Giants in Final Game, 1-0,” Chicago Daily Tribune, Oct. 23, 1909.
Lead photo courtesy Charles LeClaire—USA Today Sports.