[...]... 1938 column describing the Grays as the new Gas House Gang, a reference to the great St Louis Cardinals teams of the 1930s, Wendell Smith wrote: “Not only are the Grays champions of Negro baseball, but they are a cocky bunch of ballplayers Beyond the Shadow of the Senators $250,000.3 The Senators attendance the following season, 255,011, was their lowest since 1919.4 They missed the Babe’s eleven appearances... four-team playoff Not even the Grays’ own letterhead boasted the 1939 championship, although it sometimes included 1939 as one of nine-straight “pennants.”101 The Grays won both halves of the regular season and the playoff every year from 1937 to 1945, except 1939 (when the Elites won the playoff) and 1941 (when the New York Cubans won the second half, but the Grays won the first half and the playoff) The firsthalf... sides of the Allegheny Mountains playing white semipro teams He also enjoyed the luxury of raiding both leagues of their best players In 1925, Posey lured Hall of Fame 37 Beyond the Shadow of the Senators 38 pitcher Smokey Joe Williams from the Lincoln Giants Although thirty-nine years old when he joined the Grays, the six-foot five-inch Williams towered over the competition in stature and talent The. .. season—these two factors rendered the official league schedules 51 Beyond the Shadow of the Senators 52 meaningless.100 To complicate matters further, the league divided its season into halves At the end of each season, the first-half and second-half winners competed in a playoff In 1939, for example, the Grays won both halves of the “regular” season but lost a three-game series to the Baltimore Elite Giants... cabinet”; the first black U.S Senator since Reconstruction, Beyond the Shadow of the Senators 16 olina, to see the Senators- Yankees doubleheader He didn’t care about sitting in the right-field pavilion He didn’t care about the lack of black players on the field Years later, the future star first baseman for the Homestead Grays described his first afternoon in a major league ballpark as the thrill of my life... Greenberg was the 39 Beyond the Shadow of the Senators 40 only other player who had hit a ball there—Greenberg accomplished the feat in 1938 while Gibson was in the Dominican Republic.29 Years later, however, eyewitnesses from both teams debated whether Gibson’s home run cleared the stadium’s left-field grandstand or merely hit the back wall of the left-field bullpen 505 feet from home plate.30 The consensus,... Near the end of the 1923 campaign, however, Lacy led the lowly Buffaloes to an 11–10 victory over the mighty LeDroit Tigers.122 Named after the upscale LeDroit Park neighborhood just south and east of Griffith Stadium’s right-field wall, the Tigers were the black champions of the D.C sandlots In 1922, they nearly beat the allblack professional Lincoln Giants at Griffith Stadium The Tigers loaded the. .. punch The black press dubbed them the “Thunder Twins.” Gibson left the Grays in mid-June of 1937 to play for dictator Rafael Trujillo’s team in the Dominican Republic Over the years, many black players jumped at midseason offers from Latin American teams because of promises of big paydays and to escape the South’s Jim Crow laws that often made life difficult for them on the road Gibson’s leaves of absence... because they could show that they won more games than they lost because they either had accessibility to a ballpark or there were instances where we played each other in an exhibition game or a league game.”102 Leon Day, a Hall of Fame pitcher for the Newark Eagles, agreed that the determination of a game’s status rested with the Grays “They’d play a game and they’d call it an exhibition if they lost,”... license, supervised the construction of ships, and ran the largest black-owned business in Pittsburgh, the Diamond Coke and Coal Company.11 His father also served as the first president and one of the founding incorporators of the Pittsburgh Courier, the nation’s largest black newspaper.12 His mother, Anna, was said to be the first black graduate of Ohio State University.13 Cum Posey was one of Pittsburgh’s . in 1900 the Black 400 con- Beyond the Shadow of the Senators 6 sisted of about one hundred families out of seventy-five thousand black residents. The Black. for the Grays. 191 Beyond the Shadow of the Senators 28 Buck Leonard (seated third from right) poses with his family in 1918 in front of their home in the