Book Description

From Rube to Robinson aims to bring together the best Negro League baseball scholarship that the Society of American Baseball Research (SABR) has ever produced, culled from its journals, Biography Project, and award-winning essays. The book includes a star-studded list of scholars and historians, from the late Jerry Malloy and Jules Tygiel, to award winners Larry Lester, Geri Strecker, and Jeremy Beer, and a host of other talented writers. Beginning in the 19th century, Todd Peterson's "May the Best Man Win: The Black Ball Championships 1866-1923" opens the volume and inventories claims to baseball supremacy that preceded the Colored World Series competition that began in 1924. The late Jerry Malloy, whose name graces SABR's annual Negro League Conference, covers an early attempt at forming a Black baseball circuit in "The Pittsburgh Keystones and the 1887 Colored League."There are also profiles of some of the Negro Leagues' now-mythic figures: Sol White (by Jay Hurd), Rube Foster (by Larry Lester), and Oscar Charleston. Seymour Award winning author Jeremy Beer contributes his article "Hothead: How the Oscar Charleston Myth Began," which rebuts the oft-repeated notion that Charleston was in need of anger management.Ballparks and venues also get a look. James Overmyer's "Black Baseball at Yankee Stadium" describes the tenant/landlord relationship of Negro Leagues teams with the New York Yankees during the 1930s and 40s, while Geri Driscoll Strecker's "The Rise and Fall of Greenlee Field" is a cradle-to-grave biography of the Pittsburgh Crawfords' stadium.The final section of the book covers integration and the socio-economics of Black baseball. Leading off is Larry Lester's masterful "Can You Read, Judge Landis?" which refutes the contention that Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis was blameless for the persistence of baseball's segregation. MLB's official historian John Thorn and the late Jules Tygiel weigh in with "Jackie Robinson's Signing: The Real, Untold Story," and Duke Goldman presents an in-depth and meticulously referenced recap of the winter meetings and in-season owners meetings from the formation of a second Negro National League in 1933 through the last gasp of the Negro American League in 1962.