This post consists of the first issue of the Agate Type newsletter, which I’ll often be crossposting here. There is a free tier and a pay tier (“Extra Innings”)—if you choose the pay tier, the proceeds help to support work on the Seamheads Negro Leagues Database. The plan is to put out at least one free issue a week (perhaps with extras occasionally), along with at least one pay issue a week. The free issues will also appear here at the Agate Type blog on WordPress the following week, in multiple parts in some cases.

Newsletters are a new format for me (though some of you might remember the Outsider Baseball Bulletin from ca. 2010, which I worked on with Scott Simkus), so there will certainly be teething issues as I get used to it.

A couple of weeks ago Jacob Pomrenke announced the most recent version of SABR’s Triple Plays Database, now including the Negro leagues. The Seamheads Negro Leagues DB contributed our list of triple plays, including a remarkable achievement by the New York Lincoln Giants. On April 27, 1924, in game 2 of an Eastern Colored League doubleheader against the Harrisburg Giants in the Bronx’s Catholic Protectory Oval, the Lincoln Giants turned two triple plays in one game while winning 9 to 3. Both were turned by the trio of Gerard Williams (shortstop), George Scales (second base), and Robert Hudspeth (first base). No MLB team would manage this feat until July 17, 1990, when the Minnesota Twins turned two triple plays against the Boston Red Sox. This remains the only time a team has accomplished the feat in MLB history.

I had found this game just a few weeks ago in the Brooklyn Standard Union, a great source for Negro league baseball in the New York area (especially Brooklyn, of course), and apparently the only publication that printed box scores for this doubleheader:

There is only one other account of the doubleheader, in the New York Age (May 3, 1924, with line scores and no box scores), and no triple plays are mentioned at all. (There are much briefer mentions of the games in other papers.) The article does praise Harrisburg left fielder Fats Jenkins in the second game for saving runs with “sensational catches.”

It does seem like two triple plays in one game (in New York City!) would have sparked more interest and coverage, but nobody has found anything else so far. (And it’s worth noting that New York’s other major Black weekly, the Amsterdam News, was not archived for 1924, so we don’t know what coverage, if any, it provided.)

Anyway, you might have noticed an oddity about the box score. It reads: “Triple plays: Wesley, Williams, Scales and Hudspeth (2).”

Edgar Wesley, of course, played for the opposing Harrisburg Giants. My interpretation is that Wesley was mistakenly left over from the Harrisburg double play listed just before, which should have read “Johnson, Fiall and Wesley.” However, If you read it literally, according to the way we read most box scores of the period, it would be saying that there were THREE triple plays in the game: one unassisted triple play by Wesley, then two more by Williams, Scales, and Hudspeth. According to this account of the 1990 Twins game, the odds of two triple plays being turned in the same game are approximately 370,000 to 1. Who knows what the chances are of an unassisted triple play AND two more triple plays, all in the same game! This multiplies the strangeness of no press notices of this game other than the Standard Union box score. I’d think an unassisted triple play would appear in a box score as “Wesley (unassisted).” Also, Wesley only has 5 putouts, leaving just 2 non-triple-play putouts by the first baseman for a team with 11 assists. This is not impossible, though—just unlikely.

Another possible interpretation, I suppose, would be that Wesley turned an unassisted triple play and Williams, Scales, and Hudspeth turned a (single) triple play for the Lincoln Giants, with the “2” notation intended to indicate that a total of two triple plays were turned in the game, one by each team. That is definitely not the standard notation for double plays (or anything else) in box scores at the time, so I’m reluctant to think that would be the case.

Returning to the Lincolns’ fielding stats, Gerard Williams, the shortstop who seems to have started both triple plays (according to my reading), is listed with zero putouts in the box score. I had an email exchange about this with SABR’s Jacob Pomrenke, who commented that:

[W]e only have two 6-4*-4*-3* triple plays [the asterisks indicating putouts] in recent memory that did NOT involve the shortstop catching a putout. And both were … extremely weird plays, leading to long delays and arguments as the umpires tried to sort out the confusion. Both of these plays were, believe it or not, turned by the Baltimore Orioles:

• 5/2/2017:

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/jbPUg-HubcM?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0

• 9/1/2000: https://www.mlb.com/video/o-s-turn-strange-triple-play-c1347836183
• There was also another 6-4*-4*-3* triple play reportedly in 1882, but we don’t have video of that one!

It’s certainly possible this exact play — involving the shortstop NOT catching a popup or line drive — happened in 1924, too.

But I find it extremely hard to believe this same (very rare!) play would have happened twice in the same game, and there wasn’t a huge controversy about it. I find it easier to believe the Lincoln Giants turned two common 6*-4*-3* triple plays in the same game, and the box score simply failed to credit SS Williams with a putout(s). But it seems farfetched that the same team turned two separate 6-4*-4*-3* triple plays … and their opponents didn’t immediately start a brawl!

It is certainly the case that most box score mistakes are in fielding statistics. I know, both from comparing play-by-play accounts to box scores, and from compiling box scores from play-by-play accounts myself, that is very easy to, say, mistakenly reverse a putout and assist on a given play, or credit a putout to the wrong player, or something like that. So Williams could simply be mistakenly credited with 0 putouts when he should have had 2 or more.

It could be that there was some major (and now untraceable) screwup in the box score. However, given that this is the evidence we have, I still think the simplest interpretation is that there were two triple plays in the game. Even with Wesley edited out, the box score still reads “Triple Plays” (plural) and has the “2” notation after the Lincoln Giants trio, which is absolutely how it would be listed if the same three players had turned two double plays.

One thing I wanted to point out: although this is a unique problem in its particulars (there’s no other instance of possible multiple triple plays in a game combined with limitations, ambiguities, and mistakes in the source), it does serve to emphasize the difficulties of using sometimes flawed or incomplete information to produce the sorts of “data” and records we expect nowadays. It’s just not always possible to make a clear and final decision in every case—quite a few things come down to interpretation and compromise in the end.

There were many fewer Negro league games played than white MLB games, even limited to the 1920-1948 era, since major Black teams played only a portion of their schedule against other Black teams. Due to the much smaller sample sizes, it’s not that common for Negro league teams to have accomplished something that no MLB team ever did, or even to have accomplished something before anyone in MLB did. But in this case the Lincolns beat the Twins by 66 years.

See this week’s pay-tier newsletter for a lot more about Negro league triple plays.

Postscript

Some brief notes on the players and ballpark involved:

•George Scales, apparent middle man for both triple plays, is the best known, a power-hitting infielder who made the Hall of Fame ballot in 2022 (though he was not elected).

•Robert Hudspeth was a towering (6’4”) first baseman from Texas who started with the Indianapolis A.B.C.’s but spent most of his career with New York-based teams.

•Gerard Williams, a peppery and well-regarded shortstop who played baseball for Morehouse College in the late 1910s, is the least known of these players. We don’t have his full name, birth or death dates, or other information, and we lack a clear photo of him. As a professional he spent considerable time with the Homestead Grays, who were an independent team in the 1920s. He left baseball in the late 1920s due to an unspecified illness and (it seems) passed away shortly thereafter.

•Edgar Wesley was the first home run king in Negro league history, clouting a grand total of 8 to lead the 1920 Negro National League. He spent most of his career with the Detroit Stars.

•The April 27, 1924, Harrisburg-Lincoln Giants game was played in the Lincolns’ home field, the Catholic Protectory Oval, which was located on the grounds of a neo-Gothic Catholic orphanage in the Bronx.