In this edition of the Agate Type newsletter, I’ll continue posting my talk for the Josh Gibson Foundation webinar series from December 2024, including slides prepared by my wife Christina Chia. (Part 1 is here.) This issue covers some ways in which coverage of news events, including an unfortunate early death, a natural disaster, racial violence, and a rash wager by Satchel Paige, all helped reveal the identities and stories of otherwise fairly obscure players.

1. Robert Griffin (1931 Chicago Columbia Giants)
2. Bill Anderson (1930 Nashville Elite Giants)
3. John Latting (1926 Dayton Marcos)
4. Eddie Watt (1924-26 St. Louis Stars, 1927 Cleveland Hornets) & Charlie Watt (1926 Cleveland Elites)
5. Clyde Augustus (1927 Memphis Red Sox)

1. Robert Griffin (1931 Chicago Columbia Giants)

Another way of mining local news for information on ball players is from obituaries, as in the example of Robert Griffin, a left-handed pitcher for the 1931 Chicago Columbia Giants, managed by Dave Malarcher. Nine years after Griffin’s tenure in the Negro National League we find a note in the Chicago Defender that Robert Griffin passed away at the age of 27 (from unspecified causes) at his home in Chicago. He is described as a “former pitcher for the American Giants at the time when Dave Malarcher was managing the team.” (The ’31 Columbia Giants are commonly understood to be part of the American Giants franchise.) Census and other records at Ancestry.com confirm his identity and give us further details about his family, so we’re able to add Robert Griffin, Jr., to the all-time roster of Negro leaguers.

2. Bill Anderson (1930 Nashville Elite Giants)

Sometimes a spectacular and newsworthy death can leave enough of a mark in the historical record that it enables historians to locate a ball player. On March 21, 1932, one of the worst tornado outbreaks in U.S. history struck the South, centered on Alabama, killing over 200 people all told. The hardest-hit single community was Northport, Alabama, where a storm struck near midnight, levelling buildings, including the Tuscaloosa County Training School, a school for the education of Black teachers. It was evidently a residential school, as students and teachers were present when the storm struck at around 11pm.

Several people died, including students and two teachers. One of them was Professor William Anderson. In the Black press he was eulogized as a great ball player of fine character, which led me to investigate his career as a college athlete. Just a few years earlier he had been a major football and baseball star at the Alabama State Normal School for Colored Students (now Alabama State University). In the summers he had played for the Atlanta Black Crackers and Nashville Elite Giants of the Negro Southern League (a fairly common practice at the time). He returned to the Elite Giants when they played in the Negro National League in 1930, so he’s now considered a major league player.

Although his stats (at least in 1930) seem decent in a limited sample, he nevertheless decided to go on to a career as a teacher—only to meet a very unexpected fate in Northport, Alabama, in 1932. And yet that fate is what helped to make clear his identity many years later.

3. John Latting (1926 Dayton Marcos)

Of course players can be swept up in all kinds of news events that later allow those of us with a parochial interest in only their baseball careers to track them down. This next one is about a player I researched several years ago, but the story is striking enough I thought I’d include it today. The 1926 Dayton Marcos were a terrible team, by any measure. They would finish dead last with 6 wins and 36 losses for a winning percentage of .143. The team’s undoubtedly desperate manager, Eddie Huff, tried 43 players that year, more than any other team in the NNL (despite the Marcos playing fewer league games than any other team). Fully 14 of them only appeared in a single league game. One of these was the leadoff man in the first game of a May 31 doubleheader against the Indianapolis ABCs. Here’s the box score, showing “Latting” leading off, hitting 0 for 4, and playing first base in a game the Marcos (of course) lost 12-2.

So, who was he?

To answer that, let me take you to Detroit, Michigan, the previous fall. In September of 1925 a graduate of Wilberforce University named Ossian Sweet, working as a dentist in Detroit, set his sights on purchasing a home in an otherwise white neighborhood. As word got out that a Black family was moving in, opposition among the neighbors grew; and on the evening of September 9, the home was surrounded by as many as 5,000 angry white people. The Sweet family and several friends were trapped in the house and brought out guns to defend themselves. In the confrontation that ensued, someone inside the house fired at the mob, killing one rioter and wounding another. The police intervened eventually, arresting everyone in the house (but none of the white rioters), and every one of them was charged with murder. This became an enormous media spectacle, and the famous attorney Clarence Darrow, fresh from the Scopes monkey trial, joined the defense. The case is very well-known and has been narrated and analyzed in many other venues, so I won’t go into the details of it, except to note that the supposedly straight news coverage I’ve read in the Detroit Free Press was incredibly biased against Dr. Sweet and the other defendants. The trial wound on for many months. Charges were eventually dismissed, though not until well into 1927, so the whole affair was a continuing and intense burden on the defendants.

Among those present in the Sweet household on September 9 was Dr. Sweet’s younger brother, Henry Sweet, a student at Wilberforce, and his college friend, whose name was John Latting. Latting, it turns out, was a baseball player at Wilberforce, in fact the captain of the team. Here he is in the Wilberforce yearbook for 1922:

It also turns out that the Dayton Marcos manager in 1926, Eddie Huff, was a Wilberforce graduate and a teammate of Latting there as recently as 1924. So, when Latting took the field for the Marcos that day in May, 1926, he was actively on trial for murder in Detroit, which I must assume is one of the very few times that has ever happened in baseball history. Now, I didn’t find any commentary on his appearance for the Marcos, but one does wonder if it was a way for Huff to support his old teammate in some way, or a publicity stunt of some sort, or a genuine attempt by a desperate manager to try out a new player—or maybe all three. In any case he never played another Negro league game, so far as I am aware.

John Latting, by the way, eventually went to dental school, and can be found in the 1940s living in Detroit and employed by Dr. Sweet, presumably in his dental practice. Here is his WW2 draft card, which actually shows him living in Dr. Sweet’s residence at 2905 Garland, which was the famous/infamous house.

4. Eddie Watt (1924-26 St. Louis Stars, 1927 Cleveland Hornets) & Charlie Watt (1926 Cleveland Elites)

Violence forms an unfortunate thread linking to the next pair of players I’m discussing. Two brothers, Eddie and Charlie Watt, emerged out of the St. Louis semipro scene in the 1920s–which, by the way, rivals the Birmingham industrial leagues as an incubator of players in the 20s, 30s, and 40s.

Much of the St. Louis scene was documented by Normal “Tweed” Webb in his “Hot Stove League” columns for the St. Louis Argus and St. Louis American. There has been a little confusion about their name—it was most frequently spelled “Watts” with an “s” in the press at the time, and we historians have largely followed that. There was also a St. Louis pitcher named Eddie Wall, who has sometimes understandably been conflated with the Watt brothers. But we now know there were three distinct players—the pitcher Eddie Wall, and the infielders (and brothers) Eddie and Charlie Watt, along with other brothers. My research on the Watt brothers actually had its first break not in St. Louis, but in Sioux City, Iowa, where the 1927 Sioux City All Stars featured a strong St. Louis contingent, including the player-manager George Womack, star pitcher Earl “Rattler” Harrison, and the Watt brothers. An article in the Sioux City Journal (June 23, 1927) informs us that “Charley Watts, a brother of last year’s shortstop, will play first base with Brooks at second, and Eddie Watts or Ellis at short.” Although this sentence does not make it clear, Eddie Watt was in fact the previous year’s shortstop. Now, it wasn’t uncommon for sportswriters to assume that two players on the same team with the same surname were brothers, even when they were unrelated, so you don’t necessarily want to accept this relation on its face—but it does give you a hypothesis to check.

While examining St. Louis sources for brothers named Charley and Eddie (or Charles and Edward), quite by accident I ran across this article in the St. Louis Argus, about the unexplained “gang-like slaying” of a ballplayer named Paul Watt:

Apparently “several white men had pulled beside a car he was driving and shot him…”, and he died at a hospital shortly thereafter. The final paragraph of the story reads: “Watt was 25 years old and lived with his parents at 3012 Rutger street. He at one time played third base for the Compton Hill Cubs [a local team that once featured Cool Papa Bell]. His brother, the late Eddie Watts, once played for the St. Louis Stars.” So, lots of information here, including the reference to Eddie as deceased. We now have a family of three ball-playing brothers, Charlie, Eddie, and Paul. Paul’s death certificate gives the name of his parents as Edward and Idella Watt. I also quickly found Eddie’s death certificate, from just the previous year—he died of polyneuritis on October 21, 1934—and I was able to locate the family in census records quite easily. They were originally from Starkville, Mississippi, just like Cool Papa Bell’s family, and also like Bell’s family, they moved to St. Louis during the Great Migration in the late 1910s to find meatpacking and factory work. And many of the brothers of both families started playing baseball with the Compton Hill Cubs. But unlike the Bells, the Watt family didn’t produce a singular star for people to remember in later years, and it took the terrible tragedy of Paul’s unsolved murder to enable us to unlock their identities many years later.

5. Clyde Augustus (1927 Memphis Red Sox)

(12) We can also find former players getting their day in the news in less dangerous or tragic ways. For example: in 1948, as the 42-year-old Satchel Paige was helping the Cleveland Indians drive toward the American League pennant, this story spread on the wire services. Paige had recently denied a report that he had played professional baseball as early as 1920, and said publicly that he would “pay $500 to the first person who can show a clippin[g] that I was in professional baseball before 1927” (which was his rookie season with the Birmingham Black Barons in the NNL). Longish story somewhat shorter, a Memphian named Ellen Curtis went to the public library and found a box score for a game played on May 16, 1926, showing “Satchell” pitching for the Chattanooga White Sox against the Memphis Red Sox in the Negro Southern League, a minor league that year. She made a “photostatic copy” and sent it to her brother in Cleveland, who met with Satchel himself. Paige demanded confirmation from Alex Herman, the Chattanooga player-manager who had signed him, and Herman obliged, writing back that he had signed Paige in April 1926. So Satchel Paige concluded, “Oh oh, I musta slept a year somewhere. A $500 year. I’ll pay off.”

So here’s the box score itself, from the Memphis Commercial Appeal, showing Memphis winning 4 to 3, with “Satchell” (two l’s, as it was often spelled in those days) charged with the complete-game loss.

Now, note the opposing pitcher, Augustus, who beat Paige, in fact getting 7 strikeouts to Satchel’s 3. And look at this story from the Jackson (Miss.) Advocate 5 years later, about a recreation program for Black people in Tupelo, Miss., run by “Mr. Clyde Augustus, former Memphis Red Sox pitcher, who holds a win over the great Satchel Paige in a game played back in 1926, May 17^th [actually 16^th]. This game cost Satchel $500 in as much as he made a bet with Harry Grayson of Cleveland [a sportswriter] that he didn’t play pro-ball until 1927. Newspaper clippings from the Commercial [A]ppeal proved Satchel played pro-ball in 1926 and therefore Satchel was minus $500.”

The article goes on to explain that Clyde Augustus was the Recreation Director and Football Coach at Carver High School in Tupelo. From there it’s easy to find a World War 2 draft card for Clyde Caesar Augustus, “Teacher in Carver High School,” living in Tupelo back in 1940, along with other documents and genealogical records.

Clyde Augustus moved to the Negro National League with the Memphis Red Sox in 1927, so he is now considered a major league player—and a rash wager made by Satchel Paige 20 years later would eventually provide the key to identifying him.