(Originally published in the Agate Type newsletter.)

Well, that didn’t take long. After trying for months to identify “Moxie” of the 1925 Western Cuban Stars, I had finally written up my failure to make any progress—then solved it within a week. While researching the piece about the Dayton Marcos I put out on Saturday, I found an outfielder/pitcher named “Moxley” playing for both the Marcos and the Cleveland Tate Stars in 1921.

Shelby Lee “Chief” Moxley was a lefthanded pitcher and slugging outfielder/first baseman who played mostly for Kentucky and Midwestern teams. His month-long sojourn with the Cuban Stars in 1925 makes a lot of sense, as that team otherwise lacked any lefthanded pitching at all. He wasn’t especially effective in the few innings he got, however, and within a couple of weeks of his last appearance with the Cubans he was pitching for the Lexington (Ky.) Hustlers.

Moxley never got back to the Black big leagues but he spent the mid-to-late 1920s and early 1930s as the Hustlers’ ace pitcher and one of their best hitters, usually batting in the middle of the order. Among his teammates were a teenager named Johnny Huber, who would go on to a very long Negro league career that lasted into the late 1940s, and Carl Glass, a longtime pitcher and manager for the Memphis Red Sox, St. Louis Stars, and Cincinnati Tigers.

Moxley was also the rare lefthanded pitcher in this era who was never once called “Lefty” (that I’ve seen, anyway).

In the late 1910s and early 1920s (excepting those stretches of time when he was away playing for the Cuban Stars, Tate Stars, and Marcos), Shelby Moxley was constantly in trouble in his hometown of Shelbyville, Kentucky. He was repeatedly arrested (along with many others) for unlawful assembly, possessing and/or selling intoxicating beverages, gambling, attempting to steal poultry. While I’m sure he did his share of gambling and drinking, the picture I take away from this is not one of an inveterate criminal, but rather a young man whose community was constantly being harassed in petty ways. A 1920 report about another one of Moxley’s transgressions—registering to vote—maybe reveals what at least some of this was really about:

He moved to Lexington when he began pitching for the Hustlers in 1925, and still got in periodic trouble for bootlegging there. After retiring from active play, Moxley continued as a coach while working various warehouse and garage jobs in Lexington. Sadly he was killed in 1950 while working at a Liggett and Myers tobacco warehouse when he was crushed beneath falling equipment. He was only 51 years old.