(Originally published in the Agate Type newsletter.)

Recently I was discussing some 1920s team photos with Matt Garvey, who is working on a book about the St. Louis Giants/Stars. He pointed out that some of them were clearly taken in Kansas City’s Association Park. Thus clued in, I realized that several more team photos were also taken in that ballpark. Not only that, but all these photographs were signed by the same photographer: J. E. Miller.

The best known photographers of the Negro leagues were probably Teenie Harris and John W. Mosley, but many others contributed to the visual record of Black baseball over the years. James Early (or Earley) Miller was one of the most important. In 1922 the Kansas City Sun published a photo of him (unfortunately of poor quality after passing through printing, microfilming, and scanning) along with a lengthy, very informative caption:

Miller ran his studio for 40 years. His work appeared in Black newspapers and magazines and he won at least one prize for inventing an unspecified camera “gadget.” But perhaps his most consequential work was his series of Negro league team photographs. Such pictures didn’t leave much scope for artistic license, but they surely presented some technical challenges at the time. Most importantly for our purposes, they provide valuable images of many teams and players, their uniforms, and the ballparks where the photographs were staged.

In 1920 Miller photographed at least five of the eight Negro National League teams, all at Kansas City’s Association Park: Chicago American Giants, Joe Green’s Chicago Giants, Indianapolis ABCs, St. Louis Giants, and Kansas City Monarchs. He also took photos of the 1923 St. Louis Stars, 1923 Indianapolis ABCs, and 1924 Kansas City Monarchs (including one that appeared in the program for the 1924 World Series), along with this photo of John Beckwith that was published in the Pittsburgh Courier:

The masterpiece of Miller’s baseball photography was this famous panoramic photograph of the Hilldale Club and Kansas City Monarchs before game 5 of the 1924 World Series in Kansas City’s Muehlebach Park:

These are just the Miller photos I’ve tracked down in the past couple of weeks—there could well be many more. I haven’t counted them, but a large number of the player images that appear at Seamheads.com, Baseball-Reference, and elsewhere are from Miller’s team photos. He played a crucial role in documenting the early Negro leagues.

It so happens that his birthplace, Muscotah, Kansas, was also the hometown of one Joe Tinker, who was born there in 1880, just a few years before Miller. Today it is the site of what purports to be the world’s largest baseball, constructed in honor of Tinker. Maybe J. E. Miller deserves some kind of recognition there too?