Our friend Gary Ashwill has played an important role in this story regarding the birthplace of Hall of Famer Pete Hill.  Check it out:

Correcting History | Culpeper Star-Exponent.

The Poz has written a story about the set.

Strat-O-Matic’s new card set brings Negro leagues to life – Joe Posnanski – SI.com.

A couple weeks back I ventured out to Iowa to play Art “Superman” Pennington in a game of Strat-O-Matic.  First time he EVER rolls the bones, Art’s lead-off hitter, Cool Papa Bell, hits a home run!  Playing Strat against the last surviving member of the Strat-O-Matic Negro League All-Star set?  Coolest. Day. Ever.

Strat-O-Matic baseball puts spotlight on Negro Leagues — latimes.com

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Our friend Craig Calcaterra joins us for the first installment of “Batting Practice Fastballs,” six meat-ball questions even the bat boy could pop out of the park. Craig, the blogger formerly known as Shyster, discusses moving his keyboard to NBC’s Circling the Bases full-time, the winter meetings in Indy, and collectible press credentials.

Allow me to loosen up the ol’ soup bone and chuck these softies over the middle of the plate…

SS: How does is feel to be part of the mainstream baseball media now?

CC: The job is nice. Not sure if this is really mainstream baseball media, though. I write in my den while wearing slippers and sipping coffee. I feel like I’m getting away with murder. Real baseball writers actually work.

SS: Regarding your first winter meeting coverage, would you consider it a) Much Ado About Nothing, b) 2Fast 2Furious, or c) Field of Dreams?

CC: 2Fast 2Furious. I mean, on the one hand nothing major happened. However, given that my mandate is to write about rumors and talks and suppositions and the general zeitgeist of the place and to offer my unsolicited opinions about everything that enters the realm of the possible as opposed to stuff that actually, you know, happens, it made for a busy, busy four days.

SS: Without the pesky legal career getting in the way, do you think we’ll notice anything different about your writing in 2010?

CC: (a) There will be much, much more of it; and (b) it will likely be infused with less angst. Not sure if (b) will be a good thing or a bad thing. Angst can be pretty potent fuel.

SS: What was the drink of choice there in Indianapolis?

CC: During the day: tons and tons of coffee. Once evening hit, my drink of choice was scotch rocks. Most baseball people are beer drinkers, however.

SS: Is there anything more you could have done to help my Cubs rid themselves of Milton Bradley?

CC: I suppose they could just offer more and more cash in the deal until Tampa Bay says yes, but really, the Cubs are over a barrel here. They have to move him. Almost no one wants him. Everyone know this. Tough place to be in. Ultimately, they’ll basically just pay some team to take him.

SS: Did you keep your first official press credential?

CC: Yeah. I’m not ashamed to admit it. I’ll probably keep it forever. This meant an awful lot to me.

Thanks, Craig. Time to get out of the cage. Who’s ready to take some cuts? Hit me up with suggestions at s_simkus@yahoo.com

Must see web site of the week is the Friends of Hinchliffe Stadium.  The Friends are a volunteer, non-profit group dedicated to preserving and revitalizing the historic Paterson, New Jersey sports venue.  Hinchliffe, of course, was the home field for the New York Black Yankees and New York Cubans back in the 1930s and 40s, and has fallen into a state of disrepair.  Brian LoPinto spearheads the organization.

 Negro League historian and researcher Phil Dixon has three new books out: American Baseball Chronicles: 1931 Homestead Grays, Volume 1;  John “Buck” O’Neil, The Rookie, The Man, the Legend, 1938,  and an updated version of a previously released volume, Wilber “Bullet” Rogan and the Kansas City Monarchs.  

 I recently stumbled across a small item in the 1923 New York Times.  Lou Gehrig’s Columbia team losing 6-5 to the Brooklyn Royal Giants in a March exhibition game.  Gehrig, who would play for the Yankees later in the summer, hit a home run against the black professionals during the contest and even pitched a couple innings.

 Friend Gary Ashwill reminded me recently that Vince McMahon, CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment, has a family connection to the Negro Leagues.  His grandfather, Jess “Red” McMahon was part-owner of the famous New York Lincoln Giants back during the days before the Eastern Colored League was founded in 1923.  McMahon was a rather well-known sports promoter, hosting, among other things, boxing and wrestling events.

And finally, Jeff Polman’s wildly popular online baseball novel, 1924 And You Are There!, took an interesting twist in recent days, when a white Major League All-Star team played a group of Negro League stars in an historic five-game series.  Polman is using Strat-O-Matic’s 1924 super-advanced set, the new Negro League release, and his deliciously twisted arsenal of creativity to take readers back in time.  Check it out!

Had a good time at WGN-TV today, but an even better time speaking via telephone with Art “Superman” Pennington, the only living member of the Strat-O-Matic Negro League All-Star set.  He’s a fascinating man and I look forward to meeting him in person in a week or two…

“It may not happen when you want it to, but it’ll be right on time.”

I remember watching a documentary where a grizzled blues musician sipped flat beer and coughed up those little pearls of wisdom during the course of an interview.  Not sure if it’s a lyric from an old song, or a dated Mississippi Delta self-help mantra (a way to keep yourself sane when you were getting paid $4 for a seven-hour set in some smoke-filled blues bar in the middle of nowheresville); but the expression struck a chord with me then, and now, now that the new Strat-O-Matic web site and Negro league All-Star set is available.

It’s been a long time coming, buddy, but it’s right on time.

As a long-time fan of Strat-O, I’m excited about the new web site.  Slick, intuitive; it’s a fantastic jumping-off point for the future of a great little company and their innovative selection of games.  Like the new Yankee Stadium, Strat-O-Matic’s new online home was long overdue.  A franchise such as Hal Richman’s deserves only the best and this bodes well for those of us who care about the game.

As has been repeated enough over the past year, to the point where its become nauseous (sorry about that, guys), I’ve spent the past several years working as a consultant to the Strat-O-Matic game company, focusing on their Negro League All-Star set.  The opportunity is really the product of happenstance, lucky timing on my part.

The Negro League set couldn’t have been produced 30 years ago, as our knowledge of blackball then was mired in what fellow baseball researcher Gary Ashwill has called the “hazy netherworld of unverifiable myth, tall tales, gut feelings and subjective judgments.”  Truth is the set couldn’t have been produced ten years ago, let alone thirty.  The data, or more accurately, the access to raw data in the form of box scores, was still outside our grasp.  The timing wasn’t right.

So why now?  How’s the research game changed over the past ten years?  What’s different?  As my involvement with the project winds down, I’ve given this question a little thought. I’ve settled on what I believe there are five key elements at play here, things which have coalesced in recent years and made the set a reality.  In list form, they are:

1. HISTORICAL FOUNDATION.  We have forty years of Negro league research upon which to build.  During the research phase, I must have consulted close to 100 books about the black leagues and/or its players, teams and ballparks during the past several years, all of which have had an impact one way or another on the set.  But out of this small library, there are really six author/researchers without whom I couldn’t have survived.  They are Robert Peterson, John Holway, James A. Riley, Dick Clark, Larry Lester and Phil Dixon.  Four books in particular; Only The Ball Was White (Peterson), The Complete Book of the Baseball’s Negro Leagues (Holway), The Biographical Encyclopedia of the Negro Baseball Leagues (Riley), and The Negro Leagues Book (Clark and Lester), are really the walls of support in the foundation of blackball knowledge.  These four volumes; with their rosters, biographical info, statistical data and oral history provide the road map which all subsequent baseball historians can follow.  These authors (and the anonymous people who have helped them behind the scenes), have produced work representing what must exceed 100 combined years of indispensable research.   
2. BILL JAMES.  Yeah, I know, I know; he has an excellent chapter on black baseball in The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract, but blackball (by his own admission) isn’t his strongest suit.  Yet it’s the other stuff, the sabermetric gadgets: ballpark effects, MLEs and league context issues, which are invaluable for creating a realistic baseball simulation.
3. WINDOWS, INTERNET and EXCEL. I don’t want to insult anybody’s intelligence by trying to explain why these things are crucial.  I was a member of the last group at my high school to take a typing class (on a genuine, good old-fashioned typewriter).  We spent a few weeks studying the dewey decimal system.  We had to learn how to track down specific magazine articles using a gigantic Hogwart’s-like book of tiny font citations, then, if we were lucky enough to discover an abstract which may (or may not) be of value, we’d check our Library Catalog to see if they actually carried the specific magazine we needed.  They never did, so we’d return to the thick book and start over.  Certain aspects of the old days sucked.
4. NEWSPAPER DIGITIZATION. Last night, in the span of only an hour or two, I uncovered 15 or 20 new historical box scores I’d never seen before.  These are Negro league teams versus white semi-pro outfits, part of a new “mad scientist” project I’m working on.  The point is, every single day literally thousands of scanned newspaper images become available on the web, through a variety of different sources.  When I started the Strat project (before it was actually the Strat-O-Matic project), I needed to use the old-fashioned microfilm editions of the Pittsburgh Courier (and other papers) to get those Homestead Grays and Pittsburgh Crawfords box scores, which required, um, leaving the house and going to a library.  Sitting in front of a machine and paying for photocopies.  Near the end of the research phase for the game, I finally got access to the Courier in digital format, which allowed me to back track and double check things with ridiculous speed.  Because of the internet and digitization, we can do things in five months which previously took five or ten years.  By the end of next year, we’ll be able to gather information in five days which might have taken five or ten years to compile in the past.  It’s a great time to be a researcher.
5. CULTURE SHIFT.  The country is simply a much different place than it was back in 1970, when Peterson first released his watershed book on black baseball.  If anything, it’s a much more inclusive place.  The Negro league legacy (warts and all), has been embraced by the Major Leagues and dozens of veterans from the black leagues have been inducted into the Hall of Fame.  In his Afterword to the 25^th Anniversary Edition of Baseball’s Great Experiment, author Jules Tygiel writes “Ironically, Americans, black and white, seem more aware of the Negro Leagues than they did in their heyday.”

Well, it’s about time.  I hope you enjoy the game.

QUICK TIP FOR PEOPLE NEW TO STRAT-O-MATIC: I suggest beginning with the board game to get a feel for the game engine before graduating up to the computer version.  Remember- You’ll need to get the game parts with the Negro League card set.  After putting the Negro League set in your shopping cart, you’ll have to go under the Baseball Board Game section and look under “Individual Game Parts.”  Under this section, scroll down to the product called “Baseball Game Setup.”  For just $16, this has all the charts, dice, etc. that you’ll need to play the game. 

By the way, if you have the coin, I’d strongly suggest getting the Hall of Fame/Negro League combo card set.  For just $69.95, you’ll have all the greats, Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Ty Cobb…and Josh Gibson, Satchel Paige and Cool Papa Bell.

There’s been a lot of interest in Pittsburgh’s long, gone Greenlee Field.  With the impending release of the Strat-O-Matic Negro League Set, I’ve been asked whether or not this park is going to be included as part of the project.  The answer, hardcore baseball simulation fans, is YES!  Greenlee, along with several other venues from the defunct black leagues will be included as part of the offering.

Now on to that mysterious right field wall in Pittsburgh.  Greenlee was the field constructed by Pittsburgh Crawfords’ owner Gus Greenlee back in the early 1930s.  It was torn down after only 7 seasons and sold to the government.  Although the home park of several legendary Hall of Famers, including Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson, very few photographs of the venue survive.  There’s also been a bit of mystery regarding the construction of the park, including the size of the right-field wall.

In Philip J. Lowry’s Green Cathedrals: The Ultimate Celebration of Major League and Negro League Ballparks, he writes of Greenlee “(There was an) embankment in play in front of a very low one-foot-high concrete wall in front of the bleachers in right, which were up on a hill.”

In another book (perhaps the one written by Eric Enders), it is suggested the one-foot-high wall was (and I’m paraphrasing here), the shortest fence in Major League history.  (Edit: Turns out, NO, this isn’t from Enders’ book)

Now, most of this is accurate.  There WAS a one-foot-high concrete wall in front of the bleachers (actually, the wall was probably closer to two or three feet high), and the stands were, indeed, built into the side of a hill.  But it turns out there was a fence in play, as well, which to my knowledge has never been mentioned before.  By using the zoom feature on one of the photographs at the Pittsburgh Historical Society’s online archives, we can see the outline of what is clearly a wire fence with wood frames in front of the bleachers.  In fact, it appears this fence is probably 12 or 14 feet tall!

So, yes, there was a short concrete wall, but this was merely the base for a regulation height, chicken wire fence.  Small detail, yes, but I think it’s important to set the record straight.  Take a gander below…

Close up of Greenlee Field's RF bleachers, mid-1930s.

According to Steve Barkan at Strat-O-Matic, the highly anticipated Negro League set (and new company web site), is getting very, very close.  As in…any day now.  So stay tuned.

I want to publicly thank Hal, Steve and Bob for their work on the set.  The bells and whistles on this product, as well as the superior card quality, is perhaps unprecedented at Strat.  It has proven to have been worth the wait.