Andrew 'Rube' Foster is considered by baseball historians to have been the best African-American pitcher of the first decade of the 1900s. In addition to pitching, he founded and managed the Chicago American Giants, one of the era's most successful African-American baseball teams.
Andrew "Rube" Foster was a professional baseball player, manager, and team executive during his time working in the Negro Leagues. Foster was elected to Major League Baseball's National Hall of Fame in 1981.
Rube Foster is considered by Negro League historians to have been perhaps the best African-American pitcher of the first decade of 1900. Foster also founded and managed the Chicago American Giants, one of the most successful black baseball teams of the pre-integration era.
Most notably, he organized the Negro National League I. The league became the first and longest lasting professional sports league for African-American ballplayers. It operated as a professional league from 1920-1931, when it collapsed. It was eventually replaced by the Negro National League II which operated from 1933 to 1945. He is known as the "father of Black Baseball." [4]
Foster was born in Calvert, Texas on September 17, 1879. His father was also named Andrew Foster was a reverend and an elder at his local African Methodist Episcopal Church. [5]
Foster started his professional baseball career in 1897 with the Waco Yellow Jackets, an independent black team, and also played for the Hot Springs Arlingtons in 1901. [6]
Over the next year he gradually built up a reputation among white and black fans of the gameand was later signed by Frank Leland's Chicago Union Giants in 1902. The Union Giants at the time were a team at the top ranks of professional black baseball. Foster soon succumbed to and adopted his longtime nickname, "Rube", making his official middle name later in his life.
Rube was once was released after a short hitting slump, then signing with a white semi-professional team based in Otsego, Michigan—Bardeen's Otsego Independents.
According to Phil Dixon's American Baseball Chronicles: Great Teams, The 1905 Philadelphia Giants, Volume III: "In completing the summer of 1902 with Otsego's multi-ethnic team—the only multi-racial team with which he would ever regularly perform—Foster is reported to have pitched twelve games. Rube finished with a documented record of eight wins and four losses along with 82 documented strikeouts. Ironically, strikeout totals for five games in which he appeared were not recorded. If found, the totals would likely show that Foster struck out more than one-hundred batters for Otsego. In the seven games where details currently exist, Rube Foster averaged around eleven strikeouts per game.
Toward the end of the 1902 season he joined the Cuban X-Giants of Philadelphia, perhaps the best team in black baseball at the time. The season saw Foster firmly establish himself as the ace of the X-Giants' and a Negro League star. In a postseason series for the eastern black championship, the X-Giants defeated Sol White's Philadelphia Giants five games to two, with Foster himself recording four games won as starting pitcher.
According to various accounts, including his own, Foster acquired the nickname "Rube" after defeating star Philadelphia Athletics left-hander Rube Waddell in a postseason exhibition game played sometime between 1902 and 1905. [7] [8] [9]
A newspaper story in the Trenton (NJ) Times from July 26 of 1904, contains the earliest known example of Foster being referred to as "Rube," indicating that the supposed meeting with Waddell must have taken place earlier than that. Recent research has uncovered a game played on August 2, 1903, in which Foster met and defeated Waddell while the latter was playing under an assumed name for a semi-professional team in New York City. [10]
Now recognized across the Negro Leagues as an ace, he jumped to the Philadelphia Giants for the 1904 season. Legend has it that John McGraw, manager of the New York Giants, hired Foster to teach the young Christy Mathewson the "fadeaway", or screwball, though historians have cast doubt on this story.
During the 1904 season, Foster won 20 games against all competition (including two no-hitters) and losing six games. In a rematch with Rube's old team, the Cuban X-Giants, he won two games and batted .400, leading the Philadelphia Giants to the black championship.
In 1905, Foster—by his own account several years later—compiled a fantastic record of 51–4 (though recent research has confirmed only a 25–3 record) and led the Giants to another series championship, this time over the Brooklyn Royal Giants.
The Philadelphia Telegraph wrote that "Foster has never been equalled in a pitcher's box." The following season, the Philadelphia Giants helped form the International League of Independent Professional Ball Players, composed of both all-black and all-white teams in the Philadelphia and Wilmington, Delaware, area.
In 1907, Foster's manager Sol White published his Official Baseball Guide: History of Colored Baseball, with Foster contributing an article on "How to Pitch." However, before the season began, he and several other stars (including, most importantly, the outfielder Pete Hill) left the Philadelphia Giants for the Chicago Leland Giants, with Foster named as player/manager.
Under his leadership, the Chicago Giants won 110 games (including 48 straight) and lost only ten games, then taking the Chicago City League pennant. The following season the Lelands tied a national championship series with the Philadelphia Giants, each team winning three games.
Suffering a broken leg in July 1909 was a set back for Foster who rushed himself back into the lineup in time for an October exhibition series against the Chicago Cubs. His pitching in the second game, lead to his team squandering a late inning three run lead, eventually losing the game a controversial play when a Cubs runner stole home while Foster was arguing with the umpire.
The Lelands went on to lose, three games to nothing. The Lelands also lost the unofficial western black championship to the St. Paul Colored Gophers.
In 1910, Foster wrestled legal control of the team from its founder, Frank Leland. [11]
He proceeded to put together the team that he later considered as his finest. He signed John Henry Lloyd away from the Philadelphia Giants; along with Hill, second baseman Grant Johnson, catcher Bruce Petway, and pitchers Frank Wickware and Pat Dougherty.
Lloyd sparked the Lelands to a 123–6 record with Foster contributing a 13–2 record as a pitcher..
The following season, Foster established a partnership with John Schorling, the son-in-law of Chicago White Sox owner Charlie Comiskey. The White Sox had just moved into Comiskey Park, and Schorling arranged for Foster's team to use the vacated South Side Park, at 39th and Wentworth.
Settling into their new home (now called Schorling's Park), the Lelands became the Chicago American Giants. For the next four seasons, the American Giants claimed the western black baseball championship, though they lost a 1913 series to the Lincoln Giants for the national championship.
By 1915, the first serious rivalry in the professional black baseball had emerged: C. I. Taylor's Indianapolis ABCs, who claimed the western championship after defeating the American Giants in four games that July. One of the victories was ruled forfeit after a brawl broke out between the two teams.
After the series, Foster and Taylor engaged in a public dispute about the game and the championship.
In 1916, both teams again played for the western title.
The rivalry contributed to a hunger for a more professional black baseball league. Declarations for more organization were made publicly, but Foster, Taylor, and the other major midwestern clubs were unable to come to any agreement.
By this time, Foster was pitching very little, compiling only a 2–2 record in 1915. His last recorded outing on the mound was in 1917; from this time he became purely a bench manager.
As a bench manager and team owner, Foster was a disciplinarian. He asserted control over every aspect of the game, and set a high standard for personal conduct for appearance, and professionalism amongst his players.
Given Schorling Park's huge and awkward dimensions, Foster developed a style of play that emphasized speed, bunting, place hitting, power pitching, and defense. He was also considered a great teacher by many of his players. They soon became managers as well. This included Pete Hill, Bruce Petway, Bingo DeMoss, Dave Malarcher, Sam Crawford, Poindexter Williams, and many others.
In 1919, Foster helped Tenny Blount finance a new ballclub in Detroit, the Detriot Stars. He also transferred several of his veteran players there, including Hill, who was already suppose to manage a new team, and Petway. He may have been preparing for the formation of a more organized league. That occured the following year with the creation of the Negro National League (NNL).
In 1920, Foster, Taylor, and other owners of the six other midwestern clubs met in the spring of that year to form a professional baseball circuit for African-American teams. Foster, as president, controlled league operations, while remaining owner and manager of the American Giants.
He was periodically accused of favoring his own team, especially in matters of scheduling his Giants in the early years to have a disproportionate number of home games and league personnel. Rube Foster seemed able to acquire whatever talent he needed from other clubs with little resistance. The Detroit Stars' best player in 1920, Jimmie Lyons was transferred to the American Giants for 1921, for Foster's own younger brother, Bill Foster, who joined the American Giants unwillingly with Rube forcing the Memphis Red Sox to give him up in 1926.
His critics believed he had organized the league primarily for the purposes of booking games for the Chicago American Giants. With a stable schedule and reasonably solvent opponents, Foster was able to improve gate receipts significantly. It is also true that when opposing clubs lost money, he was known to help them meet payroll, sometimes out of his own pocket. [12]
His American Giants won the new league's first three pennants before being overtaken by the Kansas City Monarchs in 1923.
At that time the two most important franchises in the EasIn were the Hilldale Ballclub and Bacharach Giants. Both teams pulled out of an agreement with the Negro National League (NNL) and founded their own league, the Eastern Colored League (ECL).
The ECL raided the older circuits of the Negro Leagues for players they liked. Foster's ace pitcher Dave Brown was among the player poached. Eventually the two leagues reached an agreement to respect one another's contracts and to play a yearly World Series.
After two years of finishing behind the Kansas Monarchs, Rube "cleaned house" in spring of 1925, releasing several veterans (including Lyons and pitchers Dick Whitworth and Tom Williams).
On May 26, Foster was nearly asphyxiated by a gas leak in Indianapolis. Though he recovered and returned to his team, his behavior grew increasingly erratic moving forward.. Foster had instituted a split-season schedule format, with his American Giants finishing third in both halves. [13]
The 1926 season saw him complete his team's reshaping by leaving only a handful of veterans from the championship squads of 1920 to 1922 off the team. The club finished third in the season's first half, but Foster would never finish the second.
Over the years, "Foster grew increasingly paranoid. carrying a revolver with him everywhere he went." Suffering from delusions, including one where he believed he was about to receive a call to pitch hit in the World Series. Rube Foster was institutionalized midway through the 1926 season at an asylum in Kankakee, Illinois. [14][15]
The American Giants and the NNL lived led by Dave Malarcher. The Giants won the pennant and World Series in both 1926 and 1927—with the league clearly suffering in the absence of Foster's leadership. Foster died in 1930, never recovering his sanity, and a year later the league he had found fell apart.
Foster is interred in Lincoln Cemetery in Blue Island, Illinois. Thousands attended his funeral in Bronzeville, Chicago, including "an overflow crowd of 3,000 people who 'stood in the snow and rain.' At his funeral, his coffin was closed, according to attendees, "at the usual hour a ballgame ends." [16]
In 1981, Rube Foster was elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame. He was the first representative of the Negro Leagues elected as a pioneer executive and player.
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On December 30, 2009, the U.S. Postal Service announced that it planned to issue a pair of postage stamps in June honoring Negro leagues Baseball. [17]
On July 17, 2010, the Postal Service issued a se-tenant pair of 44-cent, first-class, U.S. commemorative postage stamps to honor the all-black professional baseball leagues that operated from 1920 to about 1960.
One of the stamps depicts Rube Foster, along with his name and the words "NEGRO LEAGUES BASEBALL". The stamps were formally issued at the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, during the celebration of the museum's twentieth anniversary. [18]
The Negro Leagues Baseball Museum hosts the annual Andrew "Rube" Foster Lecture, in September. [4]
In 2021, Rube Foster was posthumously inducted into the Chicagoland Sports Hall of Fame. [19]
On November 10, 2021, the United States Mint announced the designs for the 2022 Negro Leagues Centennial Commemorative coins, with Foster featured on the $5 gold half eagle. [20]
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Satchel Paige began his 20 year career in the Negro Leagues pitching for the Chattanooga Lookouts. He would later make his MLB debut at age 42 for the Cleveland Indians.
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Considered perhaps the best African-American pitcher of the first decade of the 1900s, Foster also founded and managed the Chicago American Giants.
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Nathaniel Strong was a Negro Leagues sports executive, businessman, team owner and founding member of the Negro National League I,
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Norman Turkey Stearnes played professionally in the Negro Leagues, and was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2000.
Gatewood pitched the first no-hitter in Nationa Negro League history when he defeated the Cincinnati Cuban Stars on June 6, 1921.
John Boyce Taylor was the second-oldest of 4 baseball-playing brothers, the others being Charles, Ben and James. For the 1899-1900 seasons, Taylor won 90% of his games starting pitcher for the Giants.
Buck signed with the Memphis Red Sox for their first year of play in the newly formed Negro American League (NAL). His contract was sold to the Kansas Monarchs the following year.
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