King Solomon "Sol" White was an American professional baseball player, infielder, manager and executive in within the collective known as the Negro Leagues. He is considered to have been one of the pioneers of black baseball.
King Solomon "Sol" White was an American professional infielder, manager and baseball executive in the Negro Leagues. He was a major influence and pioneer of the Negro Leagues.
As an active sportswriter for many years, he wrote the first definitive history of black baseball in 1907. He was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2006.
As a teenager Sol White was a fan of the Bellaire Globes, a local amateurs team. The journalist Floyd J. Calvin recounts the story of how White got a chance to play for his team. The Globes were playing a team from Marietta, Ohio.
"One of the Globes players got his finger smashed and since they all knew Sol, the captain pushed him into the game. Sol always remembered that game for the captain and second baseman of the Marietta team was none other than Ban B. Johnson, in later years president of the American League and a leading sportsman of the West. Sol takes pride in having played against Ban when he was an obscure captain of a hick town club."
White would go on to quickly make a name for himself in black baseball.
By the time he was 16, he "attracted the attention of managers of independent teams throughout the Ohio Valley and his services were in great demand." Originally a shortstop, White eventually "developed into a great all-round player filling any position from catcher to right field." [5] [7]
In 1887 he joined the Pittsburgh Keystones of the National Colored BaseBall League as a left fielder, and later as a second baseman. He was hitting .308 before the league folded after a week it had began.
Unfazed, he then joined the Wheeling (West Virginia) Green Stockings of the Ohio State League. There he saw regular playing time, hitting .370 with a slugging percentage of .502 as the team’s starting third baseman. [8]
In the off-season the Ohio State League renamed itself to the Tri-State League and banned black players, including White.
Weldy Walker, an African American catcher for the league's Akron club, wrote an eloquent open letter to league officials protesting the decision. It was published in the Sporting Life Magazine in March 1888, and within a few weeks the outrage was so grievous that the ban was rescinded.
White was reassigned and sent to join his team on the barnstorming [on the road], but the Wheeling manager, Al Buckenberger, refused to accept him possibly due to his sexual orientation, and he was released from the team. [9] [10]
Although he would later rejoined his old team, the Pittsburgh Keystones, and have the opportunity to played in a "Colored World Championship Tournement" held in New York City.
The matchup between the first place Cuban Giants and the second place Keystones was shaping up to be an interesting affair.
White spent most 1889 with the New York Gorhams, a black team that spent part of the season in the Middle States League. While playing with New York, White took the position of both catcher and second base for the Gorhams.
The next year, he joined the Colored Monarchs of the Eastern Interstate League, a white-owned team that signed most of the 1889 Cuban Giants.
White played second base for that team, hitting .350, with 21 stolen bases in 54 games. In 1891 he played for the Big Gothams of New York, a team that he later called "without a doubt one of the strongest teams ever gotten together, white or black." [15]
The following season the New York Gorhams became the Norwalk Gorhams briefly representing Norwalk, Connecticut, in the Connecticut State League.
It was in 1895 that White batted .385 as a second baseman for the Fort Wayne, Indiana team of the Western Interstate League., and later that year, White would go on to overtake starter Bud Fowler at second base, on the barnstorming power house Page Fence Giants team.
White seized the opportunity batting .404 for the Giants, who finished the season with a 118-36-2 record, playing in an amazing in 112 towns across 7 states.
Sol then enrolled in Wilberforce University as a theology student in 1896, spending the next four years alternating between professional baseball with the Cuban X-Giants in the summer and college in the fall and winter.
He was still listed as an athletic instructor at Wilberforce in 1900. [2]
After a year as shortstop for the Chicago Columbia Giants in 1900 and one last season with the Cuban X-Giants in 1901, White moved to Philadelphia where he co-founded the Philadelphia Giants.
His playing time was gradually curtailed as he concentrated on the business of baseball. This is when Sol White showed his talent as a manager.
According to research by Bob Davids, for his career; Sol White also spent all or part of five seasons in organized minor leagues, playing 152 games and hitting .359 with 169 runs scored, 231 hits, 40 doubles, and 41 stolen bases. [20]
Along with Walter Schlichter, a sportswriter for the Philadelphia Item, and Harry Smith, a baseball writer for the Philadelphia Tribune, White founded the Philadelphia Giants in 1902, servingas the team's captain and manager.
His Philadelphia Giants were at first paid on a profit-sharing "cooperative plan," but in 1903 White reorganized the team and put all the players on a yearly static contracted salary.
The Giants lost a playoff for the colored championship to the Cuban X-Giants that season, losing to legendary ace pitcher, Rube Foster. The following season White was so impressed he signed Foster, outfielder Pete Hill, and second baseman Charlie Grant.
With those significant signings added to an already championship level team, the Philadelphia Giants won a championship series from the X-Giants the next season, winning the series 5-2.
For the 1905 campaign White signed Home Run Johnson, stealing him from the X-Giants, making the Philadelphia Giants into what he believed was "the strongest organization of the time."
The Giants went undefeated playing in the New England League sweeping a four game championship in the the Newark International League . The Giants went on to play a total of 158 games, finishing the season with a recored of 134-21-3.
Powerful baseball promoter and team owner Nat Strong declared the 1904-1905 Philadelphia Giants "the best team in the history of the game." [22]
Despite losing Johnson to the Brooklyn Royal Giants in 1906, the Giants still won both the informal "colored championship" and the pennant of the racially integrated International League of Independent Professional Base Ball Clubs.
For the organization, player losses became an issue in 1907, as Rube Foster defected to the Leland Giants of Chicago, dealing a huge blow to the Brooklyn Royal Giants.
Despite losing possibility the greatest pitcher of the time in Foster, White began to make moves. He brought in eventual Hall of Famer John Henry Lloyd to play shortstop along with catcher Bruce Petty, and the Royal Giants finished first in the National Association of Colored Baseball Clubs of the United States and Cuba, an all-black league.
This marked the fourth consecutive year in which the Philadelphia Giants claimed a black professional championship.
The next season in 1908, the Giants lost Pete Hill to the Lelands Giants, and in 1909 Sol White left the team completely after a disagreement with Schlichter.
He went on to managed the Philadelphia Quaker Giants for a year, and in 1910 was hired to manage the Brooklyn Royal Giants again, but had trouble controlling some of the players, and left after one season. [24] [25]
For the following season Jess McMahon and his brother Eddie hired White to manage their new startup team, the New York Giants.
White again began assembling a collection of top talent within the Negro Leagues. He added John Henry Lloyd, Spot Poles, and Bill Francis to the team immediately. In July 1911 he raided his old team, the Philadelphia Giants, for their star rookie battery, Dick Redding and Louis Santop.
As a result, Schlichter could no longer keep the team running, and it was dissolved. White then quit the Lincolns before the season was over, being replaced as manager by John Henry Lloyd. [26]
White’s next venture in baseball was to manage in the Cuban League for the 1911-12 winter league season. He brought along his friend and fellow visionary, Rube Foster and a number of American black players. However, the team lost five of its first six games. After such a poor showing White disbanded the team and most of his players were released
After a year managing an obscure team called the Boston Giants, White retired from baseball completely, and returned to Bellaire. [27] [28}
He would returned to baseball once more to serve as secretary for the Columbus Buckeyes of the Negro National League (NNL) in 1921, and helped bring in his old friend, John Henry Lloyd, as player-manager.
White then took on his last two managerial jobs, with Cleveland: in 1922 he guided an independent club, the Fears Giants of Cleveland, and in 1924 he managed the Cleveland Browns of the Negro National League. [29] [30]
Before calling it quits White took on one last job in baseball as a coach for the 1926 Newark Stars of the Eastern Colored League (ECL).
Sol White is perhaps best known for his writing of the History of Colored Base Ball, also inscribed on the title page as "Sol White's Official Base Ball Guide."
A small, 128-page, soft-covered pamphlet, History of Colored Base Ball was sold at Philadelphia Giants games in the spring of 1907. [32] [33]
The first chapter of the book begins with the organization in 1885, of the first professional colored baseball teams, discussing the brusque removal of all black players from the predominantly white leagues during the next four years, and then outlines the growing strength of "colored base ball” moving into the early years of the 20th century.
This short book-within-a-book is history, but it can also be described as an almanac, a scorecard, an archive, a who's who of African-American baseball up to 1907. Akin to the Bill James Abstract.
In addition to White's narrative talking about the history of black professional teams, the book featured chapters on "Colored Baseball as a Profession," "The Color Line," and "Managers' Troubles," among others.
Rube Foster, one of White's former players, contributed a chapter on "How to Pitch," and Home Run Johnson wrote a short essay on the "Art and Science of Hitting." The book was also illustrated with 57 photographs of players, manager, and owners, many of them found nowhere else. [33]
White's History of Colored Base Ball was the first book devoted specifically to black professional baseball, and it would remain the only one for more than 60 years, until Robert W. Peterson published Only the Ball Was White in 1970. Today only five copies are known to exist. [34]
Sol White's career as a baseball writer would continue with a series of articles on "colored baseball" in the Cleveland Advocate, a black newspaper, in 1919.
After moving to the east coast in the 1920s he wrote articles and columns for the New York Age and the New York Amsterdam News.
In 1927 the Pittsburgh Courier reported that White "has a new book he would like to publish, a kind of second edition to his old one, bringing the game from 1907 down to date, and if there is anybody anywhere in sports circles who thinks enough of what has gone before to help Sol print his record, he will be glad to hear from them. Without a doubt this record will prove valuable in years to come."
This second book on black baseball by Sol White never appeared.
Sol White married Florence Fields on March 15, 1906. Their first child, a son named Paran Walter White (named after Sol's older brother), was born later that year. A second son, a boy, died when he was only two days old in August 1907.
Sol’s wife Paran died of kidney disease in April 1908. A third child, a daughter named Marion, lived to adulthood. Florence and Sol White appear to have become separated at some point before 1930. [36]
When Sol White was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 2006, no family members were was present for his induction, so the Commissioner of Baseball, Bud Selig accepted his plaque on the family's behalf.
White died at age 87 in Central Islip, New York.
He was buried in an unmarked grave in Frederick Douglass Memorial Park in the Oakwood neighborhood of Staten Island, New York City, until 2014, when the Negro Leagues Baseball Grave Marker Project installed a new headstone at his burial site.
He remains the only Hall of Fame Major League Baseball player to be buried on Staten Island. [37] [38]
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