Mr. Speaker, I include in the Record the following article titled, ``The Glorious Return of Hinchliffe, Yankee Stadium of the Negro Leagues'' written by Eric Wills about Hinchliffe Stadium in Paterson, New Jersey. [From GQ SPORTS, June 19,…
Mr. Speaker, I include in the Record the following article titled, ``The Glorious Return of Hinchliffe, Yankee Stadium of the Negro Leagues'' written by Eric Wills about Hinchliffe Stadium in Paterson, New Jersey.
[From GQ SPORTS, June 19, 2023]
The Glorious Return of Hinchliffe, Yankee Stadium of the Negro Leagues
(By Eric Wills)
One of the last remaining Negro League ballparks was nearly
lost to history. But professional baseball has now returned
to the fabled stadium, which stands as a monument to
generations of Black players once consigned to the periphery
of our national pastime.
Hinchliffe Stadium hosted some of the greatest Black
ballplayers in history, including more than 20 future Hall of
Famers. A Juneteenth game and ceremony will honor their
legacy.
Keon Barnum, a lefty first baseman who, at 6'5" and 225
pounds, makes everything around him look curiously out of
scale, stepped into the batter's box at Hinchliffe Stadium.
The full sweep of Paterson, New Jersey, unfolded before him:
brick mill buildings and church steeples rising beyond the
outfield wall, the city's thundering Great Falls just a long
toss away. It was a Friday afternoon in mid-May. Barnum and
his teammates from the New Jersey Jackals, a Frontier League
team that had recently moved from nearby Little Falls, were
taking measure of their new ballpark the day before their
home opener. A majestic Art Deco number built in 1932,
Hinchliffe had sat vacant for more than a quarter century,
its concrete and graffiti-covered bleachers crumbling, the
unhoused living in its locker rooms. Once the pulsing heart
of Paterson, the stadium was reduced to a ruin, a heart-
rending symbol of the city's decline. But now, following a
$100-million-plus restoration, Hinchliffe once again glimmers
anew--a restored monument to one of baseball's most mythical
and complicated legacies.
Thwack! Thwack! Thwack! Barnum began launching moonshots
into the sun-streaked ether--the glorious sound of baseball
returning to Hinchliffe. ``It's an honor to play here,'' he
later said, after joining a select lineage of Black
ballplayers who once called the ballpark their own. In its
heyday, Hinchliffe flourished as the home to a trio of Negro
League teams--the New York Black Yankees, the New York
Cubans, and the Newark Eagles--and host to dozens of other
Black ball clubs. More than 20 future Hall of Famers once
haunted its confines: the likes of Monte Irvin, the legendary
outfielder for the New York Giants; Larry Doby, who grew up
in Paterson and became the second man, after Jackie Robinson,
to break baseball's color barrier; and Josh Gibson, the
fabled bomber reputed to have hit nearly 800 home runs. The
1933 Colored Championship of the Nation between the Black
Yankees, the Pittsburgh Crawfords, and the Philadelphia Stars
unfolded at Hinchliffe, as did a 1935 no-hitter by Black
Yankees pitcher Terris ``Elmer'' McDuffie.
``Jackie got all the publicity for putting up with it. He
was first, but the crap I took was just as bad. Nobody said,
`We're going to be nice to the second Black.' ''--Larry Doby,
Hall of Fame outfielder for the Newark Eagles and Cleveland
Indians
Today, only a handful of Negro League players still survive
from the era before Robinson broke the color barrier, in
1947; only a handful of stadiums where they played still
stand. Of those that do--including Rickwood Field in
Birmingham, Alabama; Hamtramck Stadium in Michigan; and J.P.
Small Memorial Stadium in Jacksonville--Hinchliffe and
Rickwood retain most of their original grandstands and look
much as they did about a century ago. Along with Wrigley
Field, Hinchliffe is the only ballpark named a National
Historic Landmark. You can read oral histories about the
Negro Leagues, peruse statistics on the Seamheads Negro
Leagues Database, an authoritative set of records compiled by
a group of trailblazing researchers. To make a pilgrimage to
Hinchliffe, however, is to foster a more intimate connection:
to walk where the players themselves once did, to commune
with the spirits of the athletes who helped build momentum
for the Civil Rights movement. If Centre Court at Wimbledon
can be considered hallowed ground, Hinchliffe is no less
sacred.
On Juneteenth, the Jackals will hold a game at Hinchliffe
that doubles as a celebration of the Negro Leagues. In a rare
tribute, the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum will
bring its plaque commemorating Larry Doby from Cooperstown to
the stadium as part of a ceremony launching the museum's
forthcoming exhibition on the history of Black baseball. Doby
was the first Black player in the American League, suiting up
with the Cleveland Indians less than three months after
Robinson's debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers. He was only 23,
and unlike Robinson, got no time in the minors, going
straight from the Newark Eagles to Comiskey Park in Chicago.
In less than 24 hours he recorded his last Negro Leagues hit
(a home run), and his first major league at bat (a pinch hit
strike out). His reception from his new teammates was
hardly welcoming; he nearly ended up in the stands in St.
Louis, when a fan taunted him with sexual innuendos about
his wife. ``Jackie got all the publicity for putting up
with it,'' Doby said of the racial slurs. ``He was first,
but the crap I took was just as bad. Nobody said, `We're
going to be nice to the second Black.' ''
After his playing career, Doby once again recorded a
historic second, becoming the second Black manager in the
majors after Frank Robinson when he took the job with the
White Sox in 1978. But before all of that, he was just an 18-
year-old kid who had come to Hinchliffe for a try out with
the Newark Eagles, a Negro Leagues team, after the owner
heard that ``there was a pretty good ballplayer out of
Eastside High School,'' as Doby recalled at his Hall of Fame
induction ceremony. ``And I played the rest of the summer
with Newark''--the effective start of his long climb to
Cooperstown.
I first visited Hinchliffe in 2009, when the chances of its
revival seemed remote. The Paterson Public School District,
which owned the stadium, had shuttered it in 1997; demolition
at one point appeared likely. My guide, Brian LoPinto, who
had gotten his first varsity hit at the ballpark, had co-
founded a group called the Friends of Hinchliffe Stadium that
was rallying support to save the site. (The restored stadium,
the product of decades of grass-roots organizing and
political wrangling, will be reserved for school events and
games 180 days a year.)
Attempting to unearth Hinchliffe's storied past, I tracked
down the man who was then the greatest living player with a
meaningful connection to the site: Monte Irvin, who was
teammates with Doby on the Eagles before he led the Giants to
the World Series in 1951. He was then 90 and living in
Houston. When I reached him by phone, he helped illuminate
the meaning of an era I had only begun to understand,
unspooling stories with a casual grace. He told me how, in
the spring of 1937, he had stepped into the batting box in
Hinchliffe as a 18-year-old high school star from nearby
Orange with a .666 batting average. And how he had launched
some 400-foot moonshots of his own over the left field fence
during his try out for the Eagles. The sound caught the
attention of two visiting players from the Homestead Grays,
who were preparing for a game against Newark later that day:
Josh Gibson and Buck Leonard (considered by newspapers at the
time to be the Black Babe Ruth and Black Lou Gehrig,
respectively, although who's to say Lou Gehrig wasn't the
white Buck Leonard?). As Irvin recalled, ``Buck hollered out
to William Bell, the manager, `Hey, who is that youngster?'
''
``Our games gave Black Americans hope all across the
country. They said, `If these ball players can succeed under
these very difficult conditions, then maybe we can too.' ''--
Monte Irvin, Hall of Fame outfielder for the Newark Eagles
and New York Giants
It was the start of an enduring friendship, and also of
Irvin's professional career. His stories revealed hard
truths: the assumed name (Jimmy Nelson) he played under to
preserve his college eligibility; the meagerness of his
starting salary (earning only $125 a month, he lived with his
parents to save money); the long bus rides (Negro League
teams sometimes logged 30,000 miles in a summer); the
difficulty finding restaurants or hotels that would serve him
and his teammates (players remembered staying at bed-bug-
infested motels, even funeral homes, and with their $1-per-
day meal money and challenges of life on the road sometimes
subsisted on sardines, bologna, crackers, or ballpark hot
dogs). ``Conditions were abominable, but we didn't know any
better,'' as Irvin once recalled. ``We were young and strong,
and we loved the game so much.''
Perhaps the greatest injustice was that segregation had
robbed him of his prime. ``This should have happened to me 10
years ago,'' he once said of joining the Giants at age 30.
``I'm not even half the ballplayer I was then.'' (And what a
player he was: With his grace and all-around game, many of
his contemporaries thought he should have been the one to
break the color barrier in the majors.) Yet Irvin expressed
no abiding anger at his fortunes, and shared with me but one
overriding regret, touching in its magnanimity: that the full
sweep of the country hadn't seen the likes of Satchel Paige
and Gibson, ``one of the greatest hitters who ever lived.''
Because almost none of the Negro League teams owned their
own stadiums, they relied on brokers and agents to arrange
games, often at major league stadiums, for a cut of the
profits, of course. Conditions at cheaper and more accessible
fields could be abysmal--rocky sandlots with peculiar
dimensions, smoke wafting in from passing trains. But at
Hinchliffe, the Black Yankees and New York Cubans found a
reliable and dignified home base that afforded them a measure
of freedom--and a chance to build their own community against
the backdrop of segregation. Here, and across the Negro
Leagues, they made the national pastime their own: a game of
speed and stylish intelligence, one that elevated the bunt-
and-run into an art form, say, or saw Paige handcuff batters
with his hesitation pitch, later outlawed in the majors.
Irvin had grown up watching the Negro Leaguers--``the way
they looked, the way they dressed, the way they played, it
was a great inspiration,'' he told me--and he remembered how
his generation had played a similar role. ``Our games gave
Black Americans hope all across the country,'' he once
recalled, before his passing at age 96, in 2016. ``They said,
`If these ball players can succeed under these very difficult
conditions, then maybe we can too.' ''
After a rainout, and two days after Barnum staged his
batting-practice show, opening day finally arrived at
Hinchliffe: the Jackals vs. the Sussex County Miners. One
fact emerged from the start: It is a hitter-friendly
ballpark. In the late afternoon glow, after LoPinto secured
the first pitched ball for the museum that's being
established at the stadium, the Miners' lead-off hitter went
deep, recording the first of 10 home runs in the Jackals' 10-
6 victory. (``The ball just flies,'' Barnum said, after
hitting one out.) Purists might wish the field were grass,
not turf, or that home plate was positioned at the bottom of
the horseshoe, as in the Negro League days, and not in the
northeast corner of the stadium, where the school district
later moved it. The right field line, listed at 327 feet,
appears far shorter than that; a 40-foot-high net prevents
line drives from leaving the park. But none of those quibbles
overshadowed the thrill of baseball returning to Hinchliffe.
Bobby Jones, the vice president and chief business officer
for the Jackals, and a former left-handed pitcher for the
Mets who grew up going to Kennedy-Eastside High School
Thanksgiving day football games at Hinchliffe, helped broker
the deal to bring the team to Paterson--a move he hopes will
contribute to the city's economic revival. ``I thought coming
here that we could be a positive light in a community that
needed it,'' he told me. ``These kids who go to that school
have never thought they'd get out of Paterson because they
looked down and saw nothing but garbage. And now it's
transformed their whole thinking. The possibilities are
real to these kids. It's bigger than baseball.''--Harold
Reynolds, former All-Star second baseman for the Seattle
Mariners
In March, Paterson, a majority Latino city with a 25
percent poverty rate, made headlines when police shot and
killed a Black counselor from an anti-violence organization,
which helped lead to the state Attorney General's office
takeover of the police department. It's too early to say
whether the Hinchliffe project, which relied on a significant
infusion of state tax credits that helped fund the
construction of affordable senior housing at the site, can
help solve some of the city's most pressing problems (some
local activists are skeptical). Or whether Jackals fans, a
few of whom expressed their disappointment on social media at
the team's move away from Yogi Berra Stadium, in Little
Falls, will stay away (attendance on opening day was sparse).
But at the stadium's ribbon cutting a few days earlier,
Harold Reynolds, the former Seattle Mariners second baseman
turned TV analyst, who's become an unofficial ambassador for
Hinchliffe, told me the project has already had a positive
effect on the students of Public School 5, which rises above
the stadium's northwest side. ``These kids who go to that
school have never thought they'd get out of Paterson because
they looked down and saw nothing but garbage,'' Reynolds
said. ``And now I was talking with the principal, and it's
transformed their whole thinking. The possibilities are real
to these kids. It's bigger than baseball.'' Reynolds has been
lobbying MLB to host a Field of Dreams-style game at
Hinchliffe (a game that will be held at Rickwood next year).
``The beauty of baseball is the folklore,'' he told me. ``The
stories are what carry our sport.''
In 2020, MLB attempted to atone for its original sin by
announcing that it was ``elevating the Negro Leagues to
`Major League' status,'' and gave credit for the decision in
part to the Seamheads Negro Leagues Database. Of course, it
was the majors that needed elevating, and the often sublime
players of the Negro Leagues who transformed the majors into
actual major leagues. (Black baseball teams logged a winning
record against major league and all-star teams between 1900
and 1948, according to research compiled by Todd Peterson in
the book The Negro Leagues Were Major Leagues.) But because
many games were lost to history, the box scores never
reported, Negro League statistics will never be comprehensive
(Gibson has but 240 reported home runs in
Seamheads); they will never reveal the constraints that Black
ballplayers faced, lack of coaching among them; and they will
always have been generated independent of the majors, an
injustice that can never be corrected.
Hinchliffe invites you to consider difficult questions:
consider if baseball had integrated a decade or two earlier,
or if the game had never been segregated at all; consider if
Paige, Gibson, Leonard, Oscar Charleston, Cool Papa Bell, and
dozens of others had enjoyed their primes in the majors, what
the record book might look like today, how different our
understanding of the game would be. Consider also the fate of
the Black players who never made it to the show because they
came of age too soon or found themselves shut out of the
game, unable to find a team, after the color line was broken,
the leagues they helped build vanishing like a ghost ship
into darkness. In a bittersweet twist, when Black fans
flocked to see Robinson at Ebbets Field, the demise of the
Negro Leagues soon followed, even as major league teams were
slow to sign Black players: The Red Sox, for instance, took
12 years after Robinson's debut to integrate. And finally,
consider the forces that kept baseball segregated, and how
those forces persist today: Witness the declining percentage
of Black ballplayers in the majors and the continuing
struggle to diversify the coaching and front office ranks.
In the thickening shadows of Hinchliffe, after the Jackals'
victory in their home opener, I stood with Nilo Rijo, the
team's second baseman, as he fielded questions from
reporters. He attended high school in nearby Passaic and
often drove by Hinchliffe on the way to his workout facility
without recognizing the then-ruin as a ballpark. Like so many
others, he has now started learning its history.
Standing there in that repository of myths, I thought back
to my chat with Reynolds after the ribbon-cutting. During his
playing days he had befriended Buck O'Neil, the legendary
first baseman turned manager from the Negro League's Kansas
City Monarchs, who had passed along stories from his fabled
career. And now, as members of the next generation step
through the gates at Hinchliffe, they too can discover the
history of the Black owners and managers who built the Negro
Leagues, and the Black ballplayers who changed the sport.
Reynolds, for his part, hopes that a trip to the ballpark
will convey a simple yet transformative truth: ``that
baseball was a Black sport.''
Eric Wills is a former senior editor at Architect magazine
whose work has appeared in The Washington Post, Smithsonian,
and GQ.