Fanwood Library Presents Virtual History of the Negro Baseball League on Weds, April 21 – TAPinto.net

FANWOOD, NJ -- Former professional baseball playerReggie Hammonds, a graduate of Scotch Plains-Fanwood High School, will host an event covering the history of the Negro Baseball League on Wednesday, April 21, at 7:30 p.m. Hammonds has recently reissued his book "Lil Diamonds: Baseball Gems in the Making" about a program designed to help youngsters be successful at the sport while also having fun.b

The event will feature selections from a documentary about the Negro Leagues, with players speaking about their playing days. Called Before You Can Say Jackie Robinson, it shares the history of black baseball and features many players from the days before Robinsonbroke the color barrierin the sport. To register, email campell@verizon.net. You will then receive a Zoom link to attend the presentation.

A special poem will be read by Kevin Kane whose Negro League version of "Casey at the Bat," called Breaking the Line with the Mudville Nine, was written for and first performed at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. Kane, a poet, musician and playwright, teaches music and performance arts at the Paul Laurence Dunbar public school in the Bronx.

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Lawrence Hoganof Fanwood is a professor of history at Union County College with a Ph.D in American and Afro-American history from Indiana University. Over the years, he acquired what is believed to be the most extensive private collection of black baseball memorabilia in the U.S. outside the Negro League Museum in Kansas City. Most of hislarge photo collection of Negro League players is now housedat the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.

Hogan says that these players and many more represented the quality of baseball in Negro Leagues, which featured great players including Josh Gibson, Satchel Paige, Monty Irvin, and Larry Doby.Except for Gibson, those players made it to the Majors.He credits black newspapers and their writers, including Sam Lacey and Wendel Smith, withpushing for inclusion.Starting with his dissertation on Black Press and their role in covering the Negro Leagues, Hogan became interested in the history of black baseball and later turned his dissertation into a book titled A Black National News Service: The Associated Negro Press.

Hogan later began running programs and exhibits to share the history of the Negro Leagues and theirplayers. He then started meeting players to put them in these programs, and later featured them in a documentary. Along the way, he becamepersonal friends with many of them.

Once you got to know the players, the were great gentlemen. You realized that they are more than great players, but also great friends, says Hogan.

Hogan was a key member of theNegro Leagues Researchers and Authors Group. In 2000, the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum received a grant from MLB to fund an external study on the full history of African-American baseball. Under Hogan's leadership, the group of researchers, historians and writersproduced several comprehensive documents.

The first was a lengthy manuscript and bibliography covering the African-American baseball story from the Civil War into the 1960s.The second was an exhaustive database of game statistics covering the period of 1920 to 1948. Although Negro Leagues Baseball continued league play throughout the 1950s, the final data year, 1948, was chosen because it was the last year of the Negro World Series.More than 25 researchers read through hundreds of newspapers to identify box scores for Negro Leagues Baseball games. This data was then cataloged so that game-by-game and year-by-year data could be reviewed and analyzed. The effort resulted in more than9,500 pagesof hitting and pitching statistics for more than 6,000 players!

Unfortunately, there are no official stats for Negro Leagues Baseball. Much of the game-by-game detail was lost or seldom reported. During the past few decades there have been several attempts to collect and rebuild these statistics, mainly using data supplied by box scores and game accounts published in the African-American newspapers that existed at the time.

The Baseball Hall of Fame's Negro League Researchers and Authors Group established a set of criteria for inclusion on this data set. Data is only included for league sanctioned games from 1920 to 1948 for which a published box score or credible scorebook existed. Statistics gleaned from game accounts alone without a supporting box score were not included.The year 1948 was determined to be the last year for the study because it was the last year of a sanctioned, official World Series.This data led to a special Hall of Fame election class in 2006.

VisitBaseball-Reference.orgto learn more about Negro Leagues statistics.

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Fanwood Library Presents Virtual History of the Negro Baseball League on Weds, April 21 - TAPinto.net