Quote:
Originally Posted by WillowGrove
Wow. Nice item there Michael. This one just came in the mail for me. Very excited as Josh Gibson, Oscar Charleston and three other Hall of Famers were on this team considered the best Negro League team of all time. If anyone knows any good online resources where I can find newspaper archives of this game please let me know. Pittsburgh Courier archives proved fruitless. Thanks for any help and thoughts. -peter
|
On July 30th, 1931 in Crucible, PA, the Grays won their 17th consecutive game crushing Crucible 12-2. Oscar Charleston hit a double, triple and a homer. Josh Gibson and Tubby Scales also had 3 hits apiece and every man in the lineup that day hit safely at least once. Lefty Williams was the winning pitcher, giving up 8 hits and striking out 5 of the locals and the Grays had 16 hits.
This is from a book called "Phil Dixon's American Baseball Chronicles Great Teams: The 1931 Homestead Grays Volume 1". Dixon wrote some very good books on the Negro Leagues and this Grays book is one of the hardest to find as it's self-published. If you are interested in the '31 Grays, there is no finer and doggedly researched book than this. Dixon tracked down almost every single box score and newspaper article on virtually all the team's games that summer and wrote a nice recap of each one for this book. The one downside is that there is no comprehensive listing of year end statistics. In reality it wouldn't really reveal anything as most of the Grays games were against town teams like Crucible which was hardly up to the task of taking on the Grays. Still, it would have been neat to see a 3-tiered breakdown of how each player did against white minor league teams, Negro League teams and town and semi-pro teams.
Neat ticket!