Jackie Robinson played for the Kansas City Royals - Say what??
 

Picked up this interesting program in a trade with a fellow Net54'er (Hi Andy). It's a program from the 1945 California Winter League. It is the Kansas City Royals negro team versus the Kent Parker's All Stars of San Diego.

The Royals team included the likes of Satchel Paige, Chet Brewer and Jackie Robinson. Robinson had just completed his short stent with the KC Monarchs prior to this. Then a few days later, he signed with the Dodgers. The Kent Parker team included several major and minor league players including Bob Feller. Apparently, major league baseball had recently started allowing their players to play in a very short winter league after the conclusion of their own season. This league was integrated (by teams) and included the negro Kansas City Royals and Birmingham Black Barons, as well as the Saltillo Mexican All-Stars, The Major League All-Stars, the Coast League All-Stars and the San Diego All-Stars. Several of these games pitted Feller against Paige. Man, that would have been a sight to have attended some of these games.

Might anybody else have any information, pics or memorabilia from this league they could add? I had never heard about it before running across this program.

Rob M

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Cool program. Here's a picture of Jackie in his K.C. Royals uniform. They were basically an extension of the Monarchs season for those who wanted to keep playing when the Negro League season ended.

http://static.newworldencyclopedia.o...binson1945.jpg

I can't currently remember with 100% certainty, but I believe it is shown/talked about in the movie 42?
http://www.historyvshollywood.com/re...e-robinson.php

http://kansascity.royals.mlb.com/new...ews_kc&c_id=kc

Thanks Dale and Hank for the additional info.

Rob M

I know this is a response to a very old post, but I do have info on this game.

I have a program from the same game which is scored,. If you look at the scorecard you can see that for many of the names, a different player was written above. This game took place on 10/24/1945, the day after Jackie signed with the Dodgers. He had flown to NY to sign the contract and therefore was not there for this game.

Both Paige and Feller pitched 6 innings, with Piage giving up 1 run and K'ing 7 and Feller giving up 0 and K'ing 14.

The game is detailed in "Satch, Dizzy and Rapid Robert" by Timothy Gay.

retrosheet has some information for you -
https://retrosheet.org/NegroLeagues/1945Season.htm