Quote:
Originally Posted by Hankphenom
Perhaps, but there also would have been a relatively larger pool of poor whites who grew up in equally hard-scrabble circumstances as many of the black players, i.e. on tenant farms, in mining communities, etc., places where kids never went to school or left at very young ages to go to work. And given that the country was 90% white at the time, I would surmise that the number of white illiterate ballplayers would have far exceeded the number of black illiterate ballplayers.
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What you say certainly makes a lot of sense. We unfortunately will only be able to speculate on this as opposed to ever being able to offer the world anything concrete. There are so many Negro Leaguers for whom full basic data is missing. Common names, no middle names on file, let alone DOB/DOD...the picture will likely never be fully formed for every NL'er.
Conversely, we do have a full list of MLB players from this 1920's-30's era. While there will continuously be fine tweaking of some of this data until the end of time, we generally know where and when they were all born and passed away. On top of that, over more than 30 years, I have collected post-baseball career info (their lines of work) and causes of death for almost all from this period. As noted, they were all capable of signing their names and I am certain I've seen all of their autographs in my years of doing this. I've also owned the vast majority of them at some point in time, albeit not all at once! Again, I do want to make room for the fact that a scant name or two could possibly be escaping me; like the rest of us, my memory is not as razor-sharp as it was in my youth!