Tom Alston

[GeoPoto]

We have previously highlighted the lives and baseball cards of the men who became the first black men to play for one of the 16 MLB franchises. Several of these men have been inducted into the MLB Hall of Fame. Several others had MLB careers long enough for them to appear on a substantial number of baseball cards, photographs, and other memorabilia. Today we focus on a player from a third group: players whose time in MLB was brief, resulting in a limited number of collectable items. Today's focus is on: Thomas E. "Tom" Alston. First baseman for the St. Louis Cardinals in 1954-1957. 66 hits and 4 home runs in 4 MLB seasons. He only got significant playing time in 1954 as he posted a .317 OBP in 271 plate appearances. He was the first black player to play for the Cardinals.

I only have two cards that feature Alston. Today and tomorrow, I will borrow excerpts from Alston's SABR biography and show the two cards I have. If anyone has Alston items in their collection, I would love to see them. For anyone interested in more on Tom's mostly troubled life and MLB career, I recommend the excellent SABR biography written by Warren Corbett:

Tom Alston tried to hit big-league pitching while hearing voices, battling chronic fatigue, and carrying the weight of being a racial pioneer in a Jim Crow city.

Alston, the first African American player for the St. Louis Cardinals, spent most of his life in torment and poverty. He never escaped the grip of mental illness that ended his baseball career.

Besides the pressure to make it in the majors and to be “a credit to his race,” Alston faced the added burden of being the most expensive black player ever. The Cardinals paid the Pacific Coast League’s San Diego Padres more than $100,000, plus four players, for his contract.

His debut in 1954 came seven years after Jackie Robinson’s. That year, for the first time, a majority of the 16 major league teams had black players, although those players made up less than 6 percent of the rosters. They were no longer an experiment, but not yet commonplace.

The Cardinals were latecomers to integration. Front-office executive Bing Devine said the owner from 1947 to 1953, Fred Saigh, refused to sign black players. There was a widespread belief that St. Louis was, in many ways, a Southern city. In the mid-1950s many of its stores and restaurants refused to serve black customers. The Cardinals, with baseball’s largest radio network blanketing the Midwest and South, had cultivated white Southern fans. Their ballpark was the last in the majors to abolish segregated seating.

When Anheuser-Busch bought the franchise in 1953, August A. Busch Jr. noticed the absence of black faces and ordered his baseball staff to find some. Busch was no civil rights crusader; he was an equal opportunity capitalist who wanted to sell his beer to everyone regardless of race, creed, or color. The Cardinals hired Negro League veteran Quincy Trouppe as a scout and signed more than a dozen African Americans in the first year of the Busch regime. The talent search eventually led to Alston. . . .