Cool Article About Walter Johnson Pitching vs a Negro League Team

[CobbSpikedMe]

Wayne is a great guy. I met him when I lived in CO for a couple years. He is definitely a go to guy when it comes to Negro League items and history.

AndyH

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[Runscott]

Originally Posted by CobbSpikedMe

Wayne is a great guy. I met him when I lived in CO for a couple years. He is definitely a go to guy when it comes to Negro League items and history.

AndyH

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He helped me immensely with my research, and I was lucky enough to be able to supply him with quite a few box scores he didn't have.

[Chris-Counts]

Thanks for posting Danny. That's some great stuff. My favorite part is when Walter is pitching as a ringer for a New York fire department team called the Fire Eaters and he loses to an obscure Negro League pitcher named "Gunboat" Thompson, 2-0. "Gunboat" actually has a page at baseballreference.com, but very little is unknown about him. If ever somebody deserved his 15 minutes of fame ...

[WillowGrove]

I dont live too far from Harlem and I think come Spring I'll go check out what's standing where those old ballparks those used to be.

[Hankphenom]

Among the seven games I came across in the research for my biography of Walter Johnson in which he pitched against black teams are the two mentioned against the Lincoln Giants in 1911 and the Lincoln Stars in 1914. He also pitched against the Mohawk Giants in 1913, and in those three games he did pitch against three of the best black pitchers of the era: Gunboat Thompson, Dick McClelland, and Frank Wickware. And that was indeed Honus Wagner at shortstop for the "All-Leaguers" vs the Lincoln Giants who had Pop Lloyd playing there for them. Wagner and Lloyd in the same game, it actually happened! I am of the firm belief, however, that Johnson and Smokey Joe Williams never pitched against each other, and that the story of their supposed matchup is a conflation of Johnson's 1-0 loss to Wickware and the Mohawk Giants on October 5, 1913, and Williams's 1-0 victory over Grover Cleveland Alexander the same day.

[ullmandds]

Geat read...in the boxscore from the likeliest scenario...wajo provided most of the offense that game too...WOW!!!

[Runscott]

That's all great, but I wouldn't have thought Johnson's memory would have been so bad that he would have imagined someone named 'Home Run Johnson' hitting a home run against him, and that being the only run. Seems unlikely.