In 1932, numbers king Gus Greenlee put together the finest black baseball team money could buy. (It certainly helped that he refused to sign a non-raiding contract, and that he didn't much care about the complaints of Negro League owners frustrated that he was poaching their stars.) Third-baseman Jud Wilson batted an estimated .486 and outfielder (and later manager) Vic Harris batted an estimated .403. According to Dixon’s research, they finished with a 143-29-2 record for an .828 winning average. But picking the 1931 Grays No. They began in the 1900s as a sandlot team, a group of steelworkers across the river from Pittsburgh who played in local industrial leagues.
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Gibson led the team in home runs (67) and RBIs (267). He cautioned that the Grays players likely wouldn’t have accumulated such gaudy stats against major-league competition. The 1931 Homestead Grays baseball team competed as an independent in Negro league baseball during the 1931 baseball season. The card-creator’s name is being withheld out of respect for his privacy. Williams and Foster in the rotation; Gibson, Charleston and Wilson in the lineup -- that's five Baseball Hall of Famers on one team, six if you count Posey -- more than the '70 Orioles, more than the '42 Cardinals, more than the Big Red Machine, as many as the '48 Indians, just one shy of the '27 Yankees. He guided his team to six consecutive pennants from 1937 through 1942; in 1945 and 1948, and led the 1948 team to the Negro League World Series championship. rebuild this lost statistical history. They played a league schedule during the years when there were Negro Leagues, but even then they barnstormed against local semipro and amateur teams in order to make ends meet. These are the kinds of experiences that fans across the decades are able to share. And really, given all the talent that we know was on that roster, talent that never had the chance to prove itself on the Major League stage, why should we stop there? A black-and-white team photograph of the 1931 Homestead Grays. Margins were slim, teams came and went and players hopped around in order to make what money they could, especially as the Great Depression set in. from and provided by the Negro Leagues Database, a project organized Their opponents shut out the Grays twice. His strategy might have gotten its roots watered across town as Gus Greenlee, a deep-pocketed racketeer who was the moneyman behind the Crawfords, was about to buy a roster of high-end talent as well. Here are some highlights of the 1931 Homestead Grays dream season against the great teams of all-time: Scales hit for the cycle against the 1946 Newark Eagles. Under the direction of Larry Lester, Wayne Stivers and Dick Clark, The Negro National League crumbled soon after Rube Foster’s demise in December 1930. On talent alone, this team should receive creditable consideration as one of the greatest teams of all time.
Oscar Owens, who also played the outfield, led the team with 15 saves. That would avoid the overuse of a higher-rated pitcher. Britt played all nine positions over the season. The players are … Much of the play-by-play, game results, and transaction information both shown and used to create certain data sets was obtained free of charge from and is copyrighted by RetroSheet. With this background in mind, a 162-game season was played between the 1931 Homestead Grays and the group of APBA’s company-produced greatest teams of all time. No, the 1931 Homestead Grays weren't particularly glamorous. Probably not, but these kinds of projects are what makes baseball fun to people across generational lines. And what do the names of these legendary figures from "black baseball" say about the '31 Homestead team? And the '31 Grays played as hard as any professional team ever did, said Rob Ruck, a senior lecturer in the History Department at the University of Pittsburgh and an authority on the Negro Leagues. He had the financial might -- he paid his players regular wages, a rarity at the time -- but just as importantly, he could close. We present them here for purely educational purposes. Owens played six. It may be that 100 different people playing the same schedule with the same teams using the same tabletop or computer game would come out with 100 different outcomes. We can manage these great players, get familiar with their playing styles, their averages, their abilities against others. He teaches in an alternative high school in Dalton, Georgia. "[2], Following the collapse of the Negro National League after the 1948 season, the Grays struggled to continue as an independent club, and ultimately disbanded in May 1951.[3].
provided by Larry Lester, Wayne Stivers and Dick Clark of the Negro Still, the Grays have staked a legitimate claim to the top spot. On the mound, the 1931 Grays had five 20-game winners.
The constant churn of the Negro Leagues made sure that the group's run was short-lived. The '27 Yankees (or the '39 Yankees, or the '98 Yankees, or ... ). Their play brought them greatness along with their paycheck. In 1900, a group of African-American players had joined together to form the Germantown Blue Ribbons, an industrial league team. Standing (L–R): Cum Posey, owner; Bill Evans, SS-OF; Jasper Washington, 1B-3B; Ambrose Reid, OF-INF; Smokey Joe Williams, P; Josh Gibson, C; George Scales, 2B; Oscar Charleston, 1B; Charlie Williams, office. They simply played anybody, anywhere -- black teams and white teams, semi-pro teams and former Negro League teams, town teams and company teams, teams of coal miners and teams of steelworkers -- and won at a rate that seems like something out of a video game. He did perhaps his best spending, some people say, in the 1931 season. newspaper boxscores, covering league sanctioned games from 1920 to So can people rate the '31 Grays as the greatest of the great black teams? This data comes from two sources. The Homestead Grays (also known as Washington Grays or Washington Homestead Grays) were a professional baseball team that played in the Negro leagues in the United States..