The Cuban Giants
African-American Baseball Players Were First Black Professional Team
First named the Athletics of Babylon, these black baseball players held their own against all competition, including several teams from the then major leagues.
A Team Is Formed
In 1884, at the Argyle Hotel in the resort city of Babylon, Long Island, headwaiter Frank Thompson organized a group of his workers into a baseball team. Whether it was meant to be a form of relaxation for the black waiters or as a means of entertainment for the resort’s white patrons is unknown. Regardless, the team played a total of ten games that summer against local white teams, winning them all.
One observer of the team was a white entrepreneur named John F. Lang who took over management of the team when the Argyle closed in October and took the Athletics of Babylon on the road to play against various teams. Two of them were the New York Metropolitans and the Philadelphia Athletics, members of the then major league American Association. The team lost both those games, but gained recognition among fans and sportswriters.
Growth of the Cuban Giants
The Athletics made changes the following year. The team was taken over by Walter Cook and renamed the Cuban Giants. Cook’s reasoning was that whites would be more likely to watch Latinos from a foreign country than blacks from their own. He further encouraged the players to speak a pidgin Spanish while on the field. In reality, neither tactic fooled anyone. Cook also rebuilt the team and over the years standout players such as Sol White, George Stovey, Bud Fowler, and Shep Trusty played for the Giants. Frank Grant, considered by baseball historian Robert Peterson (see below) as the best black player of his era, played periodically for them.
The Giants Become the First Black Professional Team
But, Cook’s biggest contribution was monetary. The Giants became the first truly black professional team. As far back as the early 1870s, there had been black teams and players who had been paid for performing, but it was on an irregular basis. The Giants offered their players guaranteed salaries of $12 to $18 a week. Although not spectacular money, it was better than what most black wage earners of the time could earn.
During the next few years, the team became the dominant black team in America and was declared “world colored champions” for 1887 and 1888. Operating originally out of Trenton, New Jersey, and then later other cities, the team traveled by private railroad car; was given first class accommodations in most towns; and played before large crowds, both black and white. And, they would play anyone -- whether, semi-pro, minor league or major league. Yale, Princeton, and the University of Pennsylvania regularly scheduled the Giants. Major league teams in Cincinnati, Indianapolis, New York, Chicago, and St. Louis were opponents in exhibition games. In 1887, the World Champion Detroit Tigers defeated the Giants 6-4 after trailing for most of the game. In 1890, the team played in the otherwise all-white Eastern Interstate League before the league folded in mid-season.
The End of the Giants
By the mid-1890s, though, the Cuban Giants were beginning to fade into history. More professional black baseball teams were appearing on the scene, most of them in direct competition with the Giants. One of these teams, the Cuban X Giants, not only stole the team’s nickname, but also many of its best players, and consistently won games against the older team.
The increase in the number of Jim Crow laws, officially practiced in the South and unofficially in the North, made life harder for the oft-traveling black team and the number of white teams willing to play the Giants grew fewer in number. The color line which had been established by the National League and American Association after black player Fleet Walker had made a brief appearance in the majors had slowly trickled downward.
Playing under a new name, the Original Cuban Giants, the team attempted a comeback in 1901, but it was short-lived. The next year it was no longer in existence.
For more on the history of black baseball see: Peterson, Robert, Only the Ball Was White (Englewood, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1970)
