ABOUT THE NEW BOOK FROM MHS PRESS, Swinging For The Fences: A History of Black Baseball in Minnesota, 2005, edited by Steven R. Hoffbeck and written by a team of baseball writers.
Dave Winfield is featured in a chapter written by Kwame McDonald and Steve Hoffbeck. The upper image shows five of the St. Paul Colored Gophers ballclub at the hardscrabble field at Hibbing, Minnesota. The Gophers defeated Hibbing 17 to 2 that day in 1909.
Baseball has been America's game since the 1860s. Swinging For The Fences: A History of Black Baseball in Minnesota tells about the struggles and victories of sixteen ballplayers over a span of 150 years. The book chronicles the hardships of integrating baseball and the relentless demands of life on the road, but also the joys of summer on a ball diamond.
It is not just about box scores, bunts and horsehide, it is also about overcoming barriers, personal tragedies and broken dreams. Swinging For The Fences conveys an epic story—the history of the black athlete's struggle to overcome the color line in baseball as well as the struggle to deal with fame and fortune after the color barrier was lifted. It relates the story of Hall of Famers Dave Winfield, Willie Mays, and Kirby Puckett and great players like Bobby Marshall and John Donaldson who have been virtually forgotten.
The book has been written by a team of nine authors--historians, sports journalists, Society For American Baseball Research (SABR) experts, all of whom love the game. These writers have documented and preserved the legacies of black baseball players who came to Minnesota to play ball. The book captures the details about careers that might otherwise be forever lost to posterity. Using personal interviews, baseball scrapbooks, and accounts of games from sundry small-town newspapers, they spin true tales of masterful pitching, artful catching, and clutch hitting, within the context of various time periods.
This compelling history tells about baseball and the athletes who played the game. Rich in storylines and illustrated with more than fifty photographs of games and players, this book conveys the mood of competition between the baselines, it captures the atmosphere of small-town ballfields, and encapsulates the very flavor of the national game.
"The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line."
1903, W.E.B. DuBois, "Worlds of Color," Foreign Affairs 20, (April, 1925): 423, in Herbert Aptheker, Writings by W.E.B. DuBois in Periodicals Edited by Others (Millwood, NY: Kraus-Thomson Organization Limited, 1982), Vol. 2, 1910-1934, p. 241.
A SHORT INTRODUCTION FOR THE BOOK, Swinging For The Fences: A History of Black Baseball in Minnesota by Steve Hoffbeck.
In the summer of 1925, a tall left-handed pitcher took the mound in Breckenridge, Minnesota. He was a man from Missouri by the name of John Donaldson.
At age thirty-three, Donaldson was not a young ballplayer. Although he had pitched for prominent teams in Kansas City, Detroit, and in Brooklyn, and had played on baseball diamonds all across the nation, he could never pitch for a major league team or for a minor league professional team. He was banned from baseball, but not for any wrongdoing.
Donaldson was pitching for the Fishermen team, a semi-professional ballclub from the tiny Minnesota town called Bertha. He had traveled ninety miles from Bertha to Breckenridge to hurl against a Montana team, from the small town of Scobey.
The star of the Scobey team that August day was playing rightfield, but he had made his name as a shortstop. His name was Charles August Risberg.
At age thirty, Risberg, known by his nickname "Swede," had several things in common with John Donaldson. The athletic six-footer had also played with great teams in major cities across the country when he played for a Chicago ballclub. Like Donaldson, he, too, was also banned from professional baseball for life, but it was because of his own actions.
The chief difference between the two men was their color. "Swede" Risberg was white and a former Chicago White Sox player who had been outlawed from baseball for his involvement in the Black Sox Scandal of 1919. Donaldson was a great Black pitcher who was barred from pro baseball, not for any misconduct, but because he had the wrong skin coloration.
Donaldson pitched for the unofficial Minnesota Champions from Bertha, and Risberg played outfield and pitched for the Montana Champions from Scobey. The local Breckenridge paper billed the match-up between the two as the "Game of Games" and promised fans "the treat of your life."
And the game was the promised "humdinger," with Donaldson and his Bertha teammates winning in a slugfest, 12 to 10. Risberg collected five hits off Donaldson in six at-bats, but just four singles and a lone extra-base hit, a double.
Risberg had his chance in professional baseball and ended up in the same status as Donaldson--playing the American game, the game each man loved, but not in the limelight at Wrigley Field. Instead they toiled for semi-pro ballclubs in small ballparks in little towns in the northern tier of the United States. Still there was a big difference between the two men---Donaldson was revered for what he could have accomplished without the barriers of racial discrimination, and after the color line was lifted, he became a major league scout for the Chicago White Sox, ironically enough. Risberg, by contrast, continued to play for lesser and lesser teams, and died in California as a man forever known for betraying the game of baseball by his own failings.
This book is about some of the men who played baseball in Minnesota. In the first chapters, those who played before the lifting of the color line, like John Donaldson, were not fully a part of the American Game of Baseball and could not achieve the American Dream, either. Yet by the last chapters in this book, those who found a place in professional baseball after Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in 1946 could participate fully in the national pastime. One of those players, a young man from St. Paul named David Winfield, could rise to the highest level to which his talent could take him--all the way to the National Baseball Hall of Fame. The other, Kirby Puckett, came to Minnesota from Chicago and became an equal-opportunity superstar.
An Alternate introduction. By Steven R. Hoffbeck:
I was only eight years old when I went to my first Minnesota Twins game on an August day. Even though I was too young to be a member of our country church's Luther League youth group, they had room for me, so I got to go. My ticket for the Saturday game cost two-dollars-and-fifty cents. Our seats were in the third deck of Metropolitan Stadium and I know I loved every minute of the game.
But I can't remember any of it except watching intently when Harmon Killebrew came to the plate. I hoped he would hit a homerun. I remember nothing of the ride to Bloomington from Morgan and back again--one hundred-twenty miles each way. But it was the first time I had ever traveled to the Twin Cities.
I didn't realize it then, but it was also the first time that I saw an African-American person and that person was Earl Battey, the Twins catcher. We had no black people in Morgan or the surrounding area. There was no reason for any African Americans to drive through Morgan, since Highway 67 doesn't really take a person anywhere they want to go, unless one wants to get to Redwood Falls via Sleepy Eye. The railroad tracks still carried carloads of corn and soybeans out of town, but there were no passenger cars on the train in the 1960s.
I can't recall if the Twins won that day, but I kept my ticket stub. The ticket has Twins president Calvin Griffith's name signed on it. I thought he must be a great man to bring professional baseball to my home state.
I became a true Twins fan in 1963, just by going to a game. Whenever I could, I would listen to Halsey Hall and Herb Carneal announce the games on WCCO Radio. I would listen to the game on the tractor radio while raking hay, I would listen in the late evening on the box radio I got as a confirmation present from my Uncle LaVerne Dahmes. I would hear the games on the barn radio as I helped my Dad milk the cows. My father subscribed to the St. Paul Pioneer Press and I read the Sports Section every day to find out more about the Twins players.
When the Twins won the pennant in 1965, I saved the Pioneer Press newspaper for that day. The huge headline read: "THERE'S JOY TODAY IN TWINSVILLE." And I felt the joy because I was a fan in Twinsville. I thought Jim "Mudcat" Grant had the best name for a ball player and I admired his skill. Camilo Pascual had the great curve and I believed that Mudcat must have had the best fastball on the team, and that Camilo Pascual had the best curveball. I vaguely knew that Pascual was from Cuba, and I did not know that Mudcat Grant had been in the Negro Leagues prior to his time with the Twins. Vic Power also had a great baseball name and he was supposed to be one of the slickest fielders at first base that the Twins ever had. Again, I had no idea that Vic Power had spent time in the Negro Leagues. In fact I never even knew there were Negro Leagues until much later.
After I became a historian, at age 35, I started to delve into African American History. While researching the story of Black attorney Charles Scrutchin, a man who served as a lawyer in backwoods Bemidji, I ran across a photo of the St. Paul Colored Gophers team. I wondered if anyone had ever written the history of the team. I could find nothing about the team.
So I determined to find the story of the St. Paul Colored Gophers ballclub. I got two research grants and wrote the biography of Bobby Marshall, the great first baseman for the Gophers and for the Minneapolis Keystones. The Minnesota Historical Society's research expert, Debbie Miller, told me of Brendan Henehan's index of Black Newspapers and there I found the help I needed to tell the whole story of Bobby Marshall and the teams that he played on from 1908 through the 1930s.
I thought I could write the story of the teams myself. But the task was too difficult, I realized it would take my whole lifetime to find all the box scores in scattered newspapers and the major Minnesota newspapers did not provide much coverage of the Black teams in the state in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s.
So I enlisted a whole team of writers to help do the job. I joined the Society of American Baseball Reseachers (SABR) and got some assistance. Ted Genoways suggested that I serve as the general editor of a book on Black Baseball in Minnesota and I started to make some contacts. Jim Karn of Crookston signed on to do the story of Walter Ball. Peter Gorton, a sports journalist, was willing to dig up the facts concerning Black baseball in Minnesota in the 1920s. Dan Cagley, who had a history internship at the Baseball Hall of Fame, said he would write about Bud Fowler in Stillwater in the 1880s. Historian Bill Green agreed to write an essay about Mr. Fisher who played for Winona in the 1870s. Ted Genoways, prominent editor of the Virginia Review, wrote a chapter about Roy Campanella's accomplishments in Minnesota. Kyle McNary, an expert on the 1935 Bismarck team, said he would be willing to investigate 1930s baseball in the Twin Cities. Sportswriter Jay Weiner was excited to join the team and wrote about the rise and fall of Kirby Puckett. Newspaperman and long-time sports writer Kwame McDonald wrote the stories of Dave Winfield and Earl Battey.
This book tells the history of African American baseball players in Minnesota. We have written the story chronologically, focusing on an individual to tell the story of a decade. The writers found a number of photographs of the players who spent time in the North Star State. We have included those photos as well as the lineups of the various Black teams in the different eras.
Our overlying theme for the time before the integration of baseball is simple. It comes from the mind of the African American sociologist Kelly Miller and is written in the book entitled Black No More:
"There were but three ways for the Negro to solve his problem in America . . . to either get out, get white or get along." As author George Schuyler pointed out, since the African American "wouldn't and couldn't get out and [he] was getting along only differently, the only thing for him was to get white." That means that the Black ballplayer was going to show that he could play the American game of baseball.
But how could a man who was Black play baseball when he was barred from the major leagues and the minor leagues? He played where he could, on local teams. A talented player could join a white team and improve its record against neighboring towns. As early as the 1880s, African Americans in Minnesota formed their own teams in the Twin Cities. Touring black teams came to the state in the early years of the Twentieth Century, creating more interest in Black baseball. Individual players from Minnesota joined the great Black teams. By the late 1920s and early 1930s, as the Negro Leagues disintegrated, some of the best Black ballplayers of all time ended up in Minnesota. Finally, Roy Campanella came to St. Paul to integrate the minor leagues, just after Jackie Robinson had integrated major league baseball. After segregation in baseball ended, then the Twins came to Minnesota and Earl Battey was one of the first African American players on the team. Later, a local kid named Dave Winfield from St. Paul, went from Legion baseball to the University of Minnesota and thence to the Padres, and the Yankees and finally to the Twins and thence to the Baseball Hall of Fame. The last part of the tale deals with the remarkable story of Kirby Puckett, a Chicago man who came to symbolize baseball as the personification of the Minnesota Twins.
What was the creed of the black baseball stars in Minnesota's history? It might be summed up in three words: Manhood, Brotherhood and Fatherhood.
A short description of Swinging For The Fences: Black Baseball In Minnesota:
Both a chronicle of forgotten baseball teams and a repository of crisp baseball biographies, The Brotherhood of Black Baseball traces the stories of sixteen ballplayers over the last 150 years. Steven R. Hoffbeck and a team of writers tell the stories of black athletes who tried to overcame the "color line" or their own weaknesses to find fulfillment on the ball diamonds of Minnesota. The book serves as a means of preserving the history of African American athletes in a clear format for both the general reader and the sports aficionado. This collection is more than just a sports almanac, more than a listing of achievements, it is a testament to the perseverance of those black athletes, little-known or prominent alike, who played America's game in Minnesota.
The volume not only tells the stories of ballplayers in ten different eras, but also charts the social changes in society as baseball advanced beyond the color line. The chapters also illuminate the personal struggles of these athletes as they toured the Upper Midwest and tried to carry on family life. Many photographs, some never published before, document forgotten chapters of regional baseball lore. The text is based on diary accounts, letters, newspaper accounts, interviews, personal recollections, and sports guidebooks. Part biography, partly a history of the National Game, this book preserves forgotten stories of the struggles of African Americans to achieve social
RESUME/VITA of Dr. Steven R. Hoffbeck
Associate Professor, History Department
Minnesota State University Moorhead
1104 7th Avenue South
Moorhead, MN 56563
1. EDUCATION:
University of North Dakota, Grand Forks, North Dakota
Doctor of Arts in American History, 1992
Doctoral paper: "Prairie Paupers: Poorhouses in North Dakota, 1879-1973."
University of Vermont, Burlington, Vermont
Master of Arts in History, 1989
Thesis: "Frontier Hotel Keeper: J.W. Speelman and Buena Vista, Minnesota."
Bemidji State University, Bemidji, Minnesota
Bachelor of Arts, 1977
Bachelor of Science-Teaching, 1979
Graduated Summa Cum Laude
2. PREVIOUS POSITIONS:
Associate Professor, Minnesota State University Moorhead, 1998-present.
Assistant Professor, Minot State University, Minot, ND, 1992-1998.
Coordinator of Historic Preservation, City of Grand Forks, ND, 1990-1992.
Historian, UNDAR WEST, University of North Dakota Archaeological Research, Grand Forks, ND, 1990.
Social Studies Teacher, Staples High School, Staples, Minnesota, 1980-1988.
Social Studies Teacher, Belgrade High School, Belgrade, Minnesota, 1979-1980.
Academic/Professional honors and awards:
Minnesota Book Award, 2001, for The Haymakers: A Chronicle of Five Farm Families (St. Paul, MN: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2000).
Solon J. Buck Award, Minnesota Historical Society, 1994, granted for the best historical article to appear in Minnesota History in 1993.
Teacher of the Year, 1985, Staples Public Schools, Staples, Minnesota, chosen by fellow teachers. 150 local teachers eligible.
Minnesota Teacher of Excellence, 1985, Minnesota Education Association, the top 25 among 1985 local Teachers of the Year in Minnesota.
Graduate College Fellow at the University of Vermont, 1988-1989.
Educator of the Year, chosen by the Staples, MN, High School Senior Class and Student Council, 1982, 1983, 1988.
3. Other pertinent biographical data.
Dr. Steven R. Hoffbeck, associate professor of history at Minnesota State University Moorhead since 1998, teaches U.S. History classes concentrating on the period from 1877 to the present. Prior to teaching at Moorhead, Hoffbeck taught history at Minot State University in North Dakota from 1992-1998. Dr. Hoffbeck has published several articles in Minnesota History magazine and in North Dakota History journal on regional topics. Additionally, he has written articles about baseball and agricultural topics for regional magazines, such as Minnesota Monthly and Lake Country Journal. Originally from Morgan, Minnesota, Hoffbeck grew up with a love of baseball and was a fan of the Minnesota Twins since childhood. He has been a member of the Society of American Baseball Researchers (SABR) since 2001.
Specializing in the regional history of the Upper Midwest, Hoffbeck has written about topics such as the history of root beer stands, aviation, baseball, street pavements, and fishing.
Hoffbeck and his wife, Dianne, live in Barnesville, Minnesota, with their four children—Leah, Katie, Mary and Johnny.
4. BOOKS PUBLISHED
Title, Publisher; Year of Publication.
The Haymakers: A Chronicle of Five Farm Families, [author], Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2000. Minnesota Book Award winner, 2001.
A 40th Anniversary History of Minot Air Force Base, Minot, North Dakota, 1955-1995, co-author. Publisher: Minot Air Force Base, 1995.
Contributing writer for North Dakota History teaching units on "Native Americans," and the "Fur Trade," sponsored by the State Historical Society of North Dakota and the North Dakota Humanities Council. Project director: Dr. D. Jerome Tweton, Historian, University of North Dakota.
5. OTHER IMPORTANT PUBLISHED WRITINGS (journal articles, etc.):
Title. Publication. Year of Pubn.
Journal Articles:
AUTHOR OF ALL THESE:
"Without Careful Consideration: Why Carp Swim In Minnesota's Waters," Minnesota History 57, no. 6, Summer 2001.
“Hayloft Hoopsters: Legendary Lynd and the State High School Basketball Tournament,” Minnesota History 55, no. 8, Winter 1997.
“Victories Yet To Win: Charles W. Scrutchin, Bemidji’s Pioneer Black Activist Attorney,” Minnesota History 55, no. 2, Summer 1996.
“W.P.A. Projects and Art Deco Architecture in North Dakota,” North Dakota History 62, no. 4, Fall 1995.
“Shooting Star: Aviator Jimmie Ward of Crookston, MN, 1886-1923,” Minnesota History 54, no. 8, Winter 1995.
"The Barrels: Root Beer Stands of the Upper Midwest, 1929-1992," Minnesota History 53, No. 7, Fall 1993.
"Sully Springs: Saga of a Badlands Railroad Settlement," North Dakota History 58, No. 3, Summer 1991.
"Remember the Poor: Poor Farms in Vermont," Vermont History 57, No. 4, Fall 1989.
MAGAZINE ARTICLES:
"When Babe Ruth Came To Minneapolis," Minnesota Monthly, 2004.
"The Barrel Root Beer Stand in Wadena," Lake Country Journal, 2004.
"The Pavement Problem: When Road Builders Tried Everything From Iron To Molasses," American Heritage of Invention and Technology, [published quarterly by American Heritage, a division of Forbes, Inc.] 7, No. 2, Fall 1991.
“Round Barns in North Dakota,” North Dakota Horizons 25, no. 2, Spring 1995.