I was excited, and even posted a comment on a popular baseball blog that I was going to hear about the Negro Leagues, on Hank Aaron's birthday, in Jacksonville, where Hank Aaron played in the South Atlantic League after integration. Ultimately, I was disappointed. A portion of my complaint is posted on my other blog, but I'll address the baseball issues here.
I met Professor Zuberi briefly before his lecture. We shook hands and I mentioned that it was interesting he was here to talk about black baseball in the south on Aaron's birthday. He didn't know it was Aaron's birthday. He also didn't find it as interesting as I did. No big deal. That's just trivia.
During the lecture, he mentioned Aaron one time. Someone shouted from the audience "It's his birthday" and Professor Zuberi said "It is? Okay, it's his birthday" as if he had never heard it before. Uh-oh.
These are trifles, though. Would anyone who knows about baseball be troubled by these comments he made:
- "When Jackie Robinson broke the color line in the late 40s. Well, around the end of World War II. Around the mid-40s..." Someone in the audience shouted out a year "1946". Someone else shouted the correct year "1947," which Zuberi obviously was not able to conjure. Zuberi said "46? 47?" When more people confirmed 1947, Zuberi said "1947. That's the mid-40s isn't it? That's what I said. Around the end of the war." I think some fairly casual baseball fans, particularly black ones, know the correct year. This guy is a sociology professor giving a lecture about black baseball, and he's fumbling for Jackie's rookie year?
- "How do we know Babe Ruth was the best? You've heard of him, right? He had 700-something hits." Hits? Are you kidding me? An audience member explained that it was 714 home runs.
- Later: "Hank Aaron came along and broke Babe Ruth's record. What did he have 715 or something?" Yeah, he passed Ruth, laid down his bat, and retired.
- He would say things like "When baseball players are playing their game, out there on the field, doing what they do..." And he would talk about baseball like that every time. He was not familiar with baseball nomenclature. Not one time did he refer to elements of the rules, equipment or any other baseball lingo. It's as if he didn't know that they hit home runs, or turned double plays or stole bases.
- Every time someone corrected him on a baseball fact he said "I told you I don't play baseball; I'm just a fan."
He struggled to remember his lecture was even about baseball. It took him 25 minutes before he said the word "baseball." His meager discussion of baseball comprised about 5 minutes of his 100 minute lecture, spread out over the entirety of the lecture, and contained exactly one reference to the Negro Leagues. That was in connection with a story he did on a field named for Pop Lloyd, as part of Zuberi's role on The History Detectives.
He did mention Aaron coming to play for the Jacksonville Braves in 1953, but the Braves were not a Negro League team; rather a Braves farm team. He looked at his notes to tell us that Felix Mantilla was also on that team. He struggled for a third name, and found it on his paper after someone in the audience shouted "Horace Garner". Just names he had written down, but not memorized, to localize his lecture.
No mention of the Jacksonville Red Caps. No mention of the dozens of Negro League teams who came through Jacksonville. No mention of Durkee Field, where black players played the game. No mention of major leaguers using Jacksonville and Durkee as a spring training site. No mention of Jackie being sent by Branch Rickey to play his minor league ball in Montreal to avoid the racism of the south (particularly in Vero Beach, the normal place for Dodger prospects to play). Vero is only a couple of hours south of here.
One saving grace from the lecture was that three former Negro League players were in the audience. I may have their names wrong: Arthur Hamilton, Ken Fell and Harold Hair. They are getting pretty up there in age, but Hamilton and Fell each addressed an audience member's question at some point. Good thing too, because the questions were about baseball, and I seriously doubt Professor Zuberi could have handled them.
I talked to Hamilton for a bit, and he showed me a picture of him in catching gear. An old baseball card-style pose. I asked him if he could still feel the dings he took as a catcher. He limped around on a bad hip. I asked him what he thought of catching equipment today, and he said "a whole lot different." I asked him if he had ever been hit in the neck, because Steve Yeager in the 1970s came up with the throat protector. Hamilton called Hair over and said "Tell him 'bout that time I got hit in the neck." Hair then related a story from a game they played in Jackson, Tennessee where Hamilton went down for the count. As he walked away Hair said: "You should hear the story about when Satchel Paige put Arthur in the dirt!" I said: "He managed to leave out that story." Hair said: "He always does."
