Important Dates in Baseball History -- July (For Those Who Are Missing Their Favorite Game)

These notes were assembled by the late Robert Lookup, a very special person whom my wife and I befriended for the last 10 years of his life.  Links to important April and May dates can be found at the end of this entertaining collection of baseball trivia.

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IMPORTANT DATES -- JULY

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Roberto Clemente, right fielder for the Pittsburgh Pirates

July 1, 1997
Tiger's Bobby Higginson homers in first inning against the Mets to become 23rd Major League player since 1900 to homer in four consecutive At Bats over two games.

(EdNote: I remember listening to a Pittsburgh Pirates game in which Roberto Clemente hit three home runs in his first three at bats, and being bummed with his fourth at bat was a long fly that caromed six inches from the top of the wall and he only got a double. The greatly respected Puerto Rican all star was my favorite player in the second half of the 60s.)

July 4, 1905
Ossie Schreckengost caught all 29 innings in a Double Header vs. the Red Sox, without shin guards.

July 5, 1993
Ricky Henderson of the A's opens both games of a Double Header with a Home Run to become the first player to do this in 60 years.

July 8, 1918
Babe Ruth hits a Home Run but loses it to the antiquated rule that an extra inning game can only be won by one run. (Previous to 1920 an extra inning home run was recorded as a single if a man was on base.)

Hall of Fame pitcher Cy Young

July 12, 1901
Cy Young of the Red Sox records his 300th win, besting the A's 5-3. (EdNote: His lifetime win-loss record was 511-315.)

July 13, 1963
Early Wynn records his 300th win, Cleveland besting the A's 7-4. (EdNote: Early Wynn was the name of one of my teddy bears, named after the Cleveland Indians starting rotation when I was born in September, 1952. The week before, my family went to see him pitch in Cleveland, in hopes that he would achieve this career milestone. I can still remember our box seats just to the right of the Indians dugout and watching him stand on the mound facing the plate.)

July 16, 1920
Babe Ruth hits 30th home run, breaking his record of 29. The Yankees beat the Browns 5-2. Ruth goes on to hit 54 home runs in 1920.

July 17, 1941
Joe DiMaggio's hitting streak of 56 games is stopped by Al Smith and Jim Bagby of Cleveland, in Cleveland.

July 17, 1990
Twins become the first team in Major League history to pull off two triple plays in one game. The Red Sox still manage a win, 1-0.

July 18, 1970
Willie Mays gets 3000th hit off Montreal Expos' Mike Wegener to become the first Giant to accomplish this feat. He is still the only Giant in this esteemed club.

July 18, 1987
Don Mattingly ties Dale Long's 31-year-old Major League record when he homers for the 8th straight game in a 7-2 loss. Ken Griffey Jr would later tie this record in 1993.

July 18, 1918
Frank Baker is last player to lose a home run to the antiquated rule that said extra inning games could only be won by one run. It was labeled a single.

Ty Cobb, the Georgia Peach

July 19, 1927
Ty Cobb of the Philadelphia A's doubles for the 4000th hit of his career.

July 20, 1998
Brian Hunter of Detroit goes 0-13 in a 26 inning double header against the Yankees.

July 25, 1941
Lefty Grove wins 300th and last game, beating Cleveland 10-6.

July 30, 1980
Astro pitcher J R Richard has a stroke during a workout at the Astrodome. Doctors removed a blood clot behind his right collarbone.

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"On many summer day, I played baseball starting at 8 in the morning, running home at noon for a quick meal, and again with fielding and batting until it was too dark to see the ball."--Carl Sandburg

"Baseball suits the character of this democratic nation. Democracy is government by persuasion. That means it requires patience; that means it involves a lot of compromise. Democracy is the slow politics of the half-loaf. Baseball is the game of the long season where small incremental differences decide who wins and who loses particular games, series, seasons. In baseball, you know going to the ballpark that the chances are you may win, but you also may lose. There's no certainty, no given. You know when a season starts that the best team is going to get beaten a third of the time; the worst team is going to win a third of the time. The argument, over 162 games, is that middle third. So it's a game you can’t like if winning is everything. And democracy is that way, too."--George Will

Related Links
Historic Interview with Roberto Clemente
Important Dates in Major League Baseball for the Month of April
Important Dates in Major League Baseball for the Month of May
Important Dates in Major League Baseball for the Month of June

The Chicago Race Riots of July 1919

One of the best ways to find good books cheap is at spring garage sales near college. Graduating students are oft in a hurry to discard some of the belongings they accumulated. If you're lucky, and it happens, you'll find some real gems for pennies on the dollar.

Last night I started re-reading a short volume called The Chicago Race Riots, July 1919 by Carl Sandburg. It was one of a dozen books I picked up for a dime each from a Hamline grad when we were living in the Midway in St. Paul.

If the Sandburg name sounds familiar, it may be because of the two Pulitzer Prizes he won as a poet. Or it may be because of the Pulitzer he won for his renowned biography of Lincoln. I had not realized at the time I picked up this volume that he was initially a journalist. This printing includes a preface by Ralph McGill and an intro by the legendary Walter Lippmann.

I fetched the book off my shelf after reading a section of Don't Know Much About History pertaining to the post-WWI South. It's painfully depressing to read about the raw treatment blacks have received at the hands of whites.

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In the Deep South cotton was king, until the boll weevil came along. Few of us today realize how devastating the boll weevil infestation was. If you're like me, you may have thought boll weevils were a problem cotton growers had always had to contend with.

The weevil had been a plaque in South America but over time came north through Latin America and Mexico to become a major problem after the First World War. The way this critter works is that it lays its egg in a cotton boll. The newly hatched baby weevil then chews up the inside a bit and thereby kills the boll. Farms that produced thousands of bales of cotton were soon producing hundreds of bales. While the Roaring Twenties roared up North, the Southern economy was in a tailspin.

This, combined with Jim Crow laws, now set in stone, led to an exodus of workers seeking employment in Northern Rust Belt cities.

This led to another problem. Racism in the North wore a different face. If you were black, you couldn't live just anywhere you wanted. The Chicago black population had been 50,000 at the beginning of the century, but with this influx of families thru the decade there were 125,000 blacks in the Windy City by 1919. (It took more than four decades to place laws on the books that would permit a black family to choose where they could live.*) The lack of housing, Chicago politics and post-war psychology all contributed to the events that happened in July 1919.

There were also riots in other cities. (Photo: East St. Louis)

For blacks who stayed in the South at this time, prospects weren't exactly comforting. Ralph McGill, in his preface to this book, cites three incidents. In Blakely, Georgia, April 5, 1919, A Private William Little returned to his hometown after the war via train. He was "met by a band of whites who ordered him to remove his uniform and walk home in his underwear." When he continued to wear his uniform (because he had no other clothes), he was found dead, "his body badly beaten, on the outskirts of town. He was wearing his uniform."

A few weeks later, in Shreveport, Louisiana, a train was held up by an armed mob in order to lynch a black man who had written a note to a white woman. Only after he was shot did anyone seek to find out whether he could read or write. He could not.

Another example from two weeks after that was cited in McGill's preface but it was so horrible I'm not even going to share it. The account begins, "Lloyd Clay, Negro laborer, was roasted to death last night." A mob of 800 to a thousand men and women removed him from a jail...

McGill's preface was to the re-issued 1969 publication of Sandberg's account, 50 years after its original publication. He laments that race relations, in spite of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965, were not wholly better. This (1969) was only a year after the  assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the race riots that shook more than 100 cities.

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The event that triggered the Chicago race riot of July 1919
A black youth accidentally floated on a raft across an invisible line at a segregated public beach shared by whites and blacks. The boy was stoned for his mistake by whites, knocked off the raft and drowned. Blacks rushed to get help from a policeman to address what had happened. The policeman refused to do anything. Fighting broke out  that spread throughout the overcrowded black neighborhoods which Sandburg called the Black Belt. After three days 20 blacks were dead and 14 whites, plus hundreds of injured.  (The Encyclopedia of Chicago states 23 African Americans and 15 whites.)

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Sandburg's book is more about the conditions that set off the riot so that it went viral through the black community. This is why the book discusses lynchings in the south. Chicago was a receiving station connected to every southern region. After every lynching somewhere in the south, Secretary Arnold Hill of the Urban League said, about two weeks later there would be more "colored people from that community" arriving. "You can depend on it."

It was this feature of Sandburg's story struck especially close to home when I read it. In my New Jersey hometown of Bridgewater we had a small section that was known as Hobbstown which consisted of two parallel streets about four blocks long. Bridgewater was a mid-to-upscale developing suburb when our family moved there in 1964. As I understood it Hobbstown started somewhere around 1920 or so.

As it turns out, this spring I discover a book about the community called Hobbstown: A Forgotten Legacy of a Unique African-American Community. As it turns out, Sandburg's description of how more blacks came north each time there was a lynching down south is precisely what triggered the birth of Hobbstown. The Hobbs brothers lived in Georgia (if I recall correctly) and worked as sharecroppers. One of the brothers was a reverend. At year's end their pay, minus expenses, came to nothing. After a lynching, and this ridiculous financial arrangement, one of the Hobbs brothers decided to go north to New York.

The New York situation was as overcrowded as Chicago, but as luck should have it, a woman showed up who said there was land in New Jersey. Hobbs sprang for it. He and his brothers were soon building a future in Bridgewater.

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It's been a hundred years since the Chicago race riots of 1919 and the book it spawned. Next summer Duluth will be having a remembrance event of its own with regard to the lynching which took place here in 2020. Much has changed over the past century, yet much has not. There is still a lot of pain and anger, frustration and fear.

The promise of social media was that it would bring us all together, but it seems to have done more to drive us apart. It was a false hope.

What is needed is imagination and love, and a willingness to step outside our comfort zones. And a decision to become our better selves.

Related Links
Tamara Tabel, Historical Novelist, on the Race Riots of 1919
The Lynchings in Duluth by Michael Fedo


*Even with the Civil Rights Acts of 1964, racist attitudes made it difficult for black families to buy homes in many areas of the country. When I was in college at Ohio U (1970-74) a black family bought a home in the county adjacent to Athens County. They were the first black family in the county, and their welcoming went something like this. Windows broken with rocks. More windows broken and vandalism. I do not know the end of the matter, only that to hear of it was pretty darn sad.

Oxford Town, Oxford Town

"How many times can a man turn his head and pretend that he just doesn't see?"

We often hear people talk about the 50's as the "good old days." In reality, the very things that were wrong in the 50's are what led to the upheavals of the 60's, no issue moreso than American racism.

The conflicts over race long preceded the Freedom Riders who put their lives on the line to draw awareness to this special problem of the Deep South. Poet/journalist Carl Sandburg shone a light on this issue when he wrote about the Chicago race riots of 1919 in which 38 people were tragically killed as a result of an incident that occurred on the segregated beachfront of Lake Michigan.

In a preface to the 1969 re-release of this volume Ralph McGill identifies WWI as one of the events that increased awareness of the racial divide. Black soldiers who put their lives on the line for America and freedom returned to the States as second class citizens.

World War II revived this same set of feelings for American blacks who served overseas only to return home to maltreatment and blatant injustice. The difference this second time around was the advent of television, by which means the rest of the country was made aware of the consequences of Jim Crow laws being enforced in the former Confederacy. Television not only made people aware of these problems, it also became a means for showing determined blacks the methods of non-violent resistance.

Dylan's song Oxford Town was written in October 1962 in response to a call for songs by Broadside magazine seeking songs about James Meredith and his attempt to attend Ole Miss, which was his constitutional right. The governor did everything in his power to prevent Meredith from entering the school as a student. Meredith refused to back down and put his life on the line in an effort to get the Kennedy's to respond to what was happening in the South.

Simultaneously the Kennedys were dealing with the Cuban missile crisis. Racial tensions and global tensions put tremendous pressure on JFK and Bobby who did everything in their power to keep the conflicts from escalating. The calls for action in Oxford were coming hard from Mississippi on the one hand and the calls for action from the Pentagon were being pressed from the other.

Oxford was a problem they both wanted to go away, but when riots broke out they ultimately took action and (according to Wikipedia, citing Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.) called in 500 U.S. Marshals to take control, who were supported by the 70th Army Engineer Combat Battalion from Ft Campbell, Kentucky. They created a tent camp and kitchen for the US Marshals. To bolster law enforcement, President John F. Kennedy sent in U.S. Army troops from the 2nd Infantry Division from Ft. Benning, GA under the command of Maj. Gen Charles Billingslea and military police from the 503rd Military Police Battalion, and called in troops from the Mississippi Army National Guard.

It was during this time that Bobby Kennedy, while looking at a map asked first how far those Russian missiles could go, and followed up with, "Do you think one of those missiles could hit Oxford?"

It was against this backdrop that the young Dylan also penned A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall, which appeared in 1963 on The Freelwheelin' Bob Dylan, his second album, and first to be all original material. Freewheeling is comprised of many songs that are now considered classics, opening with Blowin' in the Wind, followed by Girl from the North Country and Masters of War. Hard Rain is so dense that he purportedly stated that every line could be a song of its own. It's impossible for me not to hear the line "I saw a white man walking a black dog" as his indictment of America's unique form of racism.

It seems strange to many of us who lived up north to think blacks had been playing professional baseball for more than a decade, and my football hero Jimmy Brown had been playing for the Browns more than five years at this point. Growing up in white suburbia most of us in the north were oblivious to the realities of segregation. In this, and many other songs of that period, Dylan drew attention to that which we were failing to see.

Oxford Town

Oxford Town, Oxford Town
Ev’rybody’s got their heads bowed down
The sun don’t shine above the ground
Ain’t a-goin’ down to Oxford Town

He went down to Oxford Town
Guns and clubs followed him down
All because his face was brown
Better get away from Oxford Town

Oxford Town around the bend
He come in to the door, he couldn’t get in
All because of the color of his skin
What do you think about that, my frien’?

Me and my gal, my gal’s son
We got met with a tear gas bomb
I don’t even know why we come
Goin’ back where we come from

Oxford Town in the afternoon
Ev’rybody singin’ a sorrowful tune
Two men died ’neath the Mississippi moon
Somebody better investigate soon

Oxford Town, Oxford Town
Ev’rybody’s got their heads bowed down
The sun don’t shine above the ground
Ain’t a-goin’ down to Oxford Town

Copyright © 1963 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed 1992 by Special Rider Music