A Park Where Only the Game Mattered

It wasn’t as aesthetic as Dodger Stadium nor as charming as the ivy-covered walls of Wrigley Field, both built later. But White Sox Park, a diamond in the rough in Central L.A., became a home field to the heroes of the black baseball leagues that proliferated during the years when African Americans were barred from major league play.

On sunny weekends and holidays from 1924 into the mid-1930s, five winter league professional teams played mostly black-versus-white double-header baseball at the 7,000-seat park.

At that time, blacks who wanted to play America’s game had to play it in the black baseball leagues, according to Negro League historian Dick Simpson. Non-white baseball teams were banned from playing in any of the Pacific Coast League parks.

Also, Los Angeles was still a minor-league town as far as baseball was concerned. The only professional game was played by the triple-A Hollywood Stars and the Los Angeles Angels.

Until two Italian American brothers who loved baseball changed that.

Joe and John Pirrone, wholesale fruit vendors, built a ballpark at 38th Street and Compton Avenue and put together a winter league, luring the most outstanding baseball players, among them the competitive Negro League players and those in search of an off-season paycheck.

The players changed from week to week, so often the names of the teams changed too. Among them were the all-white All-Stars, White King and Shell Oil teams and two teams made of rotating players from the Negro Leagues, among them the Philadelphia Hilldale Giants, Royal Giants, Kansas City Royals and Monarchs.

The ballpark’s start was inauspicious, however. On opening day--Oct. 25, 1924--the Eastern Colored Giants failed to show. They had missed their train.

Determined that the opening show would go on, Joe Pirrone quickly found a stand-in, a white team pulled together at the last minute and managed by the clown prince of baseball, Carl Sawyer, who entertained fans with zany antics and danced with a dummy at the seventh-inning stretch.

No one seemed to mind that instead of a black team versus a white one, two white teams were playing each other. Baseball was baseball.

Over the years, players from the Negro Leagues and from the sandlots of L.A. formed popular all-black teams that became known as the Los Angeles Stars, White Sox, Monarchs and Sons of Italy.

And most of the time, the black teams beat the local and out-of-town white teams. The black players acquired monikers: James Thomas Bell was “Cool Papa,” George Suttles was “Mule,” Bob Griffin was “Big Boy,”, and Wilbert Rogan was “Bullet,” for the speed of the ball he pitched. Rogan’s catcher often put 3-inch steaks inside his glove to protect his hands from Rogan’s fast balls. By the eighth inning, they were ground beef.

When the major leagues were finally integrated, player-managers like Odem “Lou” Dials and Chet Brewer would be credited with training many Central L.A. ballplayers for the Big Show.

But it was L.A.’s Royal Giants and their larger-than-life legend, the future Hall of Famer Satchel Paige, who always drew crowds with his “hesitation,” or “beeball,” pitch. He won 75 to 100 games a year, for which he was paid his customary $1,000 per game.

Word of the teams’ prowess reached Hollywood, and silent comedians and baseball lovers Buster Keaton and Joe E. Brown often worked out with the teams on Sundays in pre-game warm-ups, clowning around to the delight of the crowd.

The off-season games attracted such players as Seattle Indians outfielder Louie Almada. “Spectators bought tickets for 50 cents, and players earned as much as $28 each during the Depression,” reminisced Almada, now 90. Sometimes, fans passed the hat to pay the players; some were never able to invest anything more than emotion.

The local teams took on all comers. Teams came from as far as Japan to play; and although Japanese spectators were too polite to yell, they clapped heartily. Big, enthusiastic police officers from nearby Newton Station and doctors from the Dunbar Hospital, the first all-black hospital in L.A., played with as much vigor as the pros. But their swings usually paid big dividends for charity, not for their pockets.

In 1929, a police officer chasing a bad guy crashed his car into a local drugstore, crippling the pharmacist. Newton Division officers raised money for his family with a ballgame between lawmen and doctors. In a return game two months later, they raised money for beds for the hospital.

Two decades after White Sox Park opened, barriers against integrated leagues began to crumble, and black teams were allowed to play against white teams at Pacific Coast League parks. By 1935, fans were packing the stands at Wrigley Field to see the Negro League and Mexican League all-stars slug it out.

White Sox Park’s mission was over. The ballpark that thousands called home fell apart, board by board, from the termite-infested dugouts to the scoreboard. Veterans housing went up on the site after World War II.

Jackie Robinson finally broke the color barrier, signing with the Brooklyn Dodgers on April 10, 1947; eventually, more black players joined the major leagues, and the Negro Leagues folded.

Ross Snyder Recreation Center sits next to where the ballpark once stood; no plaque or monument tells of the stars who helped to make the game America’s favorite pastime and the pot of gold it is today.