Newark Eagles Hit for Average in Cooperstown

Larry Doby can still picture it: Ruppert Stadium on a soft summer afternoon, a crowd dressed in its Sunday best, cheering on the 1946 Negro League champions--his Newark Eagles.

“People in the stands in shirts, ties and hats, most of them right from church,” Doby says, his voice wistful as his mind drifts back a half-century. “That brings pleasant memories.”

Doby envisions Monte Irvin crouched at shortstop, Leon Day going into his trademark no-windup delivery. He summons the early 1940s and sees Willie Wells and Ray Dandridge side by side on the same infield.

This July, Doby will see something he once thought impossible: his plaque in the Hall of Fame, joining those of Irvin, Day, Dandridge and Wells. Cooperstown has been kinder to the Eagles than their hometown has been; their five match the Pittsburgh Crawfords as the Negro Leagues’ most honored franchise.

The city of Newark long ago forgot about its Eagles. Ruppert Stadium, with its short left-field porch and the Wolf’s Head Oil sign in right, was razed a half-century ago. Its old location sits unmarked; there’s no evidence that a baseball team ever played here.

Wilson Avenue is now a soccer hotbed, filled with immigrants from Brazil and Portugal. The Emigrante Go-Go and Tio Pepe’s restaurant provide the nightlife. The Eagles? “I don’t know anything about that,” says Danny Jerling, Tio Pepe’s day manager. “Nothing.”

That’s nothing new. Their uniforms read “NEWARK,” but the Eagles often played in obscurity--ignored by the white media and the masses, confined to segregated accommodations on the road.

Owned by ex-numbers boss Abe Manley and his wife, Effa, the Eagles--born 1936, died 1948--were a unique organization in the often disorganized Negro Leagues. Until killed by dwindling attendance and departing players lured to the major leagues, the Manleys’ franchise was known as a mecca for African-American players.

“Mrs. Manley was a great lady, and Abe was a good man,” Doby remembers. “The owners were interested in us off the field. That was kind of rare.”

Their powerful lineup compared favorably with those of the white major league teams across the Jersey border: the New York Yankees, the New York Giants, the Brooklyn Dodgers. The Manleys paid on their par too.

Irvin remembers taking a stiff pay cut--to $5,000 from $6,000--when he signed with Horace Stoneham’s Giants. “Abe, for an ordinary guy, had quite a bit of money,” Irvin recalls.

Money? Sure. Ordinary guy? No.

Diminutive, cigar-chomping Abe Manley made his fortune in the New Jersey numbers trade but opted for the less volatile Harlem real estate business when the mob firebombed his Camden nightclub.

The recently relocated Manley met his future wife in 1932 at a World Series game in Yankee Stadium. Effa Manley soon persuaded him to invest in the Negro Leagues, and their Newark franchise debuted four years later.

Effa Manley was a convention-shattering combination of Rosa Parks and George Steinbrenner. She was a feminist, a businesswoman, a revelation--”way, way ahead of her time,” says Negro Leagues historian Jim Riley. “Her life would make a good miniseries.”

The child of an affair between her black mother and a white man, Effa Manley moved easily among both races in an era where Jim Crow still flew high.

Her picture, standing in the Eagles dugout with a high-heeled shoe on one step, ran in the white New York Post. She was rumored to flash signs to her players from the stands. And she handled all the team’s business dealings.

When pitcher Leniel Hooker staged a 1941 holdout, Effa Manley fired off this Steinbrenner-esque missive:

“Your record last year showed six (6) wins and seven (7) losses. Five of those wins took place before July 14 . . . You know only too well how poorly you looked at the end of the season.”

She was not above using her sex to advantage. When Doby ignored a 1946 contract offer, she wrote him, “I have not had the courtesy of a reply from you. Having met your mother, I know you were not raised this badly.”

“She was a tough negotiator,” says Doby, who still respectfully refers to her as Mrs. Manley. “We all found that out.”

The rest of the Negro Leagues’ teams discovered that Abe could scout talent. The Eagles were routinely in the title hunt and captured the 1946 championship by defeating the immortal Satchel Paige and his Kansas City Monarchs.

The ballclub was generally second to one: the Homestead Greys, winner of eight consecutive Negro League titles. But their players took a back seat to no one and were leading the 1947 pennant race when Doby--hitting .458 at the time--bolted to become the American League’s first black ballplayer.

“If not for the elimination of the color line,” says historian Riley, “they would have won again in ’47.”

Doby, with the Cleveland Indians, eventually played in the World Series, as did Irvin with the New York Giants. But there were other Eagles--brilliant players, future Hall of Famers--who never spent one day in The Show.

There was Dandridge, a 5-foot-5-inch, 175-pounder appropriately known as “Squat.” “The best third baseman who ever lived,” Hall of Famer Buck O’Neill of the Kansas City Monarchs says flatly. Dandridge was Brooks Robinson with a much bigger bat: He hit .404 in the 1937 season, .335 over eight Negro League seasons.

Or Day, who opened the Eagles’ 1946 championship season with a no-hitter. Between starts, he played the field and hit .431 that year. Effa Manley, in a May 1946 letter to a friend, marveled at Day’s abilities.

“Day can play any position on the field as well as he can pitch,” she wrote. “This is no exaggeration. Any spot in the infield or the outfield.”

Shortstop Wells, a player-manager, “was like Ozzie Smith--except a much better hitter,” Irvin recalls. O’Neill compares him to Ernie Banks. He hit for power, and hit for average: .403 in 1930.

How was Wells as a manager? “We won games,” Doby says. “That’s the only criteria I go by.”

The winning--like the Eagles--came to a swift and stunning demise once Jackie Robinson broke the color line.

On July 4, 1947, Doby played the first game of a doubleheader in Newark against the Philadelphia Stars, then signed with the Indians before the nightcap. Irvin and popular pitcher Don Newcombe left too, and the fans followed: Attendance plunged from 140,000 in 1946 to 57,000 a year later.

In 1948, the Manleys sold the team. The Eagles were moved to Houston, but the good times were over; the Negro Leagues were out of business by the mid-1950s.

Wells, Day and Dandridge never made the majors--a particularly painful development for Dandridge. Though he routinely tore up minor league pitching, an unwritten quota--one black per year--kept him off the New York Giants.

Stoneham’s team added Irvin in 1949 and Hank Thompson in 1950. A year later, the Giants summoned a third black: Dandridge’s minor league roommate, a kid named Willie Mays.

Dandridge’s call never came.

“Dandridge always said, ‘Just one game. Just one inning, and I would die happy,’ ” Irvin recalls. “He never did get the chance.”

Dandridge, who died in 1994, attended his 1987 induction at the hall. Wells and Day didn’t survive for their days in Cooperstown.

Six days after his selection in 1995, Day died in a Maryland hospital bed. Two years later, Wells--who died in 1989--was inducted.

There were other Eagles greats: Newcombe, later a Brooklyn Dodgers star. Pitcher Terris McDuffie, the Negro Leagues’ Dizzy Dean. Slugging first baseman Mule Suttles and second baseman Dick Seay, who combined with Dandridge and Wells to form the Negro Leagues’ “Million Dollar Infield.”

Newark Star-Ledger columnist Jerry Izenberg suggested recently that “this long-gone baseball team might well deserve to have double” its total of five Hall of Famers.

Irvin doesn’t disagree.

“If they had let our guys play in the major leagues 10 years sooner,” Irvin reflects, “they would have seen some great stars.

“There’s still a lot that deserve the Hall of Fame.”