Josh Gibson

Early 1800s Baseball is introduced in the United States. 1860s During the Civil War, soldiers, black freemen and emancipated slaves play the game across the widening map of America. 1867 Philadelphia's Pythian Club, founded by former cricket players James H. Francis and Francis Wood, plays in the 1867 Colored World Championship. 1878 John "Bud Fowler" Jackson becomes the first black pro baseball player, for a team in Chelsea, Mass. 1880s Black teams such as the St. Louis Black Stockings and New York Cuban Giants are formed.

SOUL OF THE GAME. 8 tonight. HBO. This classy HBO docudrama, "Soul of the Game," smartly removes the myth and mystique from one of the most fascinating stories of old-time Negro League baseball: the push to bust the Major League color barrier that was ultimately won by Jackie Robinson. But as we see in this marvelously acted effort, that quest was really the story of three distinct talents: the legendary, crafty veteran pitcher Satchel Paige, phenomenal slugger Josh Gibson - a/k/a the "Black Babe Ruth" - and Robinson, the Brooklyn Dodger who made his mark as much by turning the other cheek as turning on the fastball.

Alexander T. Dziatkiewicz, 77, who played semipro baseball during World War II with such legends as Josh Gibson and Roy Campanella, died Sunday at the Mediplex Rehab-Cooper Plaza in Camden. Mr. Dziatkiewicz, a retired optometrist, was born in Camden. He graduated from the Philadelphia School of Optometry. As the result of a childhood injury, Mr. Dziatkiewicz was ineligible to join the Armed Forces during World War II. Instead, he put himself through optometry school working for Campbell Soup.

Buck Leonard, a Hall of Fame first baseman who batted .340 and averaged 34 home runs during his 17-year career in the Negro Leagues, died at age 90 yesterday in Rocky Mount, N.C. Walter Fenner "Buck" Leonard had turned down numerous requests for public appearances over the past 12 months because of the debilitating effects of a stroke he suffered a decade ago, said his wife, Lugenia Leonard. Leonard began his professional career with the Rocky Mount Black Swans in 1925 and retired in 1955 after five years in the Mexican Leagues.

Today in an age suspicious of baseball executives like George Steinbrenner, Bill Veeck remains everyone's favorite owner. The man who sent a midget up to bat, the first American League executive to integrate baseball, Veeck was baseball's hustler par excellence. In his 1962 book, "Veeck as in Wreck," he says he had a plan to integrate baseball three years before Branch Rickey. He'd purchase the futile 1943 Phillies and stock the team with stars from the Negro Leagues, such as Josh Gibson, Satchel Paige and Monty Irvin.

The Postal Service chose an appropriate site for its Legends of Baseball commemoratives. The 20 33-cent stamps will be issued Thursday, a week before this year's All-Star game in Atlanta. The legends are: Roberto Clemente, Pittsburgh Pirates, first Hispanic elected to the Hall of Fame. Ty Cobb, Detroit Tigers, nine-time American League batting champion and career batting-average leader. Mickey Cochran, Philadelphia Athletics, catcher and inspirational leader of the A's championship teams of 1929-31.

Jesse Branson, 95, of South Philadelphia, a retired State Store employee and baseball authority who was featured in a Phillies video about the 2008 World Series, died last Friday at Penn Hospice at Rittenhouse. Mr. Branson grew up playing sandlot baseball, and "he was a good player," said his sister, Georgette Fields. "If a ball went into the outfield, the other players knew he would catch it. " Her brother followed Negro League teams and worked as a water boy or ball boy to get a chance to go to games, she said.

Don't ask Stanley Glenn whether he regrets never having played in the major leagues. He'll tell you politely, but plainly, that he did play major-league baseball. Glenn, 76, spent "four or five years" in the Boston Braves farm system in the early 1950s and never made it to the big club. But from 1944 to 1950, Glenn played catcher for the Philadelphia Stars in the Negro leagues. "The Negro leagues were the major leagues," he said. "Don't ever let anybody tell you otherwise.

You have done it for years around water coolers or over beers. Now you can do it beyond your circle of associates and friends (and enemies, depending how heated the arguments get), and perhaps reap a valuable reward. The major league baseball All-Star Game is coming to Philadelphia this summer and fans around the country soon will begin punching out ballots to choose the starting lineups. Your good, ol' People Paper is frying bigger fish. With the able assistance of you, oh, cherished reader, this spring and summer we are naming - drum roll, please - The Daily News All-Time All-Star Team.

Since it had been decades - and too many memorized averages - away from my last pilgrimage to the Baseball Hall of Fame in rural Cooperstown, N.Y., I was only too happy to make the five-hour trek again when a baseball-playing young friend from Hiroshima, Japan, came for his first visit to the United States. Millions of Americans have grazed around the museum's displays, sighing over Christy Mathewson's withered glove here or Ted Williams' bat there. But few have the chance to see what is seemingly the most American of shrines through the eyes of a baseball-mad lad from another land.

By William C. Kashatus Stanley "Doc" Glenn was a man who spoke softly but carried a big stick - a baseball bat, to be precise. I first met Glenn in 1997, when he was speaking to high school students about the history of Negro league baseball. Fascinated by his reminiscences, I asked if I could interview him for a book I was writing. He agreed, and over the next six years he became a personal inspiration to me. Glenn, who died last week at the age of 84, taught me that even though life isn't always fair, you can't allow the setbacks to "take your joy away.

Jesse Branson, 95, of South Philadelphia, a retired State Store employee and baseball authority who was featured in a Phillies video about the 2008 World Series, died last Friday at Penn Hospice at Rittenhouse. Mr. Branson grew up playing sandlot baseball, and "he was a good player," said his sister, Georgette Fields. "If a ball went into the outfield, the other players knew he would catch it. " Her brother followed Negro League teams and worked as a water boy or ball boy to get a chance to go to games, she said.

In 2002 I wrote a book called Clearing the Bases, a collection of arguments about various baseball players, one of which was that Mike Schmidt was, quite possibly, the greatest baseball player of all time. That is to say that if all players in baseball history lined up to play against the same competition at the same time and under the same circumstances, there was a very good chance that Schmidt would emerge as the best ever. In 2006, Mike Schmidt got his revenge, coauthoring a book also titled Clearing the Bases without once acknowledging that he stole his title from me. (Actually, as I found out later, someone else had used the title several years before both of us.)

Spring training makes me think of Gene "Spider" Benson. An exceptionally gifted and exciting player, Spider roamed center field with fleet feet and an open, youthful smile from 1937 to 1949 for the Philadelphia Stars, of the old Negro leagues. In this, Black History Month, there is much to learn from Benson. Because he was black, Benson was banned from the Major Leagues. He could have been bitter about it. He wasn't. "When you have bitterness in your heart," he once told me, "you'll have the wrong things on your mind.

The door from the steam room opens, and Darren Daulton, leader of The Daulton Gang and of Macho Row, emerges, swathed in towels and fog, walking with the slow, deliberate gait of a sea captain feeling his way across a storm-tossed deck. Daulton's knees make the sound of someone cracking walnuts. He sits heavily and says: "Takes a while to get all the parts back where they belong. " And so it does. Such is the life of a catcher, the toughest position in all of sports. And so it is on this midsummer night in 1993, with the game long over, with everyone else long gone, that only Daulton remains, trying to undo the damage that accumulates from all those knee-crippling frog squats in the dirt, on a steamy 90-degree night, encased in armor, scrambling to block pitches in the dirt, shaking off the foul tips that rip into you like shrapnel.

Early 1800s Baseball is introduced in the United States. 1860s During the Civil War, soldiers, black freemen and emancipated slaves play the game across the widening map of America. 1867 Philadelphia's Pythian Club, founded by former cricket players James H. Francis and Francis Wood, plays in the 1867 Colored World Championship. 1878 John "Bud Fowler" Jackson becomes the first black pro baseball player, for a team in Chelsea, Mass. 1880s Black teams such as the St. Louis Black Stockings and New York Cuban Giants are formed.

MONDAYS, Bill Cash works with Meals on Wheels, delivers food packages to the aged, the infirm, the housebound. "It's rewarding," Cash says, "doing something to help senior citizens. " Cash is 85, sharp as a cactus, with a memory as vivid as vintage Kodachrome. He is a deacon in his church, an officer of the Shriners, an eloquent historian of Negro League baseball. Played for the Philadelphia Stars for 8 years, mostly as a catcher. "Played everything but shortstop and pitcher," is the way he remembers it. Visits churches, schools, colleges, sharing his recollections of a baseball league where only the ball was white, a league that vanished shortly after Jackie Robinson broke in with the Dodgers in 1947.

The integration of major league professional baseball in 1947 represents a major victory over the segregation of the races and a reaffirmation of the American tradition of equal opportunity. Yet there was a downside to the integration of baseball. Historian Neil Lanctot in a new book, Negro League Baseball: The Rise and Ruin of a Black Institution, argues that the loss of star black baseball players to the major leagues resulted in the dissolution of the Negro leagues. "Black baseball helped build an irreplaceable sense of collective solidarity, identity and self-esteem for which no adequate replacement has emerged," Lanctot said.

Don't ask Stanley Glenn whether he regrets never having played in the major leagues. He'll tell you politely, but plainly, that he did play major-league baseball. Glenn, 76, spent "four or five years" in the Boston Braves farm system in the early 1950s and never made it to the big club. But from 1944 to 1950, Glenn played catcher for the Philadelphia Stars in the Negro leagues. "The Negro leagues were the major leagues," he said. "Don't ever let anybody tell you otherwise.

The Postal Service chose an appropriate site for its Legends of Baseball commemoratives. The 20 33-cent stamps will be issued Thursday, a week before this year's All-Star game in Atlanta. The legends are: Roberto Clemente, Pittsburgh Pirates, first Hispanic elected to the Hall of Fame. Ty Cobb, Detroit Tigers, nine-time American League batting champion and career batting-average leader. Mickey Cochran, Philadelphia Athletics, catcher and inspirational leader of the A's championship teams of 1929-31.