Kansas City Monarchs

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.

EVEN THE man who sang the national anthem before the game at Yankee Stadium doesn't remember much about it, but it was played almost 50 years ago exactly, on Aug. 20, 1961, and was the final game of the Negro Leagues. It was an all-star contest between East and West teams, held a year after their league had folded and sponsored by the Improved Benevolent and Protected Order of Elks, which was having its national convention in New York. More than 30,000 members attended the convention, but only about 7,000 fans were at the game.

Major League Baseball agreed yesterday to pay $1 million to 29 former players from the Negro Leagues who were excluded from the big leagues in the late 1940s and 1950s. The money is compensation for being left out of the major leagues even after Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in 1947. In reality, many major league teams remained segregated until the late 1950s. The Boston Red Sox, the last team to integrate, did not do so until 1959. Under the compensation plan, the 29 surviving players can choose to receive either $833 a month for 4 years, or $375 a month for life.

Deanna and Drexel Collins of Cinnaminson prefer outfielder/ pitcher James "Cool Papa" Bell over Curt Schilling, and the Kansas City Monarchs to the Phillies. For them, the Negro League is the ticket. The professional baseball league organized by blacks, who were excluded from major league baseball because of their race, included 12 franchise teams that played from 1920 to 1955. The Collinses own DDAT Club, a small company that manufactures and sells Negro League memorabilia, including T-shirts and baseball cards.

"This is not a sad story. It's a celebration!" That is what Buck O'Neil would often say to people who would lament the fact that he and countless other baseball players, managers and officials were relegated to the Negro leagues in the segregated America of yore. The same sentiment now should hold true as we say goodbye to Buck O'Neil, who died at age 94 Friday night. Major League Baseball and the world at large will say one last, loving farewell to Mr. O'Neil, the man who put the human face on an era and the leagues in which he played and managed.

The event was a quiet one, the rededication of a refurbished baseball diamond named for John Henry "Pop" Lloyd, the legendary Negro league shortstop. A U.S. Coast Guard band played "Take Me Out to the Ball Game," but the music barely carried in yesterday's cool, gray ocean breeze. There were no professional autograph hunters here, no TV cameras, no event planners. It wasn't an event at all, not in the modern sense of the word. Just a few local pols, a minister, some neighborhood kids, their parents, the boss from the company that bankrolled the thing, some old ballplayers.

It's too thin, and has a distinctive arc, but it is still immediately recognizable as a baseball bat. It's a tree branch painstakingly carved, the grip fashioned of medical adhesive tape, made in 1942 by a United Press reporter named Glen Stadler. With a ball crafted from a champagne cork, wrapped with two socks and layers of adhesive tape, it was the foundation of a short winter season for 100 American journalists and diplomats interned by the Nazis at Bad Nauheim after the United States entered World War II. For anyone who wonders why baseball is called "America's pastime," there are answers aplenty at "Baseball as America," the current exhibit at the National Constitution Center on Independence Mall.

Judy Johnson, Delaware's only native son enshrined in the Baseball Hall of Fame, yesterday was enshrined in bronze and in spirit in Wilmington, where he lived for 75 years and where he died in 1989. Until yesterday, to many youngsters growing up in Wilmington, Judy Johnson meant nothing more than a place - a neighborhood ballpark. "Judy Johnson? That's why we're here? I thought we came here to see baseball," said a youngster seated yesterday afternoon with his peewee baseball teammates outside the front gates to Wilmington's minor-league baseball stadium.

On a sun-splashed, sultry day, the National Baseball Hall of Fame and the major leagues shone a light, perhaps for one last time, on the racial chasm that once divided a sport and a nation. And judging by the celebratory air that surrounded the induction of not only relief ace Bruce Sutter but 17 luminaries from the era of Negro league baseball, closure was very much at hand. "It is an awesome responsibility to stand before you and try to explain to you how important this day is to us," Jackie Robinson's daughter, Sharon, told the audience gathered to salute the Hall's largest induction class ever as well as Houston Astros announcer Gene Elston (Ford C. Frick Award)

John F. Kennedy once said lies are not the enemy of truth, myth is. Ken Burns' remarkable Baseball epic does not tell lies, but it tells myths. Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak is not so pure: New York scorers gave the Yankee star at least two blatant gift hits. Babe Ruth and his prodigious home-run hitting did not save baseball from the Black Sox scandal of 1919 - the game always gets a big rebound after wars. Johnny Pesky didn't really hold the ball when Enos "Country" Slaughter dashed home to win the 1946 World Series for the Cardinals.

EVEN THE man who sang the national anthem before the game at Yankee Stadium doesn't remember much about it, but it was played almost 50 years ago exactly, on Aug. 20, 1961, and was the final game of the Negro Leagues. It was an all-star contest between East and West teams, held a year after their league had folded and sponsored by the Improved Benevolent and Protected Order of Elks, which was having its national convention in New York. More than 30,000 members attended the convention, but only about 7,000 fans were at the game.

It's too thin, and has a distinctive arc, but it is still immediately recognizable as a baseball bat. It's a tree branch painstakingly carved, the grip fashioned of medical adhesive tape, made in 1942 by a United Press reporter named Glen Stadler. With a ball crafted from a champagne cork, wrapped with two socks and layers of adhesive tape, it was the foundation of a short winter season for 100 American journalists and diplomats interned by the Nazis at Bad Nauheim after the United States entered World War II. For anyone who wonders why baseball is called "America's pastime," there are answers aplenty at "Baseball as America," the current exhibit at the National Constitution Center on Independence Mall.

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.

"This is not a sad story. It's a celebration!" That is what Buck O'Neil would often say to people who would lament the fact that he and countless other baseball players, managers and officials were relegated to the Negro leagues in the segregated America of yore. The same sentiment now should hold true as we say goodbye to Buck O'Neil, who died at age 94 Friday night. Major League Baseball and the world at large will say one last, loving farewell to Mr. O'Neil, the man who put the human face on an era and the leagues in which he played and managed.

On a sun-splashed, sultry day, the National Baseball Hall of Fame and the major leagues shone a light, perhaps for one last time, on the racial chasm that once divided a sport and a nation. And judging by the celebratory air that surrounded the induction of not only relief ace Bruce Sutter but 17 luminaries from the era of Negro league baseball, closure was very much at hand. "It is an awesome responsibility to stand before you and try to explain to you how important this day is to us," Jackie Robinson's daughter, Sharon, told the audience gathered to salute the Hall's largest induction class ever as well as Houston Astros announcer Gene Elston (Ford C. Frick Award)

Major League Baseball agreed yesterday to pay $1 million to 29 former players from the Negro Leagues who were excluded from the big leagues in the late 1940s and 1950s. The money is compensation for being left out of the major leagues even after Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in 1947. In reality, many major league teams remained segregated until the late 1950s. The Boston Red Sox, the last team to integrate, did not do so until 1959. Under the compensation plan, the 29 surviving players can choose to receive either $833 a month for 4 years, or $375 a month for life.

Gene Benson's death last week marked the end of a bittersweet era in Philadelphia baseball history. Hopefully, the late Negro Leaguer's invaluable contributions to the national pastime will soon be honored by a bronze plaque in Baseball's Hall of Fame. Major-league baseball was segregated until 1947, when Jackie Robinson of the Brooklyn Dodgers broke the color barrier. Before that, black athletes established their own teams, and later black leagues. Men with extraordinary athletic ability passed their lives in relative obscurity.

Deanna and Drexel Collins of Cinnaminson prefer outfielder/ pitcher James "Cool Papa" Bell over Curt Schilling, and the Kansas City Monarchs to the Phillies. For them, the Negro League is the ticket. The professional baseball league organized by blacks, who were excluded from major league baseball because of their race, included 12 franchise teams that played from 1920 to 1955. The Collinses own DDAT Club, a small company that manufactures and sells Negro League memorabilia, including T-shirts and baseball cards.

It began as a means to unite and legitimize the Negro Leagues. It grew to be the annual event that united the nation's black populace and legitimized the black baseball player. It was called the East-West Game, an all-star game that was the jewel of the Negro Leagues in the 1930s and '40s. Upon its inception in 1933, the East-West Game, like the major league All-Star Game that also started that year, was meant to make money for struggling owners. That, it did. But it did more. It became bigger than the Negro World Series.

Judy Johnson, Delaware's only native son enshrined in the Baseball Hall of Fame, yesterday was enshrined in bronze and in spirit in Wilmington, where he lived for 75 years and where he died in 1989. Until yesterday, to many youngsters growing up in Wilmington, Judy Johnson meant nothing more than a place - a neighborhood ballpark. "Judy Johnson? That's why we're here? I thought we came here to see baseball," said a youngster seated yesterday afternoon with his peewee baseball teammates outside the front gates to Wilmington's minor-league baseball stadium.