Poster for a Negro Leagues baseball game

I don’t know how I missed the poster. It was propped up right smack in front of me against the wall but I was looking down, enamored with the vintage model Chevys, Fords, Thunderbirds and Cadillacs.

I didn’t notice the poster until later when the auctioneer picked it up and said the words “Negro Leagues.” Then I perked up. Any and everything relating to the Negro baseball leagues immediately gets my attention. I was standing too far away from him to get a good look, so I followed the assistant as the auctioneer told him to put it in a safe place.

A phone bidder had just paid $140 for the framed poster, and the auctioneer wanted to make sure no one lifted (or stole) it. I could understand his concern. It was an original, a little dirty, with some tears on the sides, but still a treasure.

The original owner had glued the poster to a wall and stuck black and white pictures around it, another assistant said. It had been retrieved by someone else who had consigned it for auction. That person had taken it from the wall, tearing it in spots around the edges to remove it.

Amazingly, the special parts of the poster were intact. I’m sure that the original owner never considered it so important that it would end up for sale at auction someday. He was just decorating his wall with something that spoke to his interests.

The poster announced a doubleheader between the Negro National League’s New York Cubans and the Newark Eagles at 155th Street and Eighth Avenue in New York on Sunday, Sept. 3. The site was likely the Polo Grounds, which was also the home of several of the city’s major league teams.

There was no year listed, which is the case in most of the vintage posters I come across. The game was likely played in 1944. In the four corners of the poster were players from both teams. Based on my research, all of them – Terris McDuffie and Ray Dandridge with the Eagles and Impo Barnhill and Juan Vargas with the Cubans – were with their respective teams in 1944. Also, Sept. 3, 1944 was a Sunday.

The first game was at 2 p.m. The cost to sit in the bleachers was 60 cents and in the grandstand, $1.20. The games were festive, exhilarating and celebratory, according to several men recounting their ball-park visits in the 1940s in a newspaper interview. One remembered taking a lunch of fried chicken wrapped in wax paper and listening to a swing band playing in the stands behind home plate. Another remembered buying peanuts for 3 cents a bag. And another recalled taking a date to the games later in the decade.

For the time they were in the ball park, they said, the albatross of race lifted from their shoulders and they cheered without inhibitions for the black players out on the green grass of the ball fields.

The pictures of the players on the poster were a bit faded but I could make out their names and their teams, which were part of the Negro National League. The league had been founded by Andrew “Rube” Foster in 1920, shut down in 1931, and revived in 1933 by Gus Greenlee. The Negro American League, which was made up of teams in the South and Midwest, was formed in 1937, and the two operated independently until 1949 when the National became part of the American. The league itself was dissolved in 1960.

A highlight of the National league was its East-West All Star Game played each year at Comiskey Field in Chicago before more than 50,000 fans.

The players on the auction poster were some of the best and most popular in the league. McDuffie and Dandridge played for a team with a pretty interesting history, especially in its co-owner Effa Manley. She and her husband Abe started the team in 1935, but she ran it. Word was that she had a romantic relationship with McDuffie, himself a colorful character off the field.

McDuffie was a standout pitcher, but he wasn’t the only “name” on the team. The others included Larry Doby, who went on to become the first African American player in the American League with the Cleveland Indians, and Don Newcombe, who was the only player to win Rookie of the Year, Cy Young and Most Valuable Player awards. The team won the Negro World Series in 1946 in an upset against the Kansas City Monarchs.

Dandridge, described as a “masterful” third baseman, joined the Eagles in the late 1930s. He spent most of the 1940s playing in leagues in Latin America. He signed with the New York Giants in 1949, went to its farm team and never made it out of there.

The New York Cubans started out as an all-Latino team called the Cuban All-Stars. That team folded and was reconstructed as the NY Cubans in 1935. The team won the Negro Leagues World Series in 1947. One of its players was Martin Dihigo, who was described as one of the best players ever in baseball.

Dave “Impo” Barnhill was considered one of the best pitchers in the East during the1940s. He matched up with Satchel Paige pretty often and shut out the famous pitcher in the 1943 East-West game. Barnhill came close to being the first black player in the major leagues in 1942, garnering an invitation from the Pittsburgh Pirates but the owner reneged.

Juan Tetelo Vargas was a centerfielder and a star of the Cubans. He played in leagues in Cuba and Latin America. He was described as one of the best players to come out of the Dominican Republic.