Turkey and the Mule

Mule Suttles and Turkey Stearnes; Turkey Stearnes and Mule Suttles. Which one is it? In 1930, this was a question of no little importance. The two were the premier sluggers in black baseball, and a seven game Negro National League championship series between Stearnes’ Detroit Stars and Suttles’ St. Louis Stars promised to help settle the question of precedence.

Suttles, a hulk from the coal mines of Alabama who swung a 50 ounce bat, had hit .384 with twenty home runs in 57 regular season games for St. Louis and Baltimore in 1930. What’s more, he’d reportedly hit a ball 600 feet the previous winter in Havana, over a 60 foot wall 500 feet from home plate. Numerous teammates and opponents who saw him play attest that no one hit a ball harder, higher or farther. Not Josh Gibson, not Babe Ruth—no one. A short anecdote, related by Buck Leonard and taken from John Holway’s Blackball Stars :

[Suttles] hit a home run one night in Buffalo [that] hit the house across the street and came back in the ball park. We got the ball and held him to two bases. The ball went out of the park and hit the house so quickly and came back into the park that the umpire…thought it hit the fence.

His teammates on the St. Louis club included Willie Wells, ‘Double Duty’ Radcliffe, and Cool Papa Bell. They won the first half pennant in a romp, going 41-15.

Stearnes cut an entirely different figure than Suttles. Just 5’9” and 165 pounds, he had broad shoulders and whipped his bat through the strike zone with tremendous speed. He played for teams in Montgomery and Memphis in 1921 and 1922 before signing with Detroit for the following season. According to Satchel Paige, “he was as good as Josh [Gibson]. He was as good as anybody who ever played baseball.”

Besides Stearnes, Detroit featured first baseman/pitcher Ed Rile, pitcher Ted Shaw, and outfielder Crush Holloway. Crush was really his given name—on the day he was born, his father saw a train crash in Hillsboro, Texas, his home town.

The Motor City outfit was a decided underdog going into the series. They had tied St. Louis in the second half with a 24-7 record, but were 50-33 over the full year, compared to 65-22 for St. Louis. Their first half troubles were due in large part to Stearnes’ absence; he began the season with the New York Lincoln Giants, and only rejoined Detroit partway through the season.

Besides the matchup it provided on the field, the 1930 NNL championship was important in Depression-era black America. The financial crisis sweeping the country had fallen with particular force on blacks, who were often among the first laid off from jobs. Lawrence Hogan notes in Shades of Glory that “black entrepreneurs were seriously handicapped by their reliance on a largely impoverished population with limited income.”

In this context, professional black baseball was suffering badly at the gate. For instance, in 1927, The Atlantic City Bacharach Giants received only $42 each for playing in a championship series against the Chicago American Giants. The 1930 series had star power to spare, and hopes were high that it could net the teams and players a decent pay day.

The first game was played in St. Louis. Stearnes immediately disquieted the home crowd by cracking a two run homer off Radcliffe, his nephew, in the first inning. St. Louis rebounded, though, and ace pitcher Ted Trent led them to a 5-4 victory. Stearnes was 3-4, including the home run, and Suttles was 1-2 with a single.

The second game was all Stearnes, and by extension all Detroit. Turkey had five hits, including a double and a home run, and the visitors evened the series at one game apiece with an 11-7 victory. Suttles was 2-6.

This game also featured one of the most astonishing plays ever made, in the Negro Leagues or elsewhere. With men on second and third and none out in the eighth, the St. Louis batter smashed a line drive over the bag at third. Detroit’s Bobbie Robinson dove, caught it in the air, and landed on the base to double off Cool Papa Bell. Not satisfied, he whipped the ball to second base, forcing runner John Henry Russell for an inning-ending triple play. Several major league players in the stands demanded that Robinson come shake their hands.

In the next game, Suttles hit his first home run, Stearnes managed just one hit, and St. Louis’ Trent shut down Detroit once more to re-take the series lead. After a fourth game in which, apparently, neither Stearnes nor Suttles played, the ballplayers moved to Detroit with the series tied at two.

The setting there was Hamtramck Stadium, named for the working class Polish neighborhood in which it stood. It had been built that very year after the previous stadium, Mack Park, burned to the ground in a terrifying fire that injured 220 spectators. Hamtramck, also known as Roesink Stadium after the man who built it, presented certain challenges to left-handed sluggers like Turkey. It was 407 feet down the right field line, and the fence was ten feet high. Down the other foul line, it was just 315 feet. Suttles hit right-handed.

In Game Five, Detroit finally got to Trent, who was pitching for the third time. Stearnes doubled twice, and the northerners overcame a Suttles home run (to left field) to win 7-5 and earn their first series lead, 3-2. In Game Six, Stearnes drove in three runs, but St. Louis won the game, 4-3. One of his hits was a blast over the distant right field wall, the first time anyone had reached it. All for naught, though—the series was tied, with one game to play.

Through the first six games, Stearnes was batting .581, with a sickening 1.273 slugging percentage. Eight of his 13 hits had gone for extra bases. In the last game, though, he was hitless in five at-bats, and St. Louis won 13-7 on the road to take the championship.

Detroit was therefore disappointed on the field in their best shot at a pennant. At the ticket office, the news was no better. Already hurt by the Mack Park fire, the construction of the new stadium, and a three-week boycott by fans that August, poor weather and the Depression combined to keep spectators away. Detroit owner John Roesink sold the team after the season.

League-wide, the news was similarly grim. Chicago and Kansas City were both forced to withdraw from the league during the 1931 season. Cost-cutting and anxiety were taking a serious toll; observer Fay Young wrote that the NNL “hasn’t any real schedule, doesn’t live up to its own rules, [and] pays little attention to the needs and wants of the fans.” Sure enough, the entire league went under in March 1932.

As it was happening, the 1930 NNL championship seemed a lot of things. Most evidently, it was a meeting between the two most feared sluggers in black baseball, and neither man disappointed. It was an opportunity for the teams, and the league, to dig themselves out of a deepening financial hole. 1930 could have been a major moment in time.

Looking back, though, it’s remembered differently. Rather than a saving grace, the series was a sort of last hurrah for the NNL before it folded a year later. It was also a final curtain call for some of the great black players of the 1920s, such as Suttles and Stearnes. Soon enough, a new wave of Negro League stars, led by Josh Gibson and Satchel Paige, took the spotlight and held it until integration in 1947.

In addition to the fine books mentioned, I used Richard Bak’s Turkey Stearnes and the Detroit Stars in researching this article.