Michigan Notable book honors all-black baseball team

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If you’re not a baseball historian, it’s likely you associate the “Negro Leagues” with something out of a fictionalized movie such as, “The Bingo Long Travelling All-Stars & Motor Boys.” When the “Negro Leagues” do get mentioned, players from the 1930s like Satchel Page, Jackie Robinson and Willie Mays get recognized, while the pre-twentieth century all-black teams are almost dust-bin material.

Well Bingo Long’s boys can’t hold a bat to the real all-black barnstorming team, the Page Fence Giants from Adrian, Michigan. Williamston High School history teacher Mitch Lutzke readily admits “stumbling” across the Giants —which posted mind-boggling won-loss records from 1895-1897— while doing research on the history of the area.

Lutzke recounts his discoveries in the 2019 Michigan Notable book; “The Page Fence Giants: A History of Black Baseball’s Pioneering Champions.”

“Discovering the Page Fence Giants kind of led me down a rabbit hole,” Lutzke said. Lutzke is originally from Adrian, where he played on a high school baseball team for one long, losing season.

That rabbit hole included hundreds of hours of research peering cross-eyed at spooling microfiche records of obscure 19th century newspapers, such as the Adrian Weekly Times and Expositor.

He initially thought he would waltz into the local history museum and find a file brimming with team schedules, lineups and records. The historian soon discovered newspaper coverage of the barnstorming teams of that era is not only spotty, but often flat out wrong.

While researching, Lutzke found a short account of a game between the Giants and the Kalamazoo Celery Eaters in an Adrian newspaper. He also found articles in papers that ballyhooed fictitious games.

“In one and a half years of research I found so little about a team that was so good,” he said.

Lutzke said he spent 200 hours alone reading “Sporting News” and “Sporting Life” which are considered bibles for baseball researchers. He was a regular at the State of Michigan Library poring through newspapers looking for any mention of the Giants.

“There was so little and rarely, if ever, was there a highlight of the team’s games. In the 1890s, newspapers rarely wrote more than three or four sentences about a game,” he said.

The author points out the infrequent longer articles often were imbued with colorful racial epithets when describing the Giants. In early baseball, the words “Giants” and “Cubans” were code for black teams and teams wearing “white caps” was a veiled reference to the Ku Klux Klan.

That’s when Lutzke decided to write a book that was not just about 19th century American baseball leagues, but also took into consideration the context of the era.

As a history teacher, Lutzke is passionate about the lessons from “The Gilded Age” and noticed the important overlap between the growth of the Negro Leagues and the corporate economy. He also teaches his students about the “post Reconstruction” era and the rise of Jim Crow laws.

Both the fans and enemies of the Page Giants couldn’t help but be impressed when the team rolled into town on a specially-outfitted Monarch railroad car they used to travel to away games. The rail car, outfitted with sleeping quarters and a kitchen, was a practical solution to the discrimination of the Jim Crow era.

Lutzke writes about how the Giants were the Harlem Globetrotters of their era with their 12 top-noch Monarch bicycles, fireman’s hats and bright red uniforms which they donned while riding through the town. Lutzke calls it “a la the Pied Piper.” The showmanship carried on to the field when players did somersaults or cartwheels around the bases when they hit one of their frequent home runs.

Interestingly, the team’s sponsors were white-owned businesses using the black team to promote themselves. Page Woven Wire Fence Co. was the capitalist venture of farmer and stockman J. Wallace Page and his “brother farmers.” Page gained prominence in Adrian for conceptualizing and manufacturing woven fences as an alternative to expensive barbed wire.

Adrian— a stop on the Underground Railroad— had already become nominally integrated prior to the turn of the twentieth century and Lutzke does a Yeoman's job in describing why.

Essentially by 1900, black-owned businesses, integrated schools and remnants from the abolitionist movement were all present in the small town.

Lutzke’s next goal is to put together family trees for the players, who mostly have been lost to time.

“With one exception, I have no idea where they died or were buried and I haven’t found anyone related to the players,” he said. There also are few photographs of the Giants, but Lutzke is committed to recreating the team’s history which includes going 118-36-2 while playing in 112 towns in 1895.

With his new book, Lutzke has written the equivalent of a walk-off home run. As a featured 2019 Notable Author, he will be recognized at the April 27 Night for Notables event at the Library of Michigan. He’ll be easy to recognize wearing a replica Giants’ jersey.

 

 

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