Negro leagues pitcher was a baseball star in Indianapolis
INDIANAPOLIS (WISH) — One of the greatest baseball pitchers the world has ever seen may have been born in the wrong time and in the wrong color to get the attention he deserved.
John Wesley Donaldson was born in 1891 in Glasgow, Missouri. He picked up a baseball in 1908 and is credited with helping bring the game, and avid fans, to Indianapolis. But as an African-American trying to make a living playing ball in an era where the color of your skin was a key qualifier for Major League teams, John Donaldson’s legacy has been largely lost to the world.
Despite civil rights movements being still two generations away, Donaldson started to challenge the norm and play baseball as a professional, supporting his family.
“It was a hard life and it didn’t pay great but it paid better than most of the other jobs that were available to African-Americans at that time,” explained Geri Stecker, a member of the Negro Leagues Research Committee. “Black baseball was an entrepreneurial effort by people who didn’t have great resources.”
Banned from MLB teams, Donaldson became a barnstormer, visiting 550 cities and playing for 25 teams. He turned heads as both a hitter and pitcher for the All Nations Team, and won an incredible 400 recorded games, the most in segregated baseball history. He is also credited with 5,002 verified strikeouts, 14 no-hitters, 2 perfect games, and struck out 30 or more batters in a single game twice, according to the John Donaldson Research Network.
“It’s amazing that his legacy has been completely lost,” said Pete Gorton, a member of the Society for American Baseball Research, who has turned his research attention to Donaldson. He and his team are trying to bring Donaldson back to the home plate of baseball history with a new documentary, “39 Seconds.”
“It’s very simple to go the web and find out every single strikeout [of] Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth, any of the great players in any time period,” said Gorton. “It’s important that we show that there is available data for John Donaldson and black players like him.”
Gorton points to what he calls a miraculous 39 surviving seconds of film footage showing Donaldson hitting and pitching. You can see him throw his fastball that sent thousands of batters, some of them former major league players, back to the bench.
“All the scouts and people I talk to show the film to say this really looks like something that happened just yesterday,” said Gorton. “And what you have to remember is this is 16 millimeter film footage, a hand-cranked camera.”
By 1918, Donaldson had made a name for himself but had to leave the All Nations Team due to the Railway Control Act of 1918 that limited commercial travel not connected with wartime efforts. Continuing his career of barnstorming would make it difficult for Donaldson to report for the draft in his home state of Missouri, so he got a job with one of the country’s early Negro League teams, the Indianapolis ABCs.
“It stands for the American Brewing Company,” said Strecker. “While they’d started as a factory team, by 1914 they had become a fully-professional, respectable organization playing teams across the Midwest.”
The team also featured greats like Baseball Hall of Famers Oscar Charleston, Biz Mackey and Ben Taylor. They played at the Indianapolis Association Baseball Park, also known as Washington Park. The Indianapolis Zoo now stands on the former field. Gorton says Donaldson was recruited by the city because of his fame and success.
“It’s very important to realize that they were trying to find stars to bring people into the seats and John Donaldson was that star,” said Gorton.
Donaldson was paid a handsome $200 a month, the most of any Black pitcher at the time. At his peak Donaldson would earn $450 a month.
According to several reports, John McGraw, the legendary manager of the New York Giants said if he could dunk Donaldson in calamine lotion, he’d hire him. Donaldson however stood firm, even turning down an offer to pretend to be Cuban to gain access to more baseball leagues. Gorton paraphrased a quote from the pitcher himself.
“John Donaldson said, ‘I’m not ashamed of my color. When I go out and play baseball, it’s not unusual for people to say hit the dirty “n” word,’ and it hurt him, he said. He said, ‘Why do fans have to get so personal? Don’t I deserve a little respect?’”
Donaldson left the Indianapolis ABCs in June of 1918 due to a salary cut, but his last game for the city made headlines for more than one reason.
On Sunday, June 3, 1918, The Indianapolis News reported 2,000 spectators showed up to Washington Park to watch the Indianapolis ABCs play an aviation depot baseball team in a war-time fundraising event. It included a stunt of throwing baseballs attached to streamers out of an airplane over Washington Park. Tragically, a streamer became entangled with the equipment on the airplane and the aircraft crashed to the ground in the middle of the ballpark, right where Donaldson was warning up. The pilot was killed instantly and his passenger survived. The Indianapolis News reports the game was cancelled.
After he left Indianapolis, Donaldson went to play ball in Brooklyn, New York. Gorton says there was a flu epidemic in the area, making the move a risk for Donaldson, but also evidence of his drive to play ball.
Donaldson later played as a founding member for the famed Negro League team The Kansas City Monarchs, training greats like Satchel Paige. Donaldson also worked as a scout for the all-white Chicago White Sox. He was the first Black man to cross that barrier.
He died in 1970 at the age of 79. He was buried in an unmarked grave in Illinois until the Negro Leagues Grave Marker project discovered him and raised the money needed for a headstone. While Donaldson hasn’t been inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame, he was a finalist in 2006, and made it to the Missouri Baseball Hall of Fame in 2017.
If you’d like to learn more about his role in Indiana baseball, and his impact on the rest of the country, learn more about the upcoming documentary “39 Seconds.”
If you would like to help fund the documentary, click here.