[Congressional Record Volume 169, Number 107 (Tuesday, June 20, 2023)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E585-E587]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




HONORING THE GLORIOUS RETURN OF HINCHLIFFE, YANKEE STADIUM OF THE NEGRO 
                                LEAGUES

                                 ______
                                 

                        HON. BILL PASCRELL, JR.

                             of new jersey

                    in the house of representatives

                         Tuesday, June 20, 2023

  Mr. PASCRELL. Mr. Speaker, I include in the Record the following 
article titled, ``The Glorious Return of Hinchliffe, Yankee Stadium of 
the Negro Leagues'' written by Eric Wills about Hinchliffe Stadium in 
Paterson, New Jersey.

                    [From GQ SPORTS, June 19, 2023]

 The Glorious Return of Hinchliffe, Yankee Stadium of the Negro Leagues

                            (By Eric Wills)

       One of the last remaining Negro League ballparks was nearly 
     lost to history. But professional baseball has now returned 
     to the fabled stadium, which stands as a monument to 
     generations of Black players once consigned to the periphery 
     of our national pastime.
       Hinchliffe Stadium hosted some of the greatest Black 
     ballplayers in history, including more than 20 future Hall of 
     Famers. A Juneteenth game and ceremony will honor their 
     legacy.
       Keon Barnum, a lefty first baseman who, at 6'5" and 225 
     pounds, makes everything around him look curiously out of 
     scale, stepped into the batter's box at Hinchliffe Stadium. 
     The full sweep of Paterson, New Jersey, unfolded before him: 
     brick mill buildings and church steeples rising beyond the 
     outfield wall, the city's thundering Great Falls just a long 
     toss away. It was a Friday afternoon in mid-May. Barnum and 
     his teammates from the New Jersey Jackals, a Frontier League 
     team that had recently moved from nearby Little Falls, were 
     taking measure of their new ballpark the day before their 
     home opener. A majestic Art Deco number built in 1932, 
     Hinchliffe had sat vacant for more than a quarter century, 
     its concrete and graffiti-covered bleachers crumbling, the 
     unhoused living in its locker rooms. Once the pulsing heart 
     of Paterson, the stadium was reduced to a ruin, a heart-
     rending symbol of the city's decline. But now, following a 
     $100-million-plus restoration, Hinchliffe once again glimmers 
     anew--a restored monument to one of baseball's most mythical 
     and complicated legacies.
       Thwack! Thwack! Thwack! Barnum began launching moonshots 
     into the sun-streaked ether--the glorious sound of baseball 
     returning to Hinchliffe. ``It's an honor to play here,'' he 
     later said, after joining a select lineage of Black 
     ballplayers who once called the ballpark their own. In its 
     heyday, Hinchliffe flourished as the home to a trio of Negro 
     League teams--the New York Black Yankees, the New York 
     Cubans, and the Newark Eagles--and host to dozens of other 
     Black ball clubs. More than 20 future Hall of Famers once 
     haunted its confines: the likes of Monte Irvin, the legendary 
     outfielder for the New York Giants; Larry Doby, who grew up 
     in Paterson and became the second man, after Jackie Robinson, 
     to break baseball's color barrier; and Josh Gibson, the 
     fabled bomber reputed to have hit nearly 800 home runs. The 
     1933 Colored Championship of the Nation between the Black 
     Yankees, the Pittsburgh Crawfords, and the Philadelphia Stars 
     unfolded at Hinchliffe, as did a 1935 no-hitter by Black 
     Yankees pitcher Terris ``Elmer'' McDuffie.

       ``Jackie got all the publicity for putting up with it. He 
     was first, but the crap I took was just as bad. Nobody said, 
     `We're going to be nice to the second Black.' ''--Larry Doby, 
     Hall of Fame outfielder for the Newark Eagles and Cleveland 
     Indians

       Today, only a handful of Negro League players still survive 
     from the era before Robinson broke the color barrier, in 
     1947; only a handful of stadiums where they played still 
     stand. Of those that do--including Rickwood Field in 
     Birmingham, Alabama; Hamtramck Stadium in Michigan; and J.P. 
     Small Memorial Stadium in Jacksonville--Hinchliffe and 
     Rickwood retain most of their original grandstands and look 
     much as they did about a century ago. Along with Wrigley 
     Field, Hinchliffe is the only ballpark named a National 
     Historic Landmark. You can read oral histories about the 
     Negro Leagues, peruse statistics on the Seamheads Negro

[[Page E586]]

     Leagues Database, an authoritative set of records compiled by 
     a group of trailblazing researchers. To make a pilgrimage to 
     Hinchliffe, however, is to foster a more intimate connection: 
     to walk where the players themselves once did, to commune 
     with the spirits of the athletes who helped build momentum 
     for the Civil Rights movement. If Centre Court at Wimbledon 
     can be considered hallowed ground, Hinchliffe is no less 
     sacred.
       On Juneteenth, the Jackals will hold a game at Hinchliffe 
     that doubles as a celebration of the Negro Leagues. In a rare 
     tribute, the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum will 
     bring its plaque commemorating Larry Doby from Cooperstown to 
     the stadium as part of a ceremony launching the museum's 
     forthcoming exhibition on the history of Black baseball. Doby 
     was the first Black player in the American League, suiting up 
     with the Cleveland Indians less than three months after 
     Robinson's debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers. He was only 23, 
     and unlike Robinson, got no time in the minors, going 
     straight from the Newark Eagles to Comiskey Park in Chicago. 
     In less than 24 hours he recorded his last Negro Leagues hit 
     (a home run), and his first major league at bat (a pinch hit 
     strike out). His reception from his new teammates was 
     hardly welcoming; he nearly ended up in the stands in St. 
     Louis, when a fan taunted him with sexual innuendos about 
     his wife. ``Jackie got all the publicity for putting up 
     with it,'' Doby said of the racial slurs. ``He was first, 
     but the crap I took was just as bad. Nobody said, `We're 
     going to be nice to the second Black.' ''
       After his playing career, Doby once again recorded a 
     historic second, becoming the second Black manager in the 
     majors after Frank Robinson when he took the job with the 
     White Sox in 1978. But before all of that, he was just an 18-
     year-old kid who had come to Hinchliffe for a try out with 
     the Newark Eagles, a Negro Leagues team, after the owner 
     heard that ``there was a pretty good ballplayer out of 
     Eastside High School,'' as Doby recalled at his Hall of Fame 
     induction ceremony. ``And I played the rest of the summer 
     with Newark''--the effective start of his long climb to 
     Cooperstown.
       I first visited Hinchliffe in 2009, when the chances of its 
     revival seemed remote. The Paterson Public School District, 
     which owned the stadium, had shuttered it in 1997; demolition 
     at one point appeared likely. My guide, Brian LoPinto, who 
     had gotten his first varsity hit at the ballpark, had co-
     founded a group called the Friends of Hinchliffe Stadium that 
     was rallying support to save the site. (The restored stadium, 
     the product of decades of grass-roots organizing and 
     political wrangling, will be reserved for school events and 
     games 180 days a year.)
       Attempting to unearth Hinchliffe's storied past, I tracked 
     down the man who was then the greatest living player with a 
     meaningful connection to the site: Monte Irvin, who was 
     teammates with Doby on the Eagles before he led the Giants to 
     the World Series in 1951. He was then 90 and living in 
     Houston. When I reached him by phone, he helped illuminate 
     the meaning of an era I had only begun to understand, 
     unspooling stories with a casual grace. He told me how, in 
     the spring of 1937, he had stepped into the batting box in 
     Hinchliffe as a 18-year-old high school star from nearby 
     Orange with a .666 batting average. And how he had launched 
     some 400-foot moonshots of his own over the left field fence 
     during his try out for the Eagles. The sound caught the 
     attention of two visiting players from the Homestead Grays, 
     who were preparing for a game against Newark later that day: 
     Josh Gibson and Buck Leonard (considered by newspapers at the 
     time to be the Black Babe Ruth and Black Lou Gehrig, 
     respectively, although who's to say Lou Gehrig wasn't the 
     white Buck Leonard?). As Irvin recalled, ``Buck hollered out 
     to William Bell, the manager, `Hey, who is that youngster?' 
     ''
       ``Our games gave Black Americans hope all across the 
     country. They said, `If these ball players can succeed under 
     these very difficult conditions, then maybe we can too.' ''--
     Monte Irvin, Hall of Fame outfielder for the Newark Eagles 
     and New York Giants
       It was the start of an enduring friendship, and also of 
     Irvin's professional career. His stories revealed hard 
     truths: the assumed name (Jimmy Nelson) he played under to 
     preserve his college eligibility; the meagerness of his 
     starting salary (earning only $125 a month, he lived with his 
     parents to save money); the long bus rides (Negro League 
     teams sometimes logged 30,000 miles in a summer); the 
     difficulty finding restaurants or hotels that would serve him 
     and his teammates (players remembered staying at bed-bug-
     infested motels, even funeral homes, and with their $1-per-
     day meal money and challenges of life on the road sometimes 
     subsisted on sardines, bologna, crackers, or ballpark hot 
     dogs). ``Conditions were abominable, but we didn't know any 
     better,'' as Irvin once recalled. ``We were young and strong, 
     and we loved the game so much.''
       Perhaps the greatest injustice was that segregation had 
     robbed him of his prime. ``This should have happened to me 10 
     years ago,'' he once said of joining the Giants at age 30. 
     ``I'm not even half the ballplayer I was then.'' (And what a 
     player he was: With his grace and all-around game, many of 
     his contemporaries thought he should have been the one to 
     break the color barrier in the majors.) Yet Irvin expressed 
     no abiding anger at his fortunes, and shared with me but one 
     overriding regret, touching in its magnanimity: that the full 
     sweep of the country hadn't seen the likes of Satchel Paige 
     and Gibson, ``one of the greatest hitters who ever lived.''
       Because almost none of the Negro League teams owned their 
     own stadiums, they relied on brokers and agents to arrange 
     games, often at major league stadiums, for a cut of the 
     profits, of course. Conditions at cheaper and more accessible 
     fields could be abysmal--rocky sandlots with peculiar 
     dimensions, smoke wafting in from passing trains. But at 
     Hinchliffe, the Black Yankees and New York Cubans found a 
     reliable and dignified home base that afforded them a measure 
     of freedom--and a chance to build their own community against 
     the backdrop of segregation. Here, and across the Negro 
     Leagues, they made the national pastime their own: a game of 
     speed and stylish intelligence, one that elevated the bunt-
     and-run into an art form, say, or saw Paige handcuff batters 
     with his hesitation pitch, later outlawed in the majors.
       Irvin had grown up watching the Negro Leaguers--``the way 
     they looked, the way they dressed, the way they played, it 
     was a great inspiration,'' he told me--and he remembered how 
     his generation had played a similar role. ``Our games gave 
     Black Americans hope all across the country,'' he once 
     recalled, before his passing at age 96, in 2016. ``They said, 
     `If these ball players can succeed under these very difficult 
     conditions, then maybe we can too.' ''
       After a rainout, and two days after Barnum staged his 
     batting-practice show, opening day finally arrived at 
     Hinchliffe: the Jackals vs. the Sussex County Miners. One 
     fact emerged from the start: It is a hitter-friendly 
     ballpark. In the late afternoon glow, after LoPinto secured 
     the first pitched ball for the museum that's being 
     established at the stadium, the Miners' lead-off hitter went 
     deep, recording the first of 10 home runs in the Jackals' 10-
     6 victory. (``The ball just flies,'' Barnum said, after 
     hitting one out.) Purists might wish the field were grass, 
     not turf, or that home plate was positioned at the bottom of 
     the horseshoe, as in the Negro League days, and not in the 
     northeast corner of the stadium, where the school district 
     later moved it. The right field line, listed at 327 feet, 
     appears far shorter than that; a 40-foot-high net prevents 
     line drives from leaving the park. But none of those quibbles 
     overshadowed the thrill of baseball returning to Hinchliffe.
       Bobby Jones, the vice president and chief business officer 
     for the Jackals, and a former left-handed pitcher for the 
     Mets who grew up going to Kennedy-Eastside High School 
     Thanksgiving day football games at Hinchliffe, helped broker 
     the deal to bring the team to Paterson--a move he hopes will 
     contribute to the city's economic revival. ``I thought coming 
     here that we could be a positive light in a community that 
     needed it,'' he told me. ``These kids who go to that school 
     have never thought they'd get out of Paterson because they 
     looked down and saw nothing but garbage. And now it's 
     transformed their whole thinking. The possibilities are 
     real to these kids. It's bigger than baseball.''--Harold 
     Reynolds, former All-Star second baseman for the Seattle 
     Mariners
       In March, Paterson, a majority Latino city with a 25 
     percent poverty rate, made headlines when police shot and 
     killed a Black counselor from an anti-violence organization, 
     which helped lead to the state Attorney General's office 
     takeover of the police department. It's too early to say 
     whether the Hinchliffe project, which relied on a significant 
     infusion of state tax credits that helped fund the 
     construction of affordable senior housing at the site, can 
     help solve some of the city's most pressing problems (some 
     local activists are skeptical). Or whether Jackals fans, a 
     few of whom expressed their disappointment on social media at 
     the team's move away from Yogi Berra Stadium, in Little 
     Falls, will stay away (attendance on opening day was sparse).
       But at the stadium's ribbon cutting a few days earlier, 
     Harold Reynolds, the former Seattle Mariners second baseman 
     turned TV analyst, who's become an unofficial ambassador for 
     Hinchliffe, told me the project has already had a positive 
     effect on the students of Public School 5, which rises above 
     the stadium's northwest side. ``These kids who go to that 
     school have never thought they'd get out of Paterson because 
     they looked down and saw nothing but garbage,'' Reynolds 
     said. ``And now I was talking with the principal, and it's 
     transformed their whole thinking. The possibilities are real 
     to these kids. It's bigger than baseball.'' Reynolds has been 
     lobbying MLB to host a Field of Dreams-style game at 
     Hinchliffe (a game that will be held at Rickwood next year). 
     ``The beauty of baseball is the folklore,'' he told me. ``The 
     stories are what carry our sport.''
       In 2020, MLB attempted to atone for its original sin by 
     announcing that it was ``elevating the Negro Leagues to 
     `Major League' status,'' and gave credit for the decision in 
     part to the Seamheads Negro Leagues Database. Of course, it 
     was the majors that needed elevating, and the often sublime 
     players of the Negro Leagues who transformed the majors into 
     actual major leagues. (Black baseball teams logged a winning 
     record against major league and all-star teams between 1900 
     and 1948, according to research compiled by Todd Peterson in 
     the book The Negro Leagues Were Major Leagues.) But because 
     many games were lost to history, the box scores never 
     reported, Negro League statistics will never be comprehensive 
     (Gibson has but 240 reported home runs in

[[Page E587]]

     Seamheads); they will never reveal the constraints that Black 
     ballplayers faced, lack of coaching among them; and they will 
     always have been generated independent of the majors, an 
     injustice that can never be corrected.
       Hinchliffe invites you to consider difficult questions: 
     consider if baseball had integrated a decade or two earlier, 
     or if the game had never been segregated at all; consider if 
     Paige, Gibson, Leonard, Oscar Charleston, Cool Papa Bell, and 
     dozens of others had enjoyed their primes in the majors, what 
     the record book might look like today, how different our 
     understanding of the game would be. Consider also the fate of 
     the Black players who never made it to the show because they 
     came of age too soon or found themselves shut out of the 
     game, unable to find a team, after the color line was broken, 
     the leagues they helped build vanishing like a ghost ship 
     into darkness. In a bittersweet twist, when Black fans 
     flocked to see Robinson at Ebbets Field, the demise of the 
     Negro Leagues soon followed, even as major league teams were 
     slow to sign Black players: The Red Sox, for instance, took 
     12 years after Robinson's debut to integrate. And finally, 
     consider the forces that kept baseball segregated, and how 
     those forces persist today: Witness the declining percentage 
     of Black ballplayers in the majors and the continuing 
     struggle to diversify the coaching and front office ranks.
       In the thickening shadows of Hinchliffe, after the Jackals' 
     victory in their home opener, I stood with Nilo Rijo, the 
     team's second baseman, as he fielded questions from 
     reporters. He attended high school in nearby Passaic and 
     often drove by Hinchliffe on the way to his workout facility 
     without recognizing the then-ruin as a ballpark. Like so many 
     others, he has now started learning its history.
       Standing there in that repository of myths, I thought back 
     to my chat with Reynolds after the ribbon-cutting. During his 
     playing days he had befriended Buck O'Neil, the legendary 
     first baseman turned manager from the Negro League's Kansas 
     City Monarchs, who had passed along stories from his fabled 
     career. And now, as members of the next generation step 
     through the gates at Hinchliffe, they too can discover the 
     history of the Black owners and managers who built the Negro 
     Leagues, and the Black ballplayers who changed the sport. 
     Reynolds, for his part, hopes that a trip to the ballpark 
     will convey a simple yet transformative truth: ``that 
     baseball was a Black sport.''
       Eric Wills is a former senior editor at Architect magazine 
     whose work has appeared in The Washington Post, Smithsonian, 
     and GQ.

                          ____________________