George "Mule" Suttles was just where he wanted to be. He stood at the plate on the biggest stage of his era, the game on the line, his huge 50-ounce baseball bat across muscular shoulders formed in his younger years toiling in Alabama coal mines.
It was Aug. 11, 1935, and Comiskey Park in Chicago was packed with 50,000 fans and celebrities for the annual East-West Classic -- All-Stars from the Negro National League squaring off against the Negro American League.
And Suttles rarely missed a chance in this game, turning it into his own classic.
With the score 4-4 in the bottom of the 11th inning, he stepped up to face New York Cubans ace Martin Dihigo, a future baseball Hall of Famer.
Before the stadium announcer even called Suttles' name, the crowd began a crescendo chant of "Kick Mule! Kick Mule! Kick Mule!" until it grew into a locomotive sound.
Suttles then launched a three-run home run to end the game, give his West team the victory and add gloss to his legend.
"Mule Suttles, now he could hit a ball," says Art "Superman" Pennington, a former Negro leagues home run king.
"He was just one of many great power hitters that we had. We got quite a bit of attention among ourselves, but things were so darn prejudiced back then, whites didn't know much about what we were doing."
Black power hitters have a long history in baseball, well before they began moving into the mainstream of American sports with Jackie Robinson's breaking of the color barrier in the major leagues in 1947. But consider that despite being excluded for the first half of the 20th century, five of the majors' top 10 home-run hitters of all time are African American, and that does not include Sammy Sosa, who is from the Dominican Republic.
Major League Baseball's record books would have a very different look if sluggers from the Negro leagues era had been able to compete. Some contend that had Josh Gibson -- inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1972 -- been allowed to play in the major leagues, Barry Bonds would be chasing Gibson's all-time mark today.
"Babe Ruth was the left-handed Josh Gibson. That's the way they should have said it," Hall of Famer Monte Irvin says about Gibson, who led the Negro leagues in homers for 10 consecutive seasons and is credited with 75 home runs in 1931 and 84 in 170 games in 1936.
