Negro League

Art Pennington hasn't faced Satchel Paige in nearly 60 years, but he's at the plate now, batting from the left side here in the water-damaged basement of a 50-year-old clapboard house. "Oh boy," Pennington says, shaking his head. "I didn't hit him then. I won't hit him now." With that, the former Negro League All-Star rolls red dice across a rickety card table. When they come to a stop, the man sitting next to him consults a color-coded rectangular card: Pennington has hit a soft grounder back to the mound.

Campy: The Two Lives of Roy Campanella Neil Lanctot Simon & Schuster: 516 pp., $28 He was a three-time National League most valuable player, an eight-time All-Star, and played in five World Series, but Roy Campanella was something else when the Dodgers began playing in Los Angeles in 1958. He was a quadriplegic, his body broken in a tragic automobile accident after the 1957 season. Few Dodgers fans in Los Angeles ever had a chance to fully appreciate the Hall of Fame catcher in action, but Neil Lanctot's rich new biography, "Campy: The Two Lives of Roy Campanella," should change that.

For Laura Hendryx and her sister Marie Goree, it's a memory that crystallizes the happiest times of their childhood: sitting on the floor pounding their father's brand-new baseball mitt, proud to be charged with the task of breaking it in for a big game he was to play the next day.

George Crowe, a former Negro Leagues baseball player who spent nine seasons in the major leagues and was Jackie Robinson's basketball teammate for one season in Los Angeles, has died. He was 89. Crowe died Jan. 18 in Rancho Cordova, Calif., said his daughter, Adrienne. The cause was not given, but Crowe had been in an assisted living home since 2008 after a series of strokes. Crowe, a left-handed batter and first baseman, played for the Boston and Milwaukee Braves, Cincinnati Reds and St. Louis Cardinals from 1952 to 1961.

Meet Earl Robinson for the first time and you soon notice the twinkle in his eye, a ready laugh, a sense of spunk and energy that completely belies his age of 74. A handshake reveals even more. The grip is firm and strong, suggesting the strength of a former athlete. Robinson was a baseball player. A good one. A catcher and an outfielder who swung the bat so proficiently, he was given the nickname "Stick." "I was just gifted," Robinson said from his home in Fullerton.

In all probability, famous Negro League stars such as Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, Cool Papa Bell, Ray Dandridge and Leon Day--all of whom are in baseball's Hall of Fame--never played the game in Orange County. But starting Saturday, some of their memorabilia will be on public display in the Negro Leagues exhibit at the Orange County Sports Hall of Fame, adjacent to Anaheim Stadium, in conjunction with Black History Month.

One has to wonder what Josh Gibson would have thought about Mark McGwire. Today, McGwire is the king of the home run after breaking major league baseball's single-season record of 61, but in the late 1930s, Gibson put up numbers in the Negro leagues that even dwarfed McGwire's. In 1936, nine years after Babe Ruth had hit 60 home runs with the New York Yankees, Gibson hit 84 homers in 170 games for the Pittsburgh Crawfords, according to "The Biographical Encyclopedia of the Negro Leagues."

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.

The voice is spry, the tone impatient, the message clear: At 82, photographer Ernest Withers wants you to know, he is very busy. "I'm hung up on life," he said by telephone from his Memphis studio. "As the old hymn goes, I was meant to work until my day is done." For nearly 60 years, Withers has spent his days and nights producing extraordinary images of the African American experience.

The distinguished gentleman stood in a Beverly Hills hotel lobby, wearing a suit and a baseball cap, sharing his stories late into the evening. He spoke of pride and prejudice. He spoke of Willie Mays and Roberto Clemente. He spoke with humility, not bitterness, about serving a country that denied him the opportunity to pursue his career at the highest levels. He spoke so late into this Saturday evening that he finally excused himself.

Art Pennington hasn't faced Satchel Paige in nearly 60 years, but he's at the plate now, batting from the left side here in the water-damaged basement of a 50-year-old clapboard house. "Oh boy," Pennington says, shaking his head. "I didn't hit him then. I won't hit him now." With that, the former Negro League All-Star rolls red dice across a rickety card table. When they come to a stop, the man sitting next to him consults a color-coded rectangular card: Pennington has hit a soft grounder back to the mound.

How fast could pitcher Leroy "Satchel" Paige hurl a baseball? According to catcher Biz Mackey, a Paige contemporary, Satchel's fastball "tends to disappear. Yes, disappear. I've heard about Satchel throwing pitches that wasn't hit but that never showed up in the catcher's mitt nevertheless. They say the catcher, the umpire and bat boys looked all over for that ball, but it was gone. Now how do you account for that?"

Sherman "Jocko" Maxwell, 100, a pioneering black sportscaster who chronicled the Negro baseball leagues before the sport's racial barrier fell, died Wednesday at a hospital in West Chester, Pa., after battling pneumonia, according to his son, Bruce Maxwell. Supporting himself with a post office job during the day, Maxwell worked at night as a radio sportscaster. He was a prolific writer, submitting stories to the Ledger in Newark, N.J. -- the predecessor of the Star-Ledger -- on games played by the Newark Eagles.

While the nation marveled at Barack Obama's presumptive capture of the Democratic Party's nomination for president last week and measured the country's racial progress against his achievement, the long march toward justice passed another milestone at Disney's Wide World of Sports complex in Florida. Before baseball's annual draft got underway, every team in the major leagues symbolically drafted a surviving member of the Negro Leagues.

"We Are the Ship: The Story of Negro League Baseball" is, ostensibly, a children's book. But author-illustrator Kadir Nelson's text is so engrossing -- and his oil paintings so evocative -- that the rubric is inadequate. Nelson's soulful work about this long-neglected brand of our national pastime deserves -- nay, demands -- an all-ages audience. The title comes from a quote by Negro Leagues founder Rube Foster: "We are the ship; all else the sea."

The distinguished gentleman stood in a Beverly Hills hotel lobby, wearing a suit and a baseball cap, sharing his stories late into the evening. He spoke of pride and prejudice. He spoke of Willie Mays and Roberto Clemente. He spoke with humility, not bitterness, about serving a country that denied him the opportunity to pursue his career at the highest levels. He spoke so late into this Saturday evening that he finally excused himself.

By Sunday, there will be 35 individuals affiliated with the black baseball era enshrined in the baseball Hall of Fame. Buck O'Neil, generally considered the foremost ambassador and a living history of that bygone period, will not be among them. For many who saw O'Neil play well over half a century ago and others who have since seen and listened to his passion for the game, that's an injustice. "I'm a big fan of Buck O'Neil," baseball Commissioner Bud Selig wrote in an e-mail.

Two sisters in Leimert Park put together a small, heartfelt exhibition. Three hundred kids play in a baseball tournament on the Conrad Hilton Field at Martin Luther King Jr. Park. And a summer holiday weekend becomes a warm tribute to a man named Sammie Haynes, a man who died three years ago, a man who was blind in his eyes but who saw with his heart and who always loved the kids, baseball and the old Negro Leagues.

Buck O'Neil, an All-Star first baseman and manager with the Kansas City Monarchs -- one of the storied franchises of black baseball -- who in his later years became a tireless ambassador for the Negro leagues, died Friday at a hospital in Kansas City, Mo. He was 94. O'Neil had been hospitalized in August and again last month for fatigue. No cause of death was given.