Our Sunday Long Read comes to us this week from The Score, where Travis Sawchuk and Ray Danner go on a road trip to cover the Depression-era route of Negro League teams, searching for the lost history of the Pittsburgh Crawfords and the box scores of that era.
We traveled east along Lake Erie, on a search for hidden gems. Negro League players followed this same route in the 1930s and 1940s, moving along U.S. Route 20 in buses and caravans of cars until gasoline and rubber rations often forced them onto trains during World War II. The Pittsburgh Crawfords had what was considered at the time to be a luxurious Mack bus. We zipped along I-90 in my old Honda Accord. My friend Ray Danner and I were retracing a small part of their path, searching for their lost history.
Ray waited months for the public library in Erie, Pennsylvania, to reopen when pandemic restrictions eased so he could access its newspaper archive. I was curious about his quest, so I asked to come along on the trip from Cleveland.
Months earlier, Ray listened to Rob Neyer interview Scott Simkus, an author and researcher for Seamheads.com, a site where a small group of hobbyists came together to try to pull off the impossible: find every existing Negro League box score from the top leagues. The result of their work means there are no longer thousands of missing box scores, but hundreds.
On the podcast, Simkus told Neyer they were certain there were missing games in places like Memphis; Zanesville, Ohio; and Erie. The missing puzzle pieces are mostly, now, in towns and cities where Negro League teams played during their lengthy tours. Seamheads was looking for volunteers willing to visit the libraries in these places and search the newspaper archives.
Erie? That's not too far away, Ray thought. He reached out to Simkus.
Ray, a history buff and member of the Society for American Baseball Research, knew Major League Baseball had elevated the best Negro Leagues to major-league status in December. Any box score Ray could unearth would eventually be included in official MLB statistics.
His work would help fill out the historical record at Baseball Reference, the preeminent statistical database, and one of his favorite online research tools. On Tuesday, Baseball Reference unveiled its new Negro League data with major-league status, data it licensed from Seamheads.
This was Ray's second trip to Erie. He recovered four box scores on his first trip and knew there were more to be found. Research like this can be tedious and underappreciated. What was the payoff?
"I like history, so it starts there," he said. "There is just an appeal to things that are forgotten or almost forgotten, and bringing them back to life."
Erie's library is right on the waterfront, not far from where Oliver Hazard Perry built his fleet that defeated the British on the lake in 1813. Ray, who works in the Cleveland aquarium's shark tank, has scuba dived to examine shipwrecks in the lake.
In the library's second-floor Heritage Room, which features paintings of Civil War battles, cabinets of microfilm, and shelves of obscure books, we scanned through the Erie Times-News archive at side-by-side terminals. The resource had been digitized but wasn't accessible outside of this room. Ray had a good idea of where to begin. About a half hour in, he turned to me.
"Oh, look at this," Ray exclaimed. "This is beautiful."
What follows is a gorgeous and heartbreaking story of Black baseball from nearly a century ago, the process of reconstructing the missing box scores of the Negro Leagues and the more than two decades that it represented the sport in ways the major leagues never could. MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred granted seven Negro League teams Major League status last December, based in part on the work of Sawchuk and Danner.
This is the history we need to preserve, and I'm so glad to see we're finally doing it.
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