From miner to majors

Sporting News, The, June 30, 1997 by Dave Kindred

Of the segregation that kept baseball white, the grand old man Piper Davis said, "Wasn't the game's fault." Of his years in the Negro Leagues, trapped in a parallel universe, he said, "Wasn't no crusading." Asked how he could have placed no blame and felt no need to right obvious wrongs, Piper Davis said, "We looked to play ball, is all. We knew what we could do."

There it is, truth stronger than fact.

If white folks didn't want to let Piper Davis play baseball with them, their actions said more about them than about him, their loss. "Fun, is what we had," he said.

Piper Davis' death last month at 79 is reason to ask: Did anybody ever enjoy baseball more?

The last time I saw him, eight years ago, memories of base hits a half-century old moved him to glorious laughter. "Praise the Lord," he said, "baseball got me out of the mines and into the sunlight."

His father was a miner for the Piper Coal Company. They lived in the company town, piper, south of Birmingham. The town is not on Alabama's map today because it disappeared when there was no more blessed/cursed coal to be scratched out by men lowered into the earth at the end of a rope.

A lucky man could make a dollar a day in the mines during the Depression of the 1930s. So, as his father had done, Lorenzo Davis me a miner because he had to. An unlucky man could be killed by a cave-in or by fire or by gases.

In three months, Davis quit. "I was afraid," he said. Besides, there was baseball to play.

An infielder with speed and power, he left home at 19 to play in Nebraska and soon became a Negro American League star alongside Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson and Cool Papa Bell. "Hit everywhere from .275 up," Davis said. "Be a million-dollar ballplayer today."

Instead, he made $350 a month as one of the hundreds of Negro Leaguers who loved the same game white folks did and played it in an America divided into black and white by law and custom.

Jim Crow laws said black people couldn't eat in some places, couldn't drink water from some public fountains, couldn't sleep in some buildings. Baseball's segregation, not a matter of law, may have been made of the sterner stuff of hide-bound custom. Davis fought no civil- rights fights. He only wanted to play for the Birmingham Black Barons, identified by the adjective to separate them from the city's Barons in that other universe.

"Wasn't nothing the white Barons did, we couldn't do," Davis said. "We outdrew 'em playing in the same ballpark. We'd have a few whites come to see us, couple hundred a night. They appreciated good ball."

During World War II, Davis even played basketball for the Harlem Globetrotters, two games a day for $300 a month with $2 a day meal money and another dollar if you would fide the bus all night rather than sleep in a hotel. "The business manager of the Black Barons was also the manager of the Globetrotters, Abe Saperstein," he said. "I was in the biggest black cafe in Birmingham, Bob's Savoy Cafe. The owner, Bob Williams, told Saperstein, `This boy Davis can play basketball, too.'"

In 1950, three years after Jackie Robinson joined the Dodgers, Davis entered the white man's leagues, signing with the Red Sox's organization. Then 32, Davis reported to a Class A team where for a month he led the team in hitting, home runs, runs batted in and stolen bases. "The deal was, if I was with the organization after May 15, certain things would happen," Davis said, meaning a pay raise and promotion. "On May 15, they handed me my paycheck for $500 and said the general manager wanted to see me. I figured I'd be moving up to Triple-A. But he said, "We got to let you go.' I said, `For what man?' `Economical conditions,' is all he said."

Maybe it was money, maybe race. The Red Sox were infamous for making decisions based on both. Piper Davis said only, "Too old, I guess."

But he was not too old to play another seven years, six in Class AAA ball. One of his managers along the way, the Hall of Fame hitter Mel Ott, once used Davis at all nine positions in a game and afterward said, "Piper Davis is the best all-around player I ever saw."

Nice words, but Davis knew better. "I'd seen Willie Mays," he said.

As Player/manager of the Black Barons in 1948, Davis had heard of the teenager Willie Mays, whose father, so quick he was known as Kitty Kat, had been an industrial-league star in Birmingham.

"Willie was 17, thereabouts, 11th grade in school," Davis said. "I had the Black Barons up to Chattanooga. I had a fella pick up ballplayers and bring 'em to the game. So I see this li'l ol' boy out of high school and I say to him, `Don't you know if they catch you out here playing ball for money, they won't let you play high school ball no more?' "And Willie says, `I don't care.' "So I called Kat, and Kat says if Willie wants to play, let him play. I let him play the second game of a doubleheader out in left field. My center fielder could out-run Willie, but he couldn't out-throw him.

"Next day, I put the lineup up in the dugout, and I got Willie in center field. I'm out on the field, and I can see the fellas in the dugout saying, `What's wrong with Piper, putting that li'l ol' boy out in center field?'