The History of Black Baseball Players, on Full Display

Octavius Catto’s impact was mostly unknown here at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, amid the sport’s heroic feats of lore and legend, like Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hit streak, Ted Williams’s .406 batting average and Hank Aaron’s 715th home run to break Babe Ruth’s record.

Catto, born a free Black man, turned to baseball in the shadows of the Civil War. He was a founder of Philadelphia’s all-Black Pythian Base Ball Club, which included Frederick Douglass’s son, Charles. (They lost their first game, 70-15, but improved quickly.) The Pythians applied for and were denied entry into Pennsylvania’s association of amateur baseball and the National Association of Base Ball Players.

The story of Catto, who was also a civil rights activist before his 1871 assassination, is among many that the museum is showcasing in its new exhibit “The Souls of the Game: Voices of Black Baseball.”

“It has been documented that we’ve been playing baseball going back to the period of being enslaved,” said Bob Kendrick, the president of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, Mo., and a member of the exhibit’s advisory committee. “Baseball has always been an important part of the African American experience in this country. It’s just the fact that it wasn’t documented in the pages of American history books.”