First black team a big hit

Workers at a Babylon hotel step up to the plate to become unofficial champs

BY JOHN JEANSONNE | Newsday Staff Writer

January 16, 2007

The first U.S. black pro baseball team was composed of Argyle Hotel employees. Their sponsor billed them as Cubans because he thought whites would not go to see blacks play. (Town of Babylon historian)

Babylon's Argyle Hotel was a white elephant. It was built too late; the area's booming resort-hotel era was coming to an end near the turn of the century. It was built too big; its 350 rooms and 14 cottages never were more than one-third occupied. Within the Argyle's short 22-year existence, it was sold, boarded up for almost a decade and finally razed in 1904.

But as a diamond in baseball's historical rough, the Argyle endures forever. It was from its staff of waiters and porters that America's first black professional baseball team was formed in 1885. It was on the Argyle grounds where that team, originally called the Athletics of Babylon, so dominated local white teams that a white New Jersey promoter bankrolled them as the "Cuban Giants" and sent them on the road to become the Harlem Globetrotters of their time and their sport.

From Argyle headwaiter Frank Thompson's first team, which won all 10 of its games against white Long Island clubs that first summer, came the "world colored champions" of 1887 and 1888: Among them, George Parago, Ben Holmes (Homes, in some records), Shep Trusty, Arthur Thomas, Clarence Williams, Frank Miller, Billy Whyte (or White), George Williams, Abe Harrison, Ben Boyd, Jack Fry, and a man whose last name, Allen, is all that survives in the sketchy records of the time.

Not a Cuban among them. But Trenton businessman Walter Cook devised the Cuban Giants tag based on racial realities of the day; it was believed that white crowds would sooner pay to see Latinos than blacks play ball, so players were instructed to "bound onto the field chirping pidgin Espanol and cackling loudly, in a gross parody of everybody's idea of how Hispanics acted," according to Mark Ribowsky's 1995 "Complete History of the Negro Leagues."

He wrote that, in spite of "reams of attention in the press . . . it takes a leap of the imagination to believe that anyone who came to see them perform was really conned" by the Cuban ploy. And plenty went to see them play. According to Jules Tygiel, a historian of black baseball, the Cuban Giants toured the East in a private railroad car, consistently drawing sellout crowds, and were so financially and artistically successful that they spawned a handful of imitators in the 1890s: the Lincoln Giants from Nebraska, the Page Fence Giants from Michigan and the Cuban X Giants in New York.

Pitchers for the Cuban Giants earned $18 a week, infielders $15, outfielders $12 - salaries equivalent to what those men were paid for their hotel jobs.

It is not clear, based on incomplete accounts at the time, whether the team originated as an after-hours diversion for the black Argyle employees, or as part of the hotel's planned amusement for white vacationers.

At the time, Babylon was just beyond the crest of its resort era, which had been sparked by the arrival of the Long Island Rail Road in 1867. First as the gateway to Fire Island's hotels and beaches - the words "Fire Island" were written as large as "Babylon" at the original Babylon station - the village began to accommodate the stream of summer visitors from New York City with the construction of more than a dozen hotels.

The Argyle was the last of these hotels, funded by a syndicate headed by LIRR president Austin Corbin and built on the former estate of Brooklyn railroad magnate Electus B. Litchfield. Litchfield's sprawling property, called Blythebourne, included a large mill pond that would become Argyle Lake, and took on its new name because the group of hotel investors included the son of the Duke of Argyll.

At that time, base ball (two words, then) had gone from recreational activity to America's No. 1 spectator sport. The Aug. 22, 1885, edition of Babylon's South Side Signal reported that a game on the Argyle grounds, between the National Club of Farmingdale and the Athletics of Babylon, was won by "the employees at the Argyle Hotel," 29 to 1.

Some accounts say the team then "went professional" under a white promoter named John F. Lang, who arranged an exhibition against the New York Metropolitans of the big league American Association. The Metropolitans won, 11-3, but the Argyle workers soon topped Eastern League champion Bridgeport, apparently the event that caught promoter Cook's eye.

Within two years, the non-Cuban Cubans "had attained a level of notoriety that gave them the right to pick and choose which white teams they would play," Ribowsky wrote. In 1888, the black Indianapolis Freeman newspaper reported, "The Cuban Giants, that famous base ball club, have defeated the New Yorks, four games out of five, and are now virtually champions of the world. The St. Louis Browns, Detroits and Chicagos, afflicted with Negro phobia and unable to bear the odium of being beaten by colored men, refused to accept the challenge."

Art Rust Jr., in his history of the black man in baseball, wrote that the Cuban Giants had the best black pitcher (Trusty) and best long-ball hitter (Sol White) of the 1880s, and White later wrote in his own history of black baseball that the Cuban Giants "were heralded everywhere as marvels of the baseball world."

By 1897, the Cuban Giants began to be done in by their legacy: Among the black teams that imitated them, the come-lately rival Cuban X Giants beat the Cuban Giants two of three games in a publicized showdown and, losing their control and identity, the Cuban Giants began calling themselves the Genuine Cuban Giants. Their impact further dwindled with the creation of more-formal leagues.

But their inheritance has carried on, from Jackie Robinson's entry into the big leagues in 1947, to today's general - if slow - integration of professional sports.

In modern-day Babylon Village, lumber from the old Argyle Hotel exists in several of the homes built on the former hotel grounds, just as the Cuban Giants live on in the big-league timber of every current black player.