LOVERRO: Negro Leagues’ Leonard, Gibson delivered titles to District as the Grays’ dynamic duo

OPINION:

On those championship Homestead Grays Negro League squads of the 1930s and 1940s, Walter “Buck” Leonard was much more than just another teammate playing in the shadow of Josh Gibson — the legendary slugger who took over first place on the career batting average list when Major League Baseball finally incorporated Negro League records earlier this year.

Like Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, Gibson and Leonard were the legendary one-two punch in the lineup of the Grays, the Negro League team that for years called Washington’s Griffith Stadium home.

In fact, while Gibson was often called the “Black Babe Ruth,” Leonard was routinely referred to as the “Black Lou Gehrig.”

Leonard, who was 5-foot-10 and 190 pounds, told The New York Times he patterned his play after Gehrig.

Together, Gibson and Leonard were known as the “Thunder Twins,” and the duo led the Grays to nine consecutive Negro National League championships from 1937 to 1945, their prime years in the District (Leonard, like Gibson, is a member of the Washington Nationals Ring of Honor).

Leonard, like some of his most revered Negro League counterparts, created some thunder again in May when MLB recognized the Negro League statistics, a decision that changed the record books forever and etched Leonard’s name among the all-time greats of the game.

Leonard’s .345 career batting average placed him eighth in baseball history. His .452 on-base percentage put him fifth among the leaders. The left-handed hitter wound up seventh on the all-time OPS list with a 1.042 mark.

Twenty-five years after Jackie Robinson broke MLB’s color barrier, Leonard was inducted into Cooperstown in 1972 — the second Negro League player elected.

But his accomplishments — he was an 11-time Negro League All-Star — in the record books now quantify the greatness of Leonard, who almost quit the game before he started.

Born in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, in 1907, Leonard, told an interviewer he nearly gave up trying to play organized baseball before he broke into the Negro League.

“I was 25 when I got there,” he said. “I had almost given up baseball. I had gotten too old to play semipro ball. I could always hit, and that was the reason I got up there. But I learned to field when I got there. And I played winter ball, which helped.”

He would go on to become one of the greatest fielding first basemen of all time. He broke in with the Brooklyn Royal Giants in 1933 and then signed with the Grays in 1934, where he became one of the voices of authority on that historic squad.

In his autobiography, “My Life in the Negro Leagues,” Grays pitcher Wilmer Fields cited Leonard as one of the Grays leaders.

“There was no playing around in the dugout of the Homestead Grays,” Fields wrote. “Players such as Buck Leonard and Sam Bankhead saw to that. … I can sincerely say that I was brought up the right way both at home and then with the Grays. Buck Leonard always reminded me what I needed to do to have a successful inning. He was a true Hall of Famer.”

Leonard’s name had been mentioned as a possible candidate to break MLB’s color line. Wendell Smith of the Pittsburgh Courier wrote in 1939 that Leonard and Gibson had been promised tryouts with the Pittsburgh Pirates by owner Bill Benswanger, but there was a dispute over whether Grays owner Cum Posey stopped the tryouts or if Benswanger truly intended to do it.

Leonard also received a tentative offer from Washington Senators owner Clark Griffith in 1943, but like the other offers, nothing ever materialized. 

In a 1995 interview with Sports Collectors Digest, Leonard spoke of the supposed tryout with the Senators. “We didn’t ever know what happened,” he said.

“He asked us if we would like to play in the major leagues and we told him yes. He asked us if we thought we could make the major leagues and we told him we were trying. He told us we would hear from him, but we didn’t hear from him again. Later Bill Veeck asked me to try out. I told him, ‘No, I can’t try out. I’m too old now.’ I was in my 40s.”

In the Holway interview, Leonard spoke of the prejudice that kept him from playing in the major leagues: “I never thought about race prejudice much. I felt, regardless of what color you were, if you could play baseball, you ought to be allowed to play anywhere that you could play. I thought integration would come, but I didn’t think it would come like it did, as quickly. I thought they were still going to keep pushing it back. Even when they took (Jackie) Robinson, I said, ‘If he doesn’t make it, they’re going to be through with us for the next 5 or 10 years. But if he does make it, maybe they are going to keep him in the minors for a long time. But we were wrong.

“I can’t understand how we could have gone about protesting,” Leonard said. “We didn’t have time to demonstrate. We were playing every day, so to speak. We were satisfied. We were doing what we liked to do, what we loved, and getting a little pay. I don’t know anything we could have done to speed it up.”

Leonard, who died in 1997 at the age of 90, recognized that once the color line was broken, that was the end of the Negro Leagues.

“It started dropping off in 1949, and in 1950 attendance was so poor that the Homestead Grays got out of the Negro National League and got into a league in Greensboro and Raleigh,” he said. “I don’t know what the name of the league was. It was just in North Carolina. We decided we would get out of the Negro National League and go south because we could make more money. We had lost most of our ballplayers to White teams, and all the young players that didn’t make the majors went to the minor leagues. We just couldn’t compete.”

• This is the latest in an occasional series of columns spotlighting Negro League ballplayers added to the Major League Baseball record books earlier this year. Catch Thom Loverro on The Kevin Sheehan Show podcast.