“In a fast and exciting game at the Hospital grounds Friday afternoon, the Leland Giants shut out the Hospital ball team by a score of 3 to 0,” reported the Kankakee Democrat on July 20, 1907.
The Chicago-based Giants, a team of talented black players that barnstormed across the Midwest in the early 1900s, played both black and white teams for a share of the gate proceeds. They were very successful, compiling a record of 110-10 (including a 48-game winning streak) in that year.
Although the team came away with a win at Kankakee State Hospital, its player-manager — and future Hall of Famer — Andrew “Rube” Foster had a disappointing outing, going 0 for 3 at the plate and committing two errors.
Two decades later, Foster would return to the state hospital at Kankakee — not as a ballplayer, but as a patient. At the end of the 1926 baseball season, after nearly 30 years as a player, manager and executive (he was founder of the first successful Negro professional baseball league), Rube Foster suffered what was described as a “nervous breakdown” and was committed to the state mental hospital.
Hailed by many as “The Father of Black Baseball,” Foster was born on Sept. 17, 1879, in Calvert, Texas. By the time he was in his late teens, he had grown to an imposing 6 foot, 4 inch height, and developed impressive skills as a pitcher. He debuted with the Fort Worth Yellow Jackets in 1897 at the age of 18; six years later, pitching for the Philadelphia-based Cuban X-Giants he won a total of 58 games, including a string of 44 straight victories.
It was while playing for the Philadelphia team that he acquired his “Rube” nickname: in an exhibition game against the Philadelphia Athletics (a white professional team), he resoundingly outpitched the Athletics’ ace, “Rube” Waddell. Fans began calling him “the black Rube,” and the nickname stuck.
In the late 1800s and early 1900s, independent teams like the Leland Giants provided the only opportunities for African-Americans to play organized baseball. Although some black athletes played on mostly white teams in the early days of baseball, noted an article on the National Baseball Hall of Fame website, “By the turn of the 20th century, unwritten rules and ‘gentleman’s agreements’ between owners had effectively shut black ballplayers out of big league competition.” The professional baseball “color line” was not crossed until 1947, when Jackie Robinson, former shortstop of the all-black Kansas City Monarchs, took the field as a member of the Brooklyn Dodgers.
While the independent teams provided African-American athletes the opportunity to play baseball, the players’ income was uncertain and working conditions (travel on decrepit buses and accommodation in segregated hotels) were less than ideal. The teams depended upon shared gate receipts (which could vary wildly) for income. As a result, expenses — including player salaries and travel arrangements — were kept to the minimum. Scheduling of games was also uncertain, since a team might abruptly cancel a scheduled game in order to play an opponent who would draw more fans (and thus higher gate receipts).
“Rube” Foster believed that he had a solution to the problem: forming a professional black baseball league to “create a profession that would equal the earning capacity of any other profession.” He observed that “The wild, reckless scramble under the guise of baseball is keeping us down, and we will always be the underdog until we can successfully employ the methods that have brought success to the great powers that be in baseball of the present era: organization.”
He put his words into practice in February 1920, when he convened a meeting of African-American team owners in Kansas City, Missouri. The result of that two-day meeting was the Negro National League, which consisted of teams in Chicago, Detroit, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, St. Louis, Kansas City, and Dayton (Ohio). The league was a success, bringing financial and organizational stability to the formerly independent teams.
Foster’s team (renamed in 1911 as the Chicago American Giants) dominated the league, winning five pennants between 1920 and 1927. Playing in Chicago’s South Side Park, former home of the White Sox, the Giants’ games drew large crowds (200,000 in the 1921 season). In 1926 and 1927, the team won the Negro World Series, which pitted the National Negro League champion against the champions of what was called the Eastern Colored League.
When the Giants began Series play in October 1926, Manager “Rube” Foster wasn’t in the dugout. In early September, he was committed to Kankakee State Hospital after an incident in his Chicago home. His wife told authorities that he “had been under the delusion lately that a world series baseball contest was in progress and that he was needed to pitch.” Foster became violent and attempted to stab a man with an ice pick.
He spent four years as a patient at the hospital, dying there on Dec. 9, 1930. Reporting on his Dec. 14 funeral, the Chicago Tribune noted that “Foster was buried as he lived — the hero of thousands on the south side. The auditorium [of the church] was packed, while outside 3,000 stood in the snow and rain.”
In 1981, a half-century after his death, Andrew “Rube” Foster was voted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame. Although he had been the most dominant pitcher of his time, he was inducted in the Hall of Fame for his career as a manager.
Trivia:
Kankakee State Hospital, where Rube Foster spent the final years of his life, has had three different names during its 139 years of existence. What was its original name, and what name is it known by today?
Answer: The facility, which eventually grew to be the second-largest mental hospital in the United States, opened in 1880 as the Illinois Eastern Hospital for the Insane. Thirty years later, in 1910, it was renamed Kankakee State Hospital. In 1975, it became a facility for developmentally disabled adults and was renamed Shapiro Developmental Center in honor of former Illinois Gov. Samuel Shapiro of Kankakee.