Baseball is famously known as America’s favorite pastime. First established in 1876, it took only a few years for it to reach Greenwood.
Greenwood historian Donny Whitehead grew up a big baseball fan, rooting for the Brooklyn Dodgers in the 1950s. He has collected photos and memorabilia and developed a strong knowledge of how baseball began in Greenwood in the early 1900s.
In 1952, the last year of minor league existence in Greenwood, Whitehead was 6 years old. “I never went to a ballgame. I just had to pick up and read papers.”
One of his favorite topics is Greenwood’s minor league history, which is complex and detailed with a lot of stops and starts. Minor league baseball teams functioned in the past much as they do today, as a way for the much larger teams in Major League Baseball to scout and prepare players to play for them.
“(Greenwood) always had baseball, but it was all semipro,” he said. “Which means, it could be somebody who plays for money before and somebody who hasn’t. It’s just a bunch of guys.”
The roots of Greenwood’s involvement in minor league baseball began in 1904, when the Cotton States League was established. The CSL had five iterations in its history.
Greenwood’s first team was a semipro team called the Greenwood Independent Team in 1908 and 1909. “In 1910, they joined the Cotton States League and had professional ball, Class D, which is the lowest minor league there was,” Whitehead said. In minor league baseball, all players are professional. Greenwood won the league’s pennant that year over Jackson’s team. The ballpark was located near the 1700 block of Strong Avenue.
That minor league team lasted until 1912. In 1920, semipro baseball returned to Greenwood with the Greenwood Indians. In 1921, the league became professional again, joining the Mississippi States League for a reason Whitehead is not sure of, before returning to the Cotton States League for the 1922 and 1923 seasons. The ballpark for that team was on South Boulevard.
After that, another gap. Professional baseball was absent from Greenwood for 11 years, until 1934.
That year, the Shreveport Sports, a minor league team in Shreveport, Louisiana, had a good team but were struggling for some reason. Whitehead suspects it could have been due to a lack of fan support.
“I think they had a group from the American Legion, and the Chamber of Commerce went to Shreveport and got the team transferred to Greenwood,” he said. “They had to talk to the Detroit Tigers, who were the major league team of which Shreveport was a farm team, and also the president of the league. They got them in Greenwood for just half a year.”
That presented an interesting scenario: What would the team be named now that it was no longer in Shreveport?
“They went off to Clarksdale and played a three-game series as the Greenwood Baseball Team, and I’ve seen it in another thing as the Greenwood Sports,” Whitehead said. “When they came back to Greenwood to play the first home game, in the meantime, they had a contest to name the team. They took the field in Greenwood as the Greenwood Sports, but before the first pitch was thrown, they were the Greenwood Chiefs. They had two names that day.”
After renting a ballpark that was used by teams with Black players for 1934, a new ballpark was built in 1935 on Carrollton Avenue, where Supreme Electronics is located today.
The team experienced a variety of name changes. They were the Chiefs, then the Giants for the 1936-37 seasons, then the Dodgers in 1938. They then became known as the Crackers in 1939, followed by the Choctaws in 1940. These changes were all due to whatever team the Greenwood minor leaguers were contracted to at the time.
Whitehead said he once had a funny conversation with Ed Amelung, who played for the Crackers in 1939. “He said he was playing first base and had a foul ball over, and he had leaned over into the boxes to catch it and dropped it. He said an old man sitting there said, ‘A good first baseman would have had that.’ He responded, ‘A good first basemen wouldn’t be playing in this league.’”
Amelung had 23 triples that season, which Whitehead notes is a Cotton States League record that will never be broken “because there is no more Cotton States League.”
Minor league baseball disappeared once again due to World War II until being established a final time in 1947 with a six-year contract with the Brooklyn Dodgers. It was that year that the Greenwood Dodgers won the Cotton States League Championship.
After 1952, the contract ended, and Greenwood never again had a minor league team.
“The Dodgers had four farm teams, and they were cutting them back,” Whitehead said. “They kept one in Great Falls, Montana, because they drew over 100,000 fans that year, which was pretty good. They kept another one in Santa Barbara, California. That was a strategic spot. After the 1957 season, (owner) Branch Rickey moved the Brooklyn Dodgers out to Los Angeles. Maybe he was getting ready for that, and he knew something no one else did.”
Whitehead has identified a number of players who made their mark on minor league baseball in Greenwood.
- Johnny Forizs played in the Greenwood Dodgers’ final year in 1952. He was the Cotton States League Rookie of the Year and had 202 strikeouts.
- Jim Bivin managed the Greenwood Dodgers in 1949. Bivin was the final pitcher faced by Babe Ruth in 1935.
- Sherry Smith was a pitcher for the Greenwood Scouts in 1911. He would pitch in the 1916 World Series for the Brooklyn Robins against the Boston Red Sox led by Babe Ruth. Smith pitched 14 innings in a loss in Game 2. The Robins would lose the series to the Red Sox 4-1.
- Walter Alston’s first professional baseball experience was with the Greenwood Chiefs in 1935. He only played one year of professional baseball, for the St. Louis Cardinals in 1936, but made his name as a manager. He managed the Brooklyn/Los Angeles Dodgers to four World Series championships (1955, 1959, 1963, 1965) and was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame.
- Former Leflore County Tax Assessor Bob Salveson played for the Greenwood Dodgers in 1938.
- Clay Hopper, manager of the Greenwood Chiefs in 1935, was not a major league player but was a highly successful minor league manager with nearly 2,000 wins. He managed eight players who were inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame, including Jackie Robinson in 1946.
- Labe Dean set a Cotton States League record in 1948 with a 1.34 earned run average (ERA).
- Carl Tumlinson, who played for the 1951 Greenwood Dodgers, was drafted into the military in 1952 and killed during the Korean War in 1953. Whitehead said that there was speculation Tumlinson’s talent would lead him to succeed Hall of Fame shortstop Harold “Pee Wee” Reese for Brooklyn.
- Danny McDevitt, who played for the 1952 Greenwood Dodgers, went on to pitch the final game at Ebbets Field, the home field for the Brooklyn Dodgers, in 1957 before they moved to Los Angeles.
- This article first appeared in Leflore Illustrated, a quarterly magazine published by The Greenwood Commonwealth.
