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Man recalls his playing days

Opened museum to showcase history of league

YOUNGSTOWN — During his professional baseball playing days, W. James “Jim” Cobbin was able to cover considerable ground in center field — even though his travels were unfairly restricted in other ways.

“I was like the Ohio Highway Patrol out there,” remembered Cobbin, who played in the Negro Leagues from 1956 to 1959, including time in Germany.

During the first two years of his career, the Montgomery, Ala., native hit 38 home runs and stole 49 bases. He also had a .317 lifetime batting average.

Cobbin, president and chief executive officer of Inner City Transit LLC, spoke last week at the W.J. Cobbin Office Tower, 1350 Fifth Ave., on the North Side, about his playing days.

This month also marks the 100th anniversary of the Negro Leagues’ formation. Today, only about 50 of the estimated 4,000 Negro League players are living, he said.

After arriving in Brunswick, Ga., for spring training with the Pittsburgh Pirates in the mid-1950s, where he began as a shortstop, separate and unequal treatment for blacks reared its head. Cobbin had to stay at the home of a local sharecropper because the segregated hotel at which his bus had arrived didn’t accept blacks, he remembered.

He and the other black players also had to enter the stadium through a rear gate to take batting practice, at which time they were met with silence from fans before games. Nevertheless, it wasn’t long before “they threw the ball to us, and we hit it. We beat the hell out of the ball,” recalled Cobbin, who also served in the U.S. Army.

The blacks who traveled especially through the Deep South usually faced discrimination in restaurants and other public accommodations, said Cobbin, who recalled having food handed to him from the back door of a restaurant while on a bus. In addition, those who were subjected to various forms of degradation and racism handled such treatment with dignity and courage, he said.

While in Brunswick in 1956, a representative with the New York Black Yankees offered Cobbin a contract, which resulted in him traveling to Tampa, Fla., for spring training and starting his career in the Negro Leagues, said Cobbin, who made $165 per month and also played for the Indianapolis Clowns.

“They had all the talent, but no money,” he added.

In the Negro Leagues’ 40-year history, many teams folded because of a lack of money and other reasons, Cobbin noted.

Besides the Black Yankees and the Clowns, 10 of the other main sustaining Negro League teams were the Cleveland Buckeyes, Chicago American Giants, Kansas City Monarchs, New York Cubans, Birmingham Black Barons, Memphis Red Sox, Philadelphia Stars, Newark Eagles, Baltimore Elite Giants and the Pittsburgh-based Homestead Grays.

The racial climate in baseball mirrored that of a large segment of society in which blacks and whites were largely kept separate.

“That paralleled the Negro Leagues exactly. There were two Major Leagues: one black, one white and unequal,” largely because the Negro Leagues had little money and often had to pay rent to play at the Polo Grounds in New York City and other white ballparks, he noted.

Nevertheless, interest in the Negro Leagues did catch on, with often full stands and many white ballplayers being exposed to the talents of players such as Leroy “Satchell” Paige, who began his professional career in 1926 in the Negro Leagues with the Birmingham Black Barons. The famous fastball pitcher was in his early 40s when named Major League Baseball’s Rookie of the Year in 1948, when he helped the Cleveland Indians win the World Series while going 6-1 with a 2.48 ERA.

Even though Jackie Robinson famously broke the color barrier in 1947, integration also resulted in the eventual demise of the Negro Leagues because Major League Baseball was absorbing the likes of Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Roy Campanella and other star black players.

“The Major Leagues were taking the cream of the crop from the Negro Leagues. That was the beginning of the demise of the Negro Leagues,” Cobbin noted.

Even though his playing days are long over, mementos of that time fill the museum the longtime businessman opened about 15 years ago in his office complex. They include two oil paintings of Cobbin by the late Youngstown artist Alfred L. “Al” Bright, one of which shows him stealing second base; a copy of the Indianapolis Clowns’ roster on which Cobbin is listed as a utility player; a copy of the Brent Kelley book “The Negro Leagues Revisited” that has a chapter on Cobbin; and the uniform he wore while playing in a World Series in 1959 in Germany.

Perhaps one of Cobbin’s most endearing items, though, is a copy of a poem his 14-year-old daughter, Erica, wrote in December 1998 titled “If a Man Has Talent.”

The piece reads in part, “If a man has talent, and a drive to win, does it matter what color skin he’s in? … Exclusion is an illusion, fooling the world by trying to hide my dark face. Only inclusion can expose delusion, telling the world that I, too, belong in this place.”

news@tribtoday.com

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