Willie Wells: "El Diablo" of the Negro Leagues

By Bob Luke and Monte Irvin

The first complete biography of an important Negro League baseball player from Austin, Texas.

Willie Wells was arguably the best shortstop of his generation. As Monte Irvin, a teammate and fellow Hall of Fame player, writes in his foreword, “Wells really could do it all. He was one of the slickest fielding shortstops ever to come along. He had speed on the bases. He hit with power and consistency. He was among the most durable players I’ve ever known.” Yet few people have heard of the feisty ballplayer nicknamed “El Diablo.” Willie Wells was black, and he played long before Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier. Bob Luke has sifted through the spotty statistics, interviewed Negro League players and historians, and combed the yellowed letters and newspaper accounts of Wells’s life to draw the most complete portrait yet of an important baseball player.

Wells’s baseball career lasted thirty years and included seasons in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Mexico, and Canada. He played against white all-stars as well as Negro League greats Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, and Buck O’Neill, among others. He was beaned so many times that he became the first modern player to wear a batting helmet.

As an older player and coach, he mentored some of the first black major leaguers, including Jackie Robinson and Don Newcombe. Willie Wells truly deserved his induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame, but Bob Luke details how the lingering effects of segregation hindered black players, including those better known than Wells, long after the policy officially ended. Fortunately, Willie Wells had the talent and tenacity to take on anything—from segregation to inside fastballs—life threw at him. No wonder he needed a helmet.

“Willie Wells: “El Diablo” of the Negro Leagues is well researched and well written, so the average baseball fan should find it to be an entertaining read.” —Dale Petroskey, president, National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum 

“The story of Willie Wells opens another window on the conditions and constraints of Jim Crow America, and how painfully difficult it can be, even now, to remedy the persistent effects of discrimination. Every baseball fan will love this story. Every American should read it.” —Ira Glasser, executive director, American Civil Liberties Union, 1978-2001

“Reconstructing, indeed resurrecting, the career of a peripatetic Negro League baseball player is a daunting task. Negro and Major League great Monte Irvin tells us that his fellow Hall of Famer, shortstop Willie Wells, belongs on the same baseball page as Gibson, DiMaggio, Paige, and Feller. This fine biography by Bob Luke does a wonderful job in telling us why and how that is the case. We have here a Hall of Fame telling of the story of a true Hall of Famer.” —Lawrence Hogan, author of Shades of Glory: The Negro Leagues and the Story of African American Baseball

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jan 1, 2010
• ISBN: 9780292778269

Book preview

WILLIE WELLS

El Diablo of the Negro Leagues

BOB LUKE

Foreword by Monte Irvin

Copyright © 2007 by Bob Luke

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

First edition, 2007

Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to:

Permissions

University of Texas Press

P.O. Box 7819

Austin, TX 78713-7819

utpress.utexas.edu/index.php/rp-form

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

ISBN 978-0-292-79498-6 (library e-book); ISBN 9780292794986 (individual e-book)

Luke, Bob.

Willie Wells : El Diablo of the Negro Leagues / Bob Luke ; foreword by Monte Irvin. —

1st ed.

    p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-292-71674-2 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-292-71751-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)

I. Wells, Willie. 2. Baseball players—United States—Biography. 3. African American baseball players—Biography. 4. Negro leagues. I. Title.

GV865.W4385 2007

796.357092—dc22

[B]

2007006103

For Judy, Jennifer, Rex, Max, Allyson, and Dylan

Contents

Foreword by Monte Irvin

Baseball has been good to me for seventy years. I played with and against some of the greatest players in the history of the game—Josh Gibson, Joe DiMaggio, Satchel Paige, Bob Feller, Mule Suttles, Willie Mays, Ted Williams, Ray Dandridge, Mickey Mantle, Leon Day, Hank Aaron, Jackie Robinson, Larry Doby, Frank Robinson, and Martin Dihigo, to name only a few. Willie Wells belongs in that group, but you don’t often hear his name. That’s why I’m pleased that Bob Luke decided to tell Wells’s story.

I knew Wells. I played with him as a member of the Newark Eagles, one of the Negro league’s most prominent teams. I visited him while I was playing with the New York Giants, and he was working in a deli in the Wall Street section of New York City. We went to the fiftieth major-league all-star game in Chicago together in 1983.

Wells really could do it all. He was one of the slickest fielding shortstops ever to come along. He had speed on the bases. He hit with power and consistency. He was among the most durable players I’ve ever known. He was still winning games with home runs as a player-manager in Canada at the age of forty-seven.

He was smart. He was known as the Shakespeare of Shortstops. He knew where most balls would be hit before the pitch was thrown. He understood the game better than most and knew how to teach the fine points of the game to others, including myself. He was generous with his knowledge. He’d talk baseball to anyone—teammate, opponent, young kid—anywhere: on the field, in hotel rooms and lobbies, on those long bus rides, in the dugout and the clubhouse. He even invented the first modern-day batting helmet.

Like many Negro-league superstars who were too old for the majors when the color line was broken, Wells wasn’t recognized by white society until too late. He wasn’t inducted into the Hall of Fame until 1997, eight years after his death and forty-three years after he retired. I was honored to be elected to the Hall of Fame, and I was equally honored to join with other members of the Hall of Fame’s Veterans Committee to elect Willie Wells.

Luke discusses how the first Negro leaguers were inducted into the Hall between 1971 and 1977. It’s hard to overstate the importance of this bit of baseball history to organized baseball and the Negro leagues and their players. It was the death knell of the mind-set that the best of black players were not as good as the best of white players. I am proud to have played a part in that history as chairman of the Hall’s Negro Leagues Committee during its existence, from 1971–1977.

Wells, like so many black stars of his era, did not find fame and riches awaiting him at retirement—quite the opposite. Few whites in his hometown of Austin, Texas, had heard of him. He was in poor health and getting by on Social Security during the last years of his life. And while he kept saying he didn’t mind the lack of recognition, he would have been gratified to know that citizens of Austin did, after his death, honor him with a special day, designate his home as a historic building, write a play about him, and rebury him in Texas’s most prestigious cemetery.

This book is another fitting tribute to Wells. I recommend it to you.

Preface

Have you heard of Willie Wells? His is not a household name, even among most baseball buffs. I first heard about him at a baseball-memorabilia auction in 1999. A letter he had written to his brother was for sale. I bought it. I was on a mission to collect an autograph of every member of the National Baseball Hall of Fame. I would not have known he was in the Hall of Fame had the fact not been mentioned in the listing. I was not alone. His anonymity qualified him for inclusion in David Fleitz’s book Ghosts in the Gallery at Cooperstown: Sixteen Little-Known Members of the Hall of Fame.

He wrote the letter on September 26, 1972, from his apartment on West 110th Street in New York City, where he was working in a deli at the corner of Liberty and Nassau streets. In the letter, he asks about the health of his brother and his brother’s wife. He says he is sending his papers so I hope you enjoy the things your Bro did for our family. He adds, I get letters from all over the world. He asks his brother to make copies of the papers, and when you are finished, send them back to me because they mean so much to me. He closes with They are going to put me in the Hall of Fame. I sent you both letters I got from them. I had to go up there last month.

He was right about the Hall of Fame, though his enshrinement wouldn’t come until twenty-five years later. I didn’t find a record of the two letters he referred to, though they may have been questionnaires that were sent at the time by the Hall’s historian, Cliff Kachline, to all living Negro league players.

Willie Wells’s 1972 letter to his brother in which Wells predicts that he is going to be in the Hall of Fame. Courtesy of the author.

The deli no longer exists. Linda Ricci, a spokesperson for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which is located on Liberty Street between Nassau and William streets, said in an April 2006 interview with me, following her inspection of the area around the intersection, that there is no delicatessen at Nassau and Liberty. In a sign of the changing times, she did note there is a Starbucks at the intersection.

It is not just anyone who knows he is going to be immortalized at Cooperstown and who gets letters from all over the world. The letter piqued my interest to find out more about him. I called the Hall of Fame and learned that he was being reburied that day, October 10, 2004, from Austin’s Evergreen Cemetery to the Texas State Cemetery—the final resting place of the state’s founders, Civil War officers, and other famous Texans. Jason Walker answered my call to the cemetery and told me that Texas governor Rick Perry, Austin mayor Will Wynn, and former Negro league stars Buck O’Neil, John Mule Miles, and Bill Blair would be among those in attendance. Walker suggested I call Gary Roberts, an Austin resident who had researched Wells’s career. Roberts was eager to share what he knew and went out of his way to assist me in identifying people to interview who had known Wells. Tape recorder and legal pad in hand, I left for a week of interviews and library research in Austin in November 2004.

WHY THIS BOOK

It is time for this star to shine brighter. Willie Wells’s career in the Negro leagues and in professional baseball in Cuba, Puerto Rico, California, Mexico, and Canada spanned thirty years—1924 to 1954. The color barrier kept him out of the majors, where he could have played for many years. He is not as well known as other Negro-league stars in the Hall, such as Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, and Buck Leonard, to say nothing of major-league Hall of Fame shortstops such as Phil Rizzuto, Ernie Banks, and Pee Wee Reese. Wells’s story adds to what we know about the greats of the Negro leagues.

HOW I WROTE THE BOOK

Negro-league historians James Riley and John Holway have presented the most extensive discussions to date of Wells’s life and career. Both relied heavily on their interviews with Wells, which provide candid insights into his career and life and, in the process, do a great service to baseball history by preserving Wells’s own words.

To introduce as much oral history as possible into this book, I have drawn on interviews that Wells gave to historians and reporters and on letters that he wrote. It is one thing to say that Wells helped develop several Negro-league players into major leaguers and was a master at spotting baseball talent. It is another to listen in on the conversations between Wells and Don Newcombe during spring training as Wells imposes a regimen on the youthful, impatient, talented pitcher; or to read the correspondence between Wells and Effa Manley, co-owner and business manager of the Newark Eagles, as they swap ideas on trades, players, and scheduling strategy through the mail while planning the Eagles’ fortunes for the 1942 season.

However, oral histories have their limitations. Memories fade. Those being interviewed like to present themselves in the best light. To enlarge upon, corroborate, and, in some instances, correct the information from interviews with Wells, I conducted interviews with players and others who knew Wells both as a player and as a person. I also consulted numerous books and articles as well as newspapers from both the black and white presses.

Acknowledgments

A joy of book writing is to meet people with similar interests, who often generously provide assistance and support. I was fortunate to have the help of many such people.

Paul Dickson has been a continued source of guidance, information, and friendship through the various stages of this book. I spent several pleasant hours with Monte Irvin hearing about Wells’s days with the Newark Eagles and Irvin’s and others’ successful efforts to induct Wells and other Negro leaguers into the Hall of Fame. Irvin read an earlier draft and wrote the foreword. I had the pleasure of having breakfast with Bob Feller while he talked about his barnstorming days with Satchel Paige and other Negro leaguers. I was fortunate to talk with former players who shared stories about Wells from on and off the field. They are Al Burrows, Bill Ready Cash, Frank Evans, Stanley Doc Glenn, John Mule Miles, Jessie Mitchell, James Red Moore, Sonny Randall, Joe Scott, Robert Williams, Artie Wilson, Mickey Vernon, and Jim Zipper Zapp.

I learned a great deal from the writings of Negro-league historians Dick Clark, John Holway (who commented on an earlier draft), Larry Lester, James Riley, Donn Rogosin, and Mark Rucker. Holway, Riley, Rucker, and Jay Sanford provided several hard-to-find photographs. My copy of James Riley’s Biographical Encyclopedia of the Negro Baseball Leagues, with its wealth of information about players, including their nicknames, is now truly a used book. Bill Cochran made available copies of letters Wells had written to his mother. Kit Krieger identified the years that Wells played in Cuba. Barry Swanton provided information covering Wells’s stint in the ManDak League in Winnipeg, Canada. David Brewer supplied information about Wells’s days with the Birmingham Black Barons. Richard Raichelson researched back copies of the Memphis World for information on Wells’s stay with the Memphis Red Sox. Dave Zang tracked down a hard-to-find article by Donn Rogosin. Rogosin himself related several of his encounters with Wells.

Many from Wells’s hometown of Austin, Texas, pitched in, including Betty Baker, Danny Bingham, Kirk Bohls, Ray Day Galloway, Mary Jane and Tom Langford, Ralph Lee, Lawrence Olsen, the late J. J. Pickle, Rob Ryland, Sarah Ruiz, Mark Swanson, Danny Roy Young, Jason Walker, and Tommy Wyatt. Margaret Schlankey, photo curator at the Austin History Center, provided several photographs of Wells. I owe a special note of thanks to Gary Roberts, who read and commented on an earlier draft.

Edward Stack, former chairman of the board of directors of the Hall of Fame, Dale Petroskey, president of the Hall of Fame, and board member John H. McHale provided information about the nature and history of the induction process. Freddy Berowski, Claudette Burke, Jim Gates, Jeff Idelson, Pat Kelly, and Tim Wiles—all also at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum—provided information about Wells, the Veterans Committee, and several photographs. Ira Glasser, longtime national executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, helped me see the bigger picture of the dynamics at play during the history of the Hall of Fame induction processes for Negro leaguers. Hall of Famer Bobby Doerr recalled Ted Williams’s commitment to giving Negro leaguers their place in Cooperstown. Bowie Kuhn, former commissioner of Major League Baseball, described how his office and the Hall started the process of inducting Negro leaguers.

Dave Kelly at the Library of Congress was generous with his knowledge of the Negro leagues and his skill at finding books and articles. Raymond Doswell, curator of the Negro Leagues Museum, provided helpful guidance. Rex Bradley, former vice president for professional and amateur sports at the Louisville Slugger Company found orders for bats placed by Wells.

Susan Beal, once again, through her considerable editorial and proofreading skills, improved the flow, organization, and readability of the final manuscript.

My bride, Judith Wentworth, has been a constant source of support and encouragement.

I am deeply indebted to one and all. Any errors and shortcomings in the book are mine alone.

Introduction

Willie Wells was a hell of a ball player in anybody’s league. A consistent .300-plus hitter whose play at shortstop and on the base paths was called peerless, he once beat a team of major leaguers almost single-handedly. In October 1929, Hall of Famers Charlie Gehringer, Heine Manush, and Harry Heilmann led a team of major leaguers against an all-star team of Negro leaguers, called the American Giants, featuring Hall of Famers Wells, Judy Johnson, and Bill Foster. In the eighth inning of the first game, Wells tripled off the right-field fence and scored the winning run moments later with a steal of home. In game two, Wells smashed two triples and again stole home as the Giants prevailed. In the bottom of the ninth in game four with the score tied, Wells came through once more, knocking in Jelly Gardner—the winning run—with a single. The Giants beat the All-Stars four games to one. Among players on both teams with fifteen or more at bats, Wells’s .409 average was second only to Heilmann’s .471. Wells batted .403 the following season and won the Fleet Walker Award that John Holway gave annually to the player he considered the best in each Negro league.¹

WHAT IS HERE

You will find more than baseball here. A friend of mine, after hearing my description of the book, said, I’d never buy a book like that, but I’m sure the baseball junkies will. While you will find a lot here about Wells the player, manager, and coach, be aware that the book is intended to interest readers besides baseball junkies—those who devote themselves to compiling and talking about statistics, pride themselves on having photographic memories for plays on the diamond, and revel in the mechanics of hitting, fielding, and baserunning. You will also find out about Wells as a person, his family, his hometown of Austin, Texas, the segregated conditions under which he played and lived during his nomadic baseball career, and his retirement years in New York City and Austin.

Willie Wells at work, probably late 1930s. Courtesy of the Newark Public Library.

You will follow a teenager as he skips town, against his mother’s wishes, for the travel, low pay, camaraderie, and opportunity to excel that the Negro leagues offered. You will see his skill as a fielder, batter, manager, and baseball strategist; his return to an impoverished civilian life; his struggle with diabetes, glaucoma, and heart problems on a modest Social Security pension—and his dedication to the world of baseball through all of it.

Willie Wells in his later years in Austin. Courtesy of the Texas State Cemetery.

You will get a view of the thirty-five-year controversy that surrounded inducting Negro leaguers, including Wells, into the Hall of Fame.

You will go to the Lone Star State to see citizens of Austin doing our best to attempt to right a wrong, as Danny Roy Young, owner of the Texicalli Grill, put it, by lobbying the Hall of Fame for his induction; writing a play about him; naming Austin’s major thoroughfare, Congress Avenue, after him for the day; and transferring his body to the Texas State Cemetery, also in Austin, with a headstone as prominent as others there. Former congresswoman Barbara Jordan is the only other African American buried in the Texas State Cemetery.

TABLE 1. Time line of Willie Wells’s baseball career

WILLIE WELLS BASEBALL TIME LINE

As an aid to following Wells’s nomadic career, I have constructed a time line (facing page) showing where he played and when. This information came from several sources. His years with the California Winter League (CWL) were taken from William F. McNeil’s California Winter League. Fellow SABR (Society for American Baseball Research) member Kit Krieger researched the line scores and rosters in Raúl Diez Muro’s Historia del Base Ball Profesional de Cuba to document Wells’s play in Cuba. I took the Negro-league team entries from newspaper articles and standard reference books, notably Dick Clark and Larry Lester’s Negro Leagues Book. Wells’s years in Mexico and Puerto Rico were taken from a chronology in his Hall of Fame file. Articles in the Winnipeg Free Press documented his years in Canada.

ONE

He Could Pick It

He could pick it. Oh, yeah, he could really pick it. Little guy, but he could play hard. He could play with anybody.¹

That was John Mule Miles, former third baseman and outfielder for the Chicago American Giants, in his living room in San Antonio, recalling with admiration how Willie Wells scooped up anything hit his way and nailed the runner at first.

Miles was thinking back to the first time he played against Wells. The year was 1948. Miles was twenty-six years old and playing the last of his three seasons for the Giants. Wells, playing third base and coaching for the Memphis Red Sox at the time, was forty-two, and the sun was setting on his career. By this time, Wells had starred for teams in the top echelon of the Negro leagues, as well as in professional leagues in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Mexico, for twenty-four years. He had played on three Negro-league championship teams and had been elected to eight East-West all-star squads.²

Miles said of Wells, He was so good he played for everybody.³ And he almost did play for everybody. He played for three Texas teams, the Austin Black Senators, the Houston Buffaloes, and the San Antonio Black Aces, while still in high school in Austin in 1923–1924.

To say he was well traveled after high school would be an understatement. The future Hall of Famer played for, coached, and managed many Negro-league teams, including the St. Louis Stars,