Negro League Museum
- A duplicate of the Homestead Grays scratchy wool jersey he wore in the 1948 Negro League World Series.
- A candy dish full of valuable, signed baseballs -- yet to be given away or sold.
- Yellowing game programs featuring the Kansas City Monarchs and the Baltimore Black Sox, with names of men who have been gone for decades
- Grainy black-and-white team photos taken at Griffith Stadium some eight decades ago -- autographed by Josh Gibson, Buck Leonard, Luke Easter and other Negro Leagues stars of the day.
And the closer, a flat-out baseball artifact, replete with a written letter in blue ballpoint from Wilmer Sr.
"In '48, I forgot my jacket on a day I pitched against the Birmingham Black Barons," the artifact reads. "I borrowed [Willie} Mays' jacket. At one time the jacket had Mays' name taped to it. After the game I forgot to give it back to him. The jacket has remained in the attic for years..."
After some prodding, Billy brought out the all-black, satiny warm-up that once belonged to the Say Hey Kid. If one can creep any closer to a religious experience in baseball, it would have to be at a ballpark or an Iowa cornfield.
"This was just some of Dad's things -- he has more," Billy said, pulling the framed jacket from the bedroom, pulling out a piece of history we've unintentionally forgotten this week.
Seventy-one years ago, the Washington Homestead Grays won their own National League pennant.
They held off the Baltimore Elites to advance to the last Negro League World Series, where they beat the Black Barons to claim their 10th Negro League title in 12 years. This was before the Major League money became too lucrative for African-American players to thumb their nose at, when baseball began fully integrating -- 15 years after the Washington Senators last played in a World Series.
From the Washington Post to MLB.com, the sport's official website, the year is always reported the same: 1933. And if we're talking strictly the Major Leagues, the answer is correct. These resilient, get-off-the-mat Washington Nationals, who play their first World Series game Tuesday night in Houston, are the first Major League ballclub in D.C. since the '33 Senators to win the pennant.
But if we're talking pro baseball, we're talking Wilmer Fields and the Grays. It's more than semantics or a technicality; it's important -- especially given the segregated world they not only played in but very much lived in.
Wilmer was bi-racial, a fact that actually helped his black teammates in towns that wouldn't serve people of color in the 1940s, even if they were famous people of color, whom tens of thousands cheered for at games.
"He had blue eyes and he was very light-skinned," Billy said. "The story was, he'd go into places where blacks weren't allowed during that time period and buy food for the bus while they were traveling between games. But there was one time when he went into a restaurant to order food and one of the ballplayers wanted him to place more orders for food. So when the ballplayer walked in, the owner of the restaurant looked up and saw the bus that said Grays. And [the owner] told them, 'We don't serve blacks.' "
Gas was 16 cents a gallon. A new home cost less than $8,000. Harry Truman was in the White House. 1948 -- the year that should rightly be championed as the last time this town won a pennant. The Nationals haven't forgotten; they erected a statue of Josh Gibson in the summer of 2009 at Nationals Park along with statues of Frank Howard, their own Sultan of Swat from 1965 to 1971, and Walter "Big Train" Johnson, who pitched the Senators to their only World Series victory in 1924.
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