Continuing Look at Negro Leagues HOF Eligibles
The Hall of Fame cases of Vic Harris and John Donaldson
Pregame Pepper
Leading Off
Two Negro Leaguers for the Classic Baseball Era Committee’s Consideration
The cases for Vic Harris and John Donaldson.
By W.H. Johnson
Unlike other entries in this series, this installment features summaries of the two players that qualified for the Classic Baseball Era Committee ballot in 2024, Vic Harris and John Donaldson. Their careers still deserve attention, though, because they absolutely must be considered again for inclusion on the next ballot.
Their biographies are summarized for context with regard to the other names that will be offered in this series as well. As suggested earlier, there is a solid case to be made for conducting a second Negro Leagues election for the Hall and allow the Classic Era ballot to exclusively consider the gamut of players who arrived after 1947.
From the 2024 ballot summary provided by the Hall of Fame:
Vic Harris played 18 seasons in the Negro Leagues, primarily as a left fielder for the legendary Homestead Grays. He compiled a .303 career batting average and was known as one of the most aggressive base runners in the Negro National League. Harris also managed the Grays for 11 seasons, winning seven Negro National League pennants and the 1948 World Series.
The summary is accurate but necessarily incomplete. Such is the nature of summaries. In the case of Harris, though, the precis misses the heart of the competitor and does not fully address the ‘why’ for his candidacy.
His remarkable run as an active player included several years in which he recorded more than 200 NNL plate appearances [winnowing out any counter-claims of inferior opposition while barnstorming]. In those seasons, he batted .359, .336, .333, and .327, and failed to reach the .270 mark only once.
In 1927 and 1937, a full decade apart, Harris recorded OPS marks of .949 and .943, and OPS+ values of 147 and 141, respectively. In his prime, he was clearly one of the finest offensive threats in baseball. And those numbers don’t even tip a figurative cap to the two years he lost during World War II due to his work in a defense-related manufacturing plant.
As a manager, though, Harris was better. Seamheads.com credits him with a [league only] record of 631-319 and the associated .664 winning percentage. His eight pennants are twice any other manager in the Negro Leagues, and no one managed more East-West All-Star squads.
Overall, as player and manager, he was a member of 25 championship teams. He is Hall-of-Fame worthy.
Also from the Hall:
John Donaldson pitched in the Negro Leagues and pre-Negro Leagues for more than 30 years, earning a reputation as one of the best pitchers in the game. Also playing the outfield and managing, Donaldson helped establish the barnstorming business model that was profitable for Black teams for decades.
One of the biggest barriers to Donaldson’s Hall of Fame candidacy is that, while he was perhaps the finest pitcher of his time [in any league], he spent his prime playing in the days before the formation of the Negro National League in 1920.
Donaldson was named to the first team of the Pittsburgh Courier’s 1952 list of greatest Negro League players, but without the actual statistical evidence, he has not garnered the necessary votes for enshrinement in Cooperstown. As such, his career has been difficult to reduce to a spreadsheet.
Pete Gorton, proprietor of a website dedicated solely to shaping and collecting the available information on Donaldson [old news accounts, box scores, anecdotes and the like], has unearthed evidence of over 400 pitching wins and over 5000 strikeouts. He also, reputedly, threw at least fourteen no-hitters during his career.
Many of those numbers accrued against inferior opposition, but in 1915 no less than Hall of Fame manager John McGraw told a reporter, “If Donaldson were a white man or if the unwritten law of baseball didn’t bar Negroes from the major leagues, I would give $50,000 for him and think I was getting a bargain.”
As mentioned earlier, one of Donaldson’s great contributions was in establishing barnstorming credibly across the North American continent. He played with teams as far west as Vancouver, Canada, and Los Angeles, as far north as Canada’s Yukon territory, all throughout the midwestern United States, and as far east as the established environs of Philadelphia and New York.
He pitched for over 40 years, and after he retired from the diamond was signed by the Chicago White Sox in 1949 as their first Black scout. His case for the Hall is unique, but his contributions helped shaped the development and spread of baseball throughout the 20th century.
As Jay Jaffe wrote for Fangraphs in 2024:
To these eyes the weight of the evidence and the assessments of his peers and historians suggest that he’s worthy of enshrinement on the basis of his pioneering, in helping to lay the groundwork as a barnstormer . . . Donaldson’s path was a singular one, and appreciating his accomplishments in the midst of the hardships he faced requires grasping a breadth that goes beyond just the performance data. He left a huge mark upon the game, one that his contemporaries grasped long before the rest of the baseball world.
Vic Harris and John Donaldson both qualified for the Classic Baseball Era Committee ballot last year, and both clearly deserved the consideration. Along with the others in this series, both should qualify for that ballot again in 2027. Both are well worthy of the Hall of Fame.
Bill Johnson has contributed nearly fifty essays to SABR’s Biography Project, and presented papers at the 2011 Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American Culture, the 2017 and 2023 Jerry Malloy Negro League Conferences, and the inaugural Southern Negro League Conference. He has published a biography of Hal Trosky (McFarland and Co., 2017) and an article about Negro American League All-Star Art “Superman” Pennington in the journal Black Ball. He is on ‘X’: @menckensmemory.
Extra Innings: What They Said . . .
I am not ashamed of my color. There is no woman whom I love more than my mother, I am light enough so that baseball men told me before I became known that I could be passed off as a Cuban. One prominent baseball man in fact offered me a nice sum [$10,000 in 1917] if I would go to Cuba, change my name and let him take me into this country as a Cuban. It would have meant renouncing my family. One of the agreements was that I was never again to visit my mother or to have anything to do with colored people. I refused. I am clean morally and physically. I go to my church and contribute my share. I keep my body and mind clean. And yet when I go out there to play baseball it is not unusual to hear some fan cry out: ‘Hit the dirty n*****.’ That hurts. For I have no recourse. I am getting paid, I suppose, to take that. But why should fans become personal? If I act the part of a gentleman, am I not entitled to a little respect?
—John Donaldson, Ironwood (Michigan) Daily Globe, 10 June 1932.
Harris had good speed and was a capable base stealer and feared base runner who thought the basepaths belonged to him. A slashing scrapper, he played to win, and his zealous hustle and aggressiveness often went beyond the bounds of reckless abandon, earning him the sobriquet “Vicious Vic” and the reputation as one of the “four big, bad men of black baseball.” He was good with his fists and quick to use them. Once when the team was traveling by automobile and a player in the car that he was driving engaged in verbal comments that Harris found offensive, he stopped the car, pulled the player from the car, and physically whipped him on the spot. Considered by many to be a dirty ballplayer, on another occasion, while engaged in an argument with an umpire, he spit in the arbiter’s face.
In many ways his behavior toward umpires was in contrast to the generally quiet approach he used with his players, never saying too much and preferring to inspire them by example to give their maximum effort. Although he was not noted as a brilliant strategist, the players responded to the fiery manger by giving good performances on the baseball diamond.
—James A. Riley, in The Biographical Encyclopedia of Black Baseball. (Carrol & Graf, 1994.)
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HERE’S THE PITCH is published daily except Sundays and holidays. Benjamin Chase [gopherben@gmail.com] handles the Monday issue with Dan Freedman [dfreedman@lionsgate.com] editing Tuesday and Jeff Kallman [easyace1955@outlook.com] at the helm Wednesday and Thursday. Original editor Dan Schlossberg [ballauthor@gmail.com], does the weekend editions on Friday and Saturday. Former editor Elizabeth Muratore [nymfan97@gmail.com] is now co-director [with Benjamin Chase and Jonathan Becker] of the Internet Baseball Writers Association of America, which publishes this newsletter and the annual ACTA book of the same name. Readers are encouraged to contribute comments, articles, and letters to the editor. HtP reserves the right to edit for brevity, clarity, and good taste.