S1E3: Early Baseball Era Committee - Candidates from the Negro Major Leagues with Scott Simkus

Building the Ballot: The Baseball Hall of Fame’s Era Committees

This Winter, the Early Baseball Era Committee will meet to vote on ten candidates for the Baseball Hall of Fame. This committee covers all of baseball before 1950. The ballot will consider players from the White major leagues and the Black major leagues as well as pioneers, managers, umpires, and executives. How will the committee distill over 100 years of baseball into just ten names? To complicate matters, this committee won’t meet again for ten years.

This episode covers the Negro major leagues as well as top Black players and pioneers before the establishment of the Negro National League in 1920. Scott Simkus from the Seamheads Negro League Database (and author of “Outsider Baseball: The Weird World of Hardball on the Fringe, 1876–1950”) joins the podcast. We started with how box scores are added to the Seamheads Negro Leagues Database and moved on to a history of Negro League players in the Hall of Fame. We then covered dozens of candidates, from Buck O’Neil to Dobie Moore to Grant “Home Run” Johnson.

Scott Simkus on Twitter: http://twitter.com/scott_simkus

Outsider Baseball: The Weird World of Hardball on the Fringe, 1876–1950: https://www.amazon.com/Outsider-Baseball-Weird-Hardball-Fringe/dp/1613748167