The Canadian all-Black All-Stars went all the way in 1934.
On a cool October day in 1934, two baseball teams met in Guelph to decide the Ontario championship. The teams, one from Chatham, a farming community in the province’s southwest, and one from Penetanguishene, on the shore of Georgian Bay, had each won a game on the road. Guelph’s Exhibition Park was chosen for the third and deciding game as it was midway between the two towns.
Phil Marchildon, who would go onto a Major League Baseball career that spanned 10 seasons, took the mound for the Penetanguishene Foundrymen. The Chatham All-Stars responded with earl “Flat” Chase, whose talent on the field lived up to his exceptionally good baseball name.
It was a tight game, but the All-Stars edged ahead 3-2 in the 11th inning. A leadoff strikeout in the bottom of the 11th put Chatham two outs away from the title.
And then something unusual happened. Here’s how a headline described it in the Chatham Daily News: “Chatham Ahead When Game Was Halted by Darkness.” And, below that: “Stars were leading 3-2 when hostilities were halted and score reverted”.
The umpire crew called the game off and declared it a tie. A fourth game would be played the following day. That’s unusual enough on its own, especially when the new game meant that Chatham’s lead had been erased. But the other thing about the postponement is that it was still just late afternoon. Chatham insisted that there was still plenty of light left.
And here’s the other thing about that Chatham team: They were in fact the Chatham Coloured All-Stars. The manager had dropped the adjective from their team name when they took part in the provincial championships, thinking they might be denied entry. The players were black.
“It would not have been dark out yet,” says Samantha Meredith, executive-director of the Chatham-Kent Black Historical Society. “No way, at 4:30 in the afternoon, would it have been dark outside in October.”
This is the story of a baseball team that is part of Canada’s sporting past, but one that is not widely known. They played for that provincial championship almost 15 years before Jackie Robinson broke the colour barrier in Major League Baseball. They were labourers, at a time when they might work at Chatham’s William Pitt Hotel, but would not be allowed to use the main entrance. Some of them were descendants of slaves, as Chatham had been an important terminus on the underground railroad before and during the U.S. Civil War. These baseball players were making history long before anyone had conceived of Black History Month.
I learned of the Chatham All-Stars, a team somewhat lost to history, from someone I hadn’t seen in almost 30 years, which seems fitting. Brock Greenhalgh was my first-year residence adviser at Wilfrid Laurier University in 1992, which meant he lived on our floor and was responsible for making a bunch of idiots act slightly less like idiots, to varying degrees of success.
Greenhalgh is from Chatham, and the All-Stars were a story that he had long wanted to give its due. He had recently written and published a children’s book about the team. Did I want to have a look?
And that’s how, amid this bloody pandemic in which seeing friends has been exceedingly difficult, I ended up having a long talk with someone who for a brief time was an outsized character in my life, the Guy Who Knew Things.
Greenhalgh is a teacher now in Kitchener-Waterloo, but as a summer job in 1989, he worked at a museum in Chatham, where he came across a picture of the Chatham Coloured All-Stars on the wall. “I do the math in my head,” Greenhalgh says, “I’m, like, ‘this is 1934, this is, more than a decade before Jackie Robinson. So, why isn’t this a bigger story?.’” He ended up doing a project for the museum that summer, and later a radio documentary, but the idea of a broader retelling stuck with him. This was a travelling team of black men, organized by a local businessman who recognized how good they were at the sport, playing at a time of tremendous bigotry. Opponents would slide into bases with their cleats deliberately up in the air, Greenhalgh says. Racist abuse from the stands was common.
“There were times where teams wouldn’t come out on the field because they weren’t going to play these guys,” Greenhalgh says. “In a lot of these towns, once the game was done, they were going to get out of town because they weren’t welcome in the town.” Some of these places had “No Coloureds After dark” rules. “Those were the kinds of things that these guys were used to dealing with,” Greenhalgh says.
“I always think of them as, not only did they have to overcome their opponents on the baseball diamond, they had to overcome so much on the road,” says Meredith of the Black Historical Society. “When they were travelling across Ontario to play these games, if they tried to go to a restaurant in the town, they’d be told, ‘you can’t eat here. You can pick up your food at the back door.’ Or if they needed to stay at a hotel, it would be, ‘No, black people can’t stay here’.” Segregation was a way of life, as was the case in Chatham, where at one point a third of the population was black. “They might work at the hotel, might even run the entire hotel,” Meredith says, “but they weren’t allowed to eat in the dining room.”
And so, when that championship game was called off in the 11th inning? It wasn’t Archie Stirling, the businessman behind the All-Stars, fought the postponement on that October afternoon, but the umpires stuck to their call. Greenhalgh notes that Stirling was successful on one count: he was able to get the baseball association to replace the crew for the fourth game. “A whole new crew was brought in from Hamilton,” he says. The game would end up somewhat anticlimactic. In a move that would cause today’s medical trainers to shudder, Marchildon returned to the pitching mound, despite throwing a day earlier. Chatham would score 12 runs in the first three innings. Chase did not start the game, but took over pitching duties after just three batters, since each reached base. Penetang scored four runs in the first, but Chase went on to pitch a full nine innings, which seems impossible but is what the record says. The 137 victory was the first such championship for a team of black athletes. “Without the usual blaring, the mad back-patting and whoops to high heaven, Chatham has finished out a baseball season,” said a column in the next day’s Chatham Daily News, under the headline “The Whole Hog Brought Home.” Writer Jack Calder continued: “And for once we ride the crest. Let there be no trace of stinting to our celebration.”
For a moment, at least, the Chatham Coloured All-Stars were embraced as equals.
The team would remain in action for several years. Fergie Jenkins, Sr., whose son would go on to a Hall of Fame career in the majors, joined the following season. The All-stars won another provincial title in 1939, and then the group was broken up as war in europe loomed.
Interest in the team’s story has picked up in recent years, Meredith says. The town’s sports hall of fame is trying to have a plaque installed to commemorate the team at a Chatham diamond named for Jenkins. The Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame, which did not induct a class of 2021 due to the pandemic, says the Chatham All-stars will be on the ballot for the next round of voting. And Sons of Kent, a local craft brewery, has released a Chatham All-Stars Pale Ale this month, with a portion of the proceeds supporting the historical society. “Their story is a really cool part of our history,” says Colin Chrysler of Sons of Kent. Athletic Field, where the All-Stars played, was not far from where the brewery sits today.
Greenhalgh’s book, Hard Road to Victory: The Chatham All-Stars Story, was published in the fall. He hopes the team is part of the next class at Canada’s baseball Hall of Fame.
For the last word, back to the florid prose of Jack Calder. The All-stars, he wrote, “like to win their games the hard way. They’ll throw the ball down the mouths of the hostile fans and make them like it. Chatham’s champions, those up and down Stars, who fortunately are better uppers than downers.”