Johnny ‘Schoolboy’ Taylor should have a ballfield
Johnny “Schoolboy” Taylor isn’t as well-known as some other Hartford luminaries.
Mark Twain and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s houses are museums, and Wallace Stevens has markers noting his walk to work. Other famous Hartford residents have things named after them — Samuel Colt has a notable park. Preacher Horace Bushnell has a park too, along with a performing arts center. Former Hartford Mayor Ann Uccello has a street, as does Bob Steele. Former Mayor Thurman
Milner has a school, former governor and Senator Abraham Ribicoff has a courthouse. Even middling poet Lydia Sigourney has a street. There are many more.
But “Schoolboy” Taylor has been overlooked until now, and it’s been an oversight. The Hartford community should fully support a move to name a baseball field in Colt Park — now rather inelegantly known as “Field 9” — after the Hartford baseball player who once beat the great Satchel Paige with a no-hitter.
Johnny Taylor started playing baseball professionally in Hartford in the 1930s and could have — should have — been in the major leagues, had it not been for the fact that he was black.
“He’s probably the most worthy figure in
Hartford’s baseball history,” Weston Ulbrich, secretary of the 91-year-old Greater Hartford Twilight Baseball League, told The Courant’s Rebecca Lurye. The Twilight League, where “Schoolboy” got his start, has been leading the effort to get the field named after Mr. Taylor.
He pitched while he was a student at Bulkeley High School, and at Colt Park in his final high school game, he set the state record for strikeouts in a nine-inning game.
Mr. Taylor’s talents were enough to draw the attention of a New York Yankees scout. But after learning that the light-skinned Mr. Taylor was black, the scout tried to convince him to pretend he was Cuban. Mr. Taylor was having none of it.
Mr. Taylor joined the New York Cubans in the Negro League in 1935. A highlight of his career came in 1937 at the Polo Grounds in New York, where in front of some 22,000 fans, Mr. Taylor threw a no-hitter. The other team was the Negro League All Stars, and its pitcher was the legendary Satchel Paige.
Mr. Taylor then played ball in the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Mexico and elsewhere, in the company of other black ballplayers who were shut out of the major leagues.
But he always thought major league baseball would be integrated. In the 1930s, he told a reporter, “[Integration] may not come in my career as a pitcher, but I’m sure it will come. Baseball shows signs of needing tonic, and it’s my frank opinion that the Negro will be just the tonic needed.”
Hartford could use a tonic too, and while naming a baseball field after a man is a humble gesture, it is meaningful. The organizers of the effort need only 100 signatures of city residents to get the deal done, and we hope that happens without a hitch. The city council and mayor should proceed with due haste as soon as the 100th signature is collected.
The city recently notched another victory in the fight to make progress in the Downtown North development. Perhaps officials could find ways to honor other unheralded members of the Hartford community — especially its communities of color — within that development and acknowledge their contributions to the city.