Yakiman Recalls His Negro Leagues Baseball Days

YAKIMA - Sanford Barnes knew he was good. Really good.

In one season, he hit 30 home runs and had a .300 batting average.

He was bold, daring, fast on his feet - just like other men in his league.

Baseball to them was about hitting home runs. Or getting to first, then stealing second.

None of that base-to-base kind of thing, no way. These men played with their own aggressive style. And they played with speed.

But off the field, things were different for men like Barnes. They traveled hundreds of miles to play a game and lived in motor homes or cheap motels the whole time. Most made little or no money. They entered restaurants through the back door.

In Yakima, they played at the Davis High School field but were forced afterward to walk to the jail to take a shower.

Meanwhile, headlines in the Yakima Morning Herald crudely announced their victories: "Negro Nine Massacres Tribe."

Such was the life of a player in the Negro Leagues.

In his Yakima home, Barnes, 82, has few mementos of his baseball days: a trophy from 1936, a handful of photos, replicas of his old uniforms.

"I could have played major-league baseball if I had been allowed to," he said after some reflection. "Lots of black men were good enough. But what were we supposed to do? Blacks didn't have much of a chance back then."

A tall man with silver sideburns and sleepy brown eyes, Barnes' eclectic surroundings include portraits of his family, baseball hats and a photo of Ken Griffey Jr. framed and hung on his recreation-room wall.

Barnes was among the hundreds of black men systematically excluded from the major leagues. By playing in the Negro Leagues, Barnes and others like him not only paved a path for future black players, they also became symbols of pride to the black community.

His brief career in the leagues started in 1935, when he left Alcorn A&M University in Port Gibson, Miss., to earn college money.

He begged his parents to let him go, he said. "Back then, you didn't tell your parents what you wanted to do, you had to ask," he said. Reluctantly, they gave him their blessing. So off he went to Alton, Ill., to play for a team called the Giant Collegiates.

"Fun while it lasted"

It was a dream come true for the 22-year-old, who spent most of his young life working on his family's 200-acre farm in a small, rural Mississippi town called Collins.

He started playing baseball when he was big enough to throw, he said. And even though people kept telling him he was good, he didn't think he would be that good.

After one season with the Collegiates, Barnes was picked to play on an all-star black team: the St. Louis Blues.

The group of 13 young men traveled all over the country for two seasons until the team went broke the summer of 1936. They played against other black teams, but also against local white teams, some with offseason players from the major leagues.

It was fun while it lasted, said Barnes, the team's first baseman.

They traveled and practiced during the week and played on weekends. In every town, posters announced upcoming games.

And the bleachers were always packed, not just by blacks proud of the players, but also by the same people who asked them to use the back door at their businesses or refused them service.

"They didn't like us, but they wanted to be entertained," he said.

Audiences in Yakima weren't any different.

It was June 30, 1936, and the Blues played against the Yakima Indians.

They beat them 14-3.

An account of the game was reported in the Yakima Morning Herald: "As good as the Detroit Giants were bad, the St. Louis Blues from the Piney Woods school in Louisiana Tuesday night made the Yakima Indians, Northwest League leaders, mighty disconsolate as they proceeded to pin a 14 to 3 defeat on the tribe before 1,800 cheering fans in the high school park."

The Blues, described as "a crack Negro team," were expected to win.

But they also had to. A black team, the Detroit Giants, had played in Yakima two weeks before and had "put up a poor exhibition," the paper reported, making fans "somewhat leery of Negro nines."

When the Blues went broke later that year, Barnes returned to Yakima.

He doesn't really know why, he said, but he stayed. He worked odd jobs cleaning furnaces and scrubbing floors.

He also was turned down for a lot of jobs.

"Back then, they could just tell you that because of your color, they can't hire you," he said. "At restaurants, they could refuse to serve you. If you wanted to buy a suit, you couldn't try it on at the store."

He wasn't allowed to play baseball, either.

When a new Yakima team, the Pippens, formed in 1938, Barnes told the manager about his experience and asked if he could play. The response was expected: "Sorry, but blacks can't play with whites. I have nothing against it, but they won't allow it."

Paved way for future

Things improved with time. In 1943, he and his friends opened a restaurant on Front Street called "Three Boys Cafe." Black soldiers in town had nowhere else to go, he said. The restaurant closed in 1950.

Barnes, who retired 23 years ago after working 17 years at Yakima's Tahoma Cemetery, isn't bitter because he never played in the major leagues. He's lived a good life, he said, with many blessings: Hattie, his wife of 54 years; two children and nine grandchildren; numerous trips all over the world.

But, like many black men at the time, he will always wonder what could have happened if he would have had the chance.

"I wasn't angry," Barnes said. "We just weren't allowed. But we kept playing because we wanted to play. We also knew we were paving the way for black men in the future."