Author: Ken Clawson
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1945 Florida State Negro Baseball League
League Re-forms – Final Regular Season Standings W L Pct Orlando All-Stars 16 3 .843 Daytona Beach Black Cats 13 4 .765 Bradenton Nine Devils 15 6 .714 West Palm Beach Black Yankees 11 7 .611 Lakeland Tigers 12 9 .571 Tampa American All-Stars 5 15 .250 Bartow Polk County All-Stars 4 15 .215…
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Coffee Pot Ballpark, Part 3
The Browns are coming! The first article in the Coffee Pot series was intended to mark the beginning of the piece. Circumstances took me back a bit in history and I found some fascinating information relating to St. Pete’s quest for Spring Training baseball. This information comes primarily from the archives of the St. Petersburg…
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Coffee Pot Ballpark Part 4
Deciding on a Location Back in the winter of 2024 the chapter decided to pursue a project of putting together a trolley tour of the spring training sites that existed in Pinellas County. First, we would need to do some research. SABR’s Spring Training Research Committee seemed like a good place to start. The committee…
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Coffee Pot Ballpark, Part 2
Late 1912 The first article in the Coffee Pot series was intended to mark the beginning of the piece. Circumstances took me back a bit in history and I found some fascinating information relating to St. Pete’s quest for Spring Training baseball. This information comes primarily from the archives of the St. Petersburg Daily Times…
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Two I Played With
I played baseball at Murrah High School in Jackson, Ms. If the name Murrah rings a bell maybe you read the novel or watched the movie The Help. The title character graduated from Murrah. Kathryn Stockett, the author of The Help graduated from Murrahten years after I did. Obviously very intelligent, she also graduated from…
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Sisler Field
A Pictorial Guide Nestled in the Southern end of the Tarpon Springs community is the little league complex. It sprung out of a gender gesture. The city recruited the St. Louis Browns back to Pinellas County in 1925. (The Browns, for their part, brought hall of famer George Sisler to town as the player/manager and…
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Coffee Pot Ballpark Part 1
St. Pete Needs Quality Baseball The first article in the Coffee Pot series was intended to mark the beginning of the piece. Circumstances took me back a bit in history and I found some fascinating information relating to St. Pete’s quest for Spring Training baseball. This information comes primarily from the archives of the St.…
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Origins of the Florida State Negro Baseball League (FSNBL)
The Florida State Negro Baseball League was the top tier of negro baseball in Florida in terms of play and producing talent for higher level teams, particularly the Negro major leagues. It was founded, disintegrated and reformed over the time period from 1932 until around 1953 after which while the league still existed it lost…
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Chronicler of Negro Baseball in Florida
E. H. “Eugene” or “Gene McLin” This article uses the term “Negro” in order to stay consistent with the times and with McLin’s own words. Little is known of “Negro Baseball” of any kind in Florida. Due to a dearth of Negro newspapers in Florida there was seldom coverage of negro happenings that did not…
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“Fast Baseball”
A term from the early years In researching the early days of baseball in St. Pete, two “must haves” were made clear; a downtown ballpark and fast baseball. I saw the term “fast baseball” from 1902 and into the 20’s, so I Googled. All of those searches included AI-generated ones talked about a hard pitch…