Andrew “Rube” Foster was an American baseball player, manager, and executive in the Negro leagues. Most notably, he organized the Negro National League on this day in 1920, the first long-lasting professional league for African-American ballplayers which operated from 1920 to 1931. He is known as the “Father of Black Baseball.” Foster was born in Calvert, Texas on September 17, 1879. His father, also named Andrew, was a reverend and elder of the local American Methodist Episcopal Church. Foster started his professional career with the Waco Yellow Jackets, an independent black team, in 1897. Over the next few years he gradually built up a reputation among white and black fans alike, until he was signed by Frank Leland’s Chicago Union Giants, a team in the top ranks of black baseball, in 1902.
According to various accounts, including his own, Foster acquired the nickname “Rube” after defeating star Philadelphia Athletics left-hander Rube Waddell in a postseason exhibition game played sometime between 1902 and 1905. George “Rube” Waddell was a remarkably dominant strikeout pitcher in an era when batters mostly slapped at the ball to get singles. He had an excellent fastball, a sharp-breaking curve, a screwball, and superb control (his strikeout-to-walk ratio was almost 3-to-1). He led the major leagues in strikeouts for six consecutive years. In 1920, Foster, Taylor, and the owners of six other midwestern clubs met to form a professional baseball circuit for African-American teams. With a stable schedule and reasonably solvent opponents, Foster was able to improve receipts at the gate. On May 26, Foster was nearly asphyxiated by a gas leak in Indianapolis. Though he recovered and returned to his team, it has been reported his behavior grew erratic from then on. Over the years “Foster grew increasingly paranoid. Took to carrying a revolver with him everywhere he went. Suffering from serious delusions he was institutionalized at an asylum in Kankakee, Illinois. Foster died in 1930, never having recovered his sanity, and a year later the league he had founded fell apart. Foster was buried at Lincoln Cemetery in Blue Island, Illinois.
In 1981, Foster was elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame and in 2010, the Postal Service issued commemorative postage stamps to honor the all-black professional baseball leagues that operated from 1920 to about 1960. One of the stamps depicts Foster, along with his name and the words “NEGRO LEAGUES BASEBALL”.
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