The Legend of Negro League Star John Donaldson

Tomorrow at the baseball winter meetings in San Diego, Negro Leagues legend John Donaldson will be on the Classic Baseball Era Committee Hall of Fame ballot. Donaldson, a barnstorming left-handed pitcher who reportedly won 428 games in 33 seasons across the USA and Canada, will be considered for a plaque in Cooperstown, New York, along with seven other candidates.

A committee of 16 Hall of Famers, media members, executives, and historians will consider the Hall of Fame cases for Donaldson, Vic Harris (a player-manager in the Negro Leagues), and six players from the 1960s-80s (Dick Allen, Ken Boyer, Luis Tiant, Tommy John, Steve Garvey, and Dave Parker). The 16 committee members are tasked to vote for a maximum of three out of the eight candidates for Cooperstown. A minimum of 75% of the vote (12 out of 16) is required for a player to make the Hall of Fame.

Donaldson was most recently considered three years ago on the “Early Baseball” ballot for the Hall’s Class of 2022. Negro League pioneers Buck O’Neil and Bud Fowler were elected on that ballot. Harris, the longtime player-manager for the Homestead Grays, received 10 votes, finishing two shy of the Hall. Donaldson got 50% of the vote (8 out of 16).

Four years ago, Major League Baseball announced that seven distinct Negro Leagues would be recognized on par with the Major Leagues (primarily the current American and National Leagues). Historical records have been altered to reflect that the statistics accumulated in the Negro Leagues would be just as valid as those in the Major Leagues as we knew them forever.

However, not all Negro Leagues statistics are created equal. The only ones that “count” are from the Negro National League (1920-31), the Eastern Colored League (1923-28), the American Negro League (1929), the East-West League (1932), the Negro Southern League (1932), the Negro National League II (1933-48), and the Negro American League (1937-48).

Most, but not all, of the most famous Negro League stars (Josh Gibson, Oscar Charleston, Cool Papa Bell, Satchel Paige) spent a significant amount of their playing days in the seven recognized leagues. However, Negro League baseball extended far beyond those seven entities. There were independent teams and barnstorming teams.

Donaldson, often called “Famous” because he was the leading box office attraction, was a barnstormer. He has five recognized seasons (from 1920-24, all with the Kansas City Monarchs in the Negro National League) and only is recorded to have pitched in two of them (1920 & 21). Thus, although his reported feats (428 wins, 5,295 strikeouts) leap off the page, the big unknown is the quality of the competition he faced. So it’s hard to compare him to the great Negro League pitchers already enshrined in Cooperstown (Paige, Bullet Rogan, Ray Brown, Andy Cooper, Bill Foster, and others).

Even so, Donaldson was, at the time, recognized as a uniquely spectacular talent. In 1915, future Hall of Fame manager John McGraw was quoted saying, “If Donaldson were a white man … I would give $50,000 for him.” Grover Cleveland Alexander said that he and Paige were the two greatest pitchers he had seen in organized baseball.

After a brief recap of Donaldson’s 33 years on the mound, I’ll tackle his Hall of Fame case.

Cooperstown Cred: John Donaldson (SP)

• Career: pitched in approximately 700 cities and towns in 33 years (1908-1940)
• Career (according to the Donaldson network): 428 wins, 5,295 strikeouts
• Reportedly pitched 14 no-hitters and two perfect games in his career.

John Donaldson: Career Highlights

John Wesley Donaldson was born on February 20, 1891, in Glasgow, Missouri. The village, located on the bluffs above the Missouri River in central Missouri, was identified as “Southern” during the Civil War. Lynch mobs murdered seventeen black men within 75 miles of Glasgow before Donaldson turned 20.

According to the John Donaldson website, the young lefty won his first game at the age of 17. He pitched sporadically from 1908-10, earning the first five of his reported 428 victories.

Donaldson’s professional career started in earnest 1911, pitching for Brown’s Tennessee Minstrels, who were often referred to as the Rats. Traveling through Iowa and Minnesota, the Rats’ record for the year was reportedly 184-17, with Donaldson going 44-3, with the young southpaw earning raves for his fastball and “slants” (his curveball).

According to Brian Flaspohler in the SABR Bio about Donaldson, Donaldson’s peak prowess was from 1912 through 1917. He pitched for a team called “All Nations,” put together by Hall of Famer J.L. Wilkinson.

“In 1911 and 1912, he is referred to by the press as the world’s best colored pitcher. Later in this period, the press begins to call him the world’s greatest pitcher. The statistics he amassed were nothing short of amazing. In both 1913 and 1914 he pitched 100 consecutive shutout innings. In 1915 he pitched 30 consecutive innings of no-hit ball. He has 2,332 verified strikeouts for those years. He pitched every third game and played the outfield the other games. He pitched seven of his 11 documented no hitters between 1912 and 1917. In short, he was absolutely amazing. Unfortunately, there was no league for him to play in.”

— Brian Flaspohler, SABR Bio about Donaldson

Wilkinson pulled the plug on All Nations in 1917, but Donaldson took over as the manager of the team and kept them on the road barnstorming throughout the Midwest. Donaldson also pitched in the winter of 1917 with the Los Angeles White Sox.

After a brief tour of duty in France with the 365th infantry, Donaldson pitched the 1918 season in Indianapolis before moving east to pitch for the Brooklyn Royal Giants. According to Seamheads, he went 7-6 with a 2.13 ERA (the Donaldson network site lists six other victories).  He spent 1919 with the Detroit Stars, going 5-5 with a 2.44 ERA in games that Seamheads has a record for (again, with seven other wins listed by the Donaldson site).

In 1920, Wilkinson, Rube Foster, and six others founded the Negro National League, the first Negro League currently recognized as official Major League Baseball. Now 29 years old and playing for the Kansas City Monarchs, Donaldson is recorded (on Baseball Reference) as having a 6-6 record with a 3.78 ERA. He also hit .295 in 75 games, mostly playing center field.

Donaldson didn’t pitch much in 1921, going 0-3 with a 4.97 ERA. Jay Jaffe has speculated that Donaldson was suffering from an injury or arm fatigue, but that is not documented.

Donaldson didn’t pitch for the Monarchs in 1922, instead serving as pitcher/manager for a new All Nations squad; the Donaldson network credits the lefty with 14 wins that year, with 19 more in 1923 when he barely played for the Monarchs.

Donaldson spent most of 1924-31 pitching for various teams in Minnesota, spending more time in the same place rather than non-stop travel. After a final barnstorming tour with the Monarchs in 1931, he continued to pitch and play from 1932-40 (until he was 49 years old) with various semipro teams, pitching and playing mostly in the Midwest but also in Canada.

All told, in his thirty-three years on the mound, John Donaldson pitched in approximately 700 different cities and towns.  Unlike most of the Negro League players enshrined in Cooperstown, Donaldson pitched in hundreds of games as the only black player in mostly small white towns (see the map below).

In 1949, Donaldson was hired as a scout by the Chicago White Sox, the first black man to be openly acknowledged to have been hired for that role. He left the organization in 1955, growing frustrated that the team wasn’t interested in some of the best players he had scouted, including Ernie Banks, who signed with the crosstown Cubs.

Donaldson, who called Chicago his home from at least 1930 until he died, worked for the U.S. Post Office in his post-baseball days. He died from bronchial pneumonia on April 14, 1970, at the age of 79, at Cook County Hospital in Chicago.

The Hall of Fame Case for and against John Donaldson

John Donaldson has not been honored with a plaque in the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, but he was elected to the Missouri Hall of Fame in 2017. In 1952, the Pittsburgh Courier conducted a poll of 31 Negro League players, managers, executives, and writers who recognized him as a first-team pitcher along with Satchel Paige, Smokey Joe Williams, Bullet Rogan, and Bill Foster, who are now all in the Hall of Fame.

Minnesota-based researcher Peter Gorton, who runs the “Donaldson Network” website, has been leading the charge to educate baseball fans about Donaldson’s exploits. The site, which is also a crowdsourcing project to uncover as much evidence as possible about Donaldson’s career, has meticulously reconstructed the record of his deeds on the mound.

“n 1971, when Satchel Paige goes into the Baseball Hall of Fame, many people thought then that John Donaldson should be the (next) person in the Baseball Hall of Fame. A lot of people from the Upper Midwest thought that was going to happen. What came back was they thought: they’ll never find John Donaldson’s career. It’s impossible, they said. It would be impossible for anybody to ever figure out all the places John Donaldson went to. And indeed, it wasn’t possible in 1970.”

— Peter Gorton, The Athletic (December 3, 2021)

In the age of the internet, what wasn’t possible in 1970 is possible today, and Gorton’s project has documented those 428 wins, 5,295 strikeouts, and 14 no-hitters. “The numbers are facts,” Gorton has said. “Primary sources. These are all sourced from newspaper accounts. We have 100, almost 200 games, where we know John Donaldson is seeing wins, but there’s no pitcher of record. And so, the 422 wins that we have for him today are probably more like 600. But we don’t count those because we’re just not into the speculation.”

This is the problem, of course, that we don’t really know how great Donaldson was. His pitching statistics in the recognized Major Leagues (in 1920-21, with the Kansas City Monarchs) show him with six wins and a 4.14 ERA in those two campaigns. From the written record of others, Donaldson’s peak years were from 1912-17, when he put up the ridiculous numbers documented by his SABR Bio and Jay Jaffe’s excellent piece in FanGraphs: 100 consecutive innings, 11 no-hitters in seven campaigns, 30 consecutive hitless innings in 1915.

“Painstakingly gathered by the Donaldson Network, a diligent group of over 500 researchers led by SABR member Peter Gorton, Donaldson’s career totals are remarkable, but they’re often waved off. In The Biographical Encyclopedia of the Negro Leagues, James A. Riley noted that Donaldson spent his prime “playing against white semi-pro ballclubs of dubious quality, resulting in both inflated statistics and fragmentary records… Even so, he’s regularly placed in the pantheon alongside those hurlers by the people who saw him.”

— Jay Jaffe, FanGraphs (November 21, 2024)

The numbers are so incredible that it does make you wonder about the quality of his competition, especially considering his middling record in the years (1920-21) in which we do know the quality of his opponents. Remember, Donaldson spent a great deal of his pitching career pitching against semipro white players in the Midwest, not black players. Those white players were almost certainly, by definition, not of Major League caliber; otherwise, they would have been in the Major Leagues.

“He was dominating a lot of farmers, let’s face it. But you have to remember, this is what segregation was. Segregation was push ’em out and get ’em out as far away as possible, and that meant some strange and out-of-the-way places where there weren’t Major Leaguers.”

— Peter Gorton (John Donaldson network), as told to MLB.com’s Matt Monagan (February 15, 2020)

None of this is fair to John Donaldson, of course. It’s not his fault that he was born a black man in 1891 and that the Negro Leagues didn’t have an organized structure until he was 29 years old and, apparently, past his prime. On the other hand, life isn’t fair.

With the caveat that this is pure speculation based on what I’ve read, it seems to me that Donaldson’s career as a barnstormer was a path that he chose, seemingly for financial reasons. Although, obviously, he couldn’t have known that, 100 years later, the Negro National League would be considered on par with the American and National Leagues, but the disparity of talent had to be obvious.

So, Donaldson could have remained with the Monarchs or in one of the other organized leagues for black players. He could have continued to participate against the best black players of the era. Starting in 1922, when he was 31 years old, playing against inferior competition was a choice. Most Negro League Hall of Famers played or pitched into their late 30s or early 40s, and, of course, Donaldson did pitch until he was 49.

Conclusion

First, I should mention that John Donaldson’s Hall of Fame case is one that is uniquely different than any other that I’ve written about on Cooperstown Cred. When writing about players in the American and National Leagues, the statistical records are complete. Even across generations, apples-to-apples comparisons are possible with the modern tools we have, such as WAR, OPS+, ERA+, etc.

For Negro League players, especially one who spent his entire career pitching against hundreds of different teams, the quality of which is hard to quantify, my level of knowledge is frankly inadequate to the task.

The same is true, however, for most of the sixteen members of the Era Committee that will be voting on Donaldson’s Hall of Fame case tomorrow in San Diego. Fortunately, two members of that committee (Larry Lester and Leslie Heaphy) will be there to educate the other fourteen members about the careers of Donaldson and the other Negro Leagues candidate, Vic Harris. Lester was the co-founder of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum. Heaphy, a member of the SABR Board of Directors, has written extensively about the Negro Leagues.

So, with that caveat out of the way, I’ll do my best here. To me, the best case for Donaldson for the Hall of Fame is as a hybrid case as a great pitcher who also was a pioneer. Donaldson’s barnstorming model was the blueprint for how to make money outside of the Major Leagues that Satchel Paige followed 20 years later

Jay Jaffe eloquently makes that case:

“To these eyes the weight of the evidence and the assessments of his peers and historians suggest that he’s worthy of enshrinement on the basis of his pioneering, in helping to lay the groundwork as a barnstormer — ‘for showing the way, to use (Buck) O’Neil’s term. Like the careers of (Bud) Fowler and O’Neil himself, Donaldson’s path was a singular one, and appreciating his accomplishments in the midst of the hardships he faced requires grasping a breadth that goes beyond just the performance data. He left a huge mark upon the game, one that his contemporaries grasped long before the rest of the baseball world.”

— Jay Jaffe, FanGraphs (November 21, 2024)

Jaffe goes on to note that Hall of Fame voting doesn’t happen in a vacuum. I’m inclined to agree with him that Donaldson is worthy of a spot in the Hall of Fame. However, he’s on a ballot with seven other men, all of whom also have worthy cases for Cooperstown.

Donaldson is one of two Negro League players on the ballot. The other is Vic Harris, a career .303 hitter who is also the most successful manager in the history of the Negro Leagues. As the manager of the Homestead Grays for 11 seasons (many as a player-manager), Harris led the Grays to seven pennants, four more than any other skipper in Negro League history.

As I indicated in this piece about Harris, to me, his case is a slam dunk (Jaffe concurs, incidentally).

As for the six other players on the ballot (Dick Allen, Luis Tiant, Tommy John, Ken Boyer, Steve Garvey, and Dave Parker), to these eyes, Allen and Tiant have exceptionally strong cases. I also feel that Boyer is a Hall of Famer, while John and Garvey probably deserve the nod as well.

On the Classic Baseball ballot, the 16-member committee members are limited to voting for three out of the eight candidates. Beyond deeds on the diamond, there are personal factors to consider. Three of those candidates (John, Garvey, and Parker) are still alive. If a voter feels like any (or all) of these candidates are worthy, honoring the living while they can enjoy the honor is a consideration.

There’s also the fact that Tiant just passed away last month. In the history of the Hall of Fame, the voters have often sentimentally elected a player shortly after their passing. And, finally, there’s the fact that Allen fell just one vote short of Cooperstown on two different ballots in the last ten years. Voters will know that.

I am just speculating here, but I suspect that many of the voters will put the candidates in two buckets, the Negro Leagues bucket (Harris and Donaldson) and the 1960s-to-80s bucket (Boyer, Allen, John, Tiant, Parker, Garvey). I am guessing that the voters will choose one of the two Negro League candidates and two of the six others.

If so, if a binary choice were to be made between John Donaldson and Vic Harris, a vote for Harris seems like the better call to these eyes.

Either way, it would be nice to see Donaldson in Cooperstown in the future. He would be a worthy addition.

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