Baseball Remembers: Branch Russell

I’m embarrassed.

Most of the time, I like to think that I know a fair amount about the Negro Leagues. Compared to most people, that’s probably true. Professional historians who specialize in those leagues certainly know more than I do, and people like Bob Kendrick at the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum certainly know more, but for an average person or even an average baseball fan, I think my knowledge of those leagues is pretty solid.

And yet I’ve never in my life heard of Branch Russell before today, and that’s kind of embarrassing.

I’ll cut myself a bit of slack because there’s a limited amount of readily-available information about him. There’s no biography of him on the SABR BioProject. There’s a brief synopsis of his life and career on Wikipedia and another on Baseball-Reference’s Bullpen, but there isn’t much detail in either. He isn’t mentioned in the most prominent books on the subject of the Negro Leagues, like Robert Peterson’s Only the Ball Was White, or John Holway’s Blackball Stars.

Even so, it seems I should have heard about Russell somewhere. He was not an obscure player. There has been a considerable amount of work done in documenting the great team fielded each year by the Army’s 25th Infantry Regiment, also known as the Wreckers. Any number of future Negro Leagues stars played for the Wreckers during their time in the Army, including Bullet Rogan, Heavy Johnson, Dobie Moore, Carl Glass, and Army Cooper. Among them was Branch Russell, who served eight years in the 25th Infantry, including throughout the First World War. His army service delayed his professional baseball career, in fact, and he didn’t begin playing pro ball until he was 26.