Baseball Remembers: Clint Thomas
The little town of Greenup, Kentucky, wound up playing an outsized role in remembering the Negro Leagues, for no other reason than it was the birthplace of Clint “Hawk” Thomas. That fact, plus his personality being one that his peers decided to honor later in his life, led directly to the explosion in recognition for the Negro Leagues that we’ve seen in recent years.
But let’s start with the recognition that Clint Thomas was a helluva baseball player. A speedy outfielder, he became known as “Hawk” for his ability to swoop across center field in pursuit of fly balls, as well as for his eye at the plate that allowed him to produce a .308 career batting average.
His professional baseball career was delayed by the fact that he joined the Army when he was eighteen and served five years, throughout World War I. The first recorded year of his baseball career was 1920 with the Brooklyn Royal Giants. They were still an independent team, not part of the new Negro National League, and were managed by the great John Henry “Pop” Lloyd. Thomas played mostly third base that year, and just for a handful of games, but he showed enough promise that he caught on with the NNL’s Columbus Buckeyes the next year.
Just twenty-four, he was immediately very good in Columbus. He played second base there, batted .295, and led the league in triples. The following year he moved to the Detroit Stars and shifted to the outfield for good, increasing his average to .321 with an OPS that was 37% better than the league average.
In 1923, Thomas moved again, this time to the new Eastern Colored League’s Hilldale Club, which was located outside of Philadelphia. There he enjoyed the best seasons of his career, for the best team in the league. Thomas’ old manager, Pop Lloyd, led the team and played shortstop, and the lineup included future Hall of Famers Biz Mackey at catcher and Judy Johnson at third base, in addition to Lloyd. The team finished first that season, with Thomas posting a 106 OPS+ and leading the league in doubles.
They won the league again in 1924 as Thomas upped his OPS+ to 130. Lloyd had moved on to Atlantic City, but Mackey moved to shortstop while another future Hall of Famer, Louis Santop, became the regular catcher. Hilldale lost the inaugural Colored World Series to the Kansas City Monarchs, but they redeemed themselves in 1925 by beating the Monarchs in the rematch, fives games to one. Thomas batted .341 that year, had an OPS+ of 144, and led the league in doubles again.
His best season may have been 1926. He played in all of Hilldale’s 88 known league games, led the league in triples for the second time, as well as in RBI and steals, and batted .321 with a 143 OPS+ as the team had the best record in the league for the fourth straight season. Unclear record-keeping and unbalanced schedules resulted in Hilldale not representing the ECL in the World Series that season, as Atlantic City claimed the league title instead.
Hilldale’s final year in the ECL was 1927. Thomas, now thirty-years old, batted .302 for them with a 114 OPS+ before the team disbanded. He moved to Atlantic City for the league’s final season and batted a career-high .366. The team jumped to the new American Negro League in 1929, with Thomas batting .302 for them.
A victim of unstable franchises and leagues at that point, Thomas spent most of the next several years with the independent New York Lincoln Giants, for whom he batted .345 in 1930 and .333 in 1932. He stayed mostly with teams in the New York area for the rest of his career, including the Newark Eagles, New York Cubans, and New York Black Yankees when those teams were part of the new Negro National League. When he was forty, Thomas hit .310 for the Black Yankees.
He was able to play with some of the greatest players in Negro Leagues history during these later years of his career, including Mule Suttles, Willie Wells, Leon Day, and Ray Dandridge with Newark, Martín Dihigo, Luis Tiant, Sr., and Chet Brewer with the Cubans, and Walter Cannady and Fats Jenkins with the Black Yankees. His years in New York coincided with the arrival of Joe DiMaggio with the Yankees, and the fact that they both played center field and had good all-around games led some to call Thomas “The Black DiMaggio.”
Thomas was good, but it’s a bit of a stretch to assert that the he was on the level of Joe DiMaggio, particularly by that point in his career. It would be more accurate to say that his prime years were somewhat similar to the numbers Tony Oliva or Tony Gwynn produced at the same ages. Here are their respective 162-game averages from ages twenty-four to thirty-one:
After his baseball career, Thomas settled in Charleston, West Virginia, about a ninety-minute drive from his hometown in eastern Kentucky. There he worked as a messenger in the state capitol until he was eighty. The same year he finally retired, his hometown of Greenup threw him a birthday party and invited several former members of the Negro Leagues, including Satchel Paige and Cool Papa Bell.
That event evolved into a series of annual reunions for the Negro Leagues, held in nearby Ashland, Kentucky. Those became larger and larger affairs each year, ultimately drawing dozens of Negro Leagues veterans to the event as well as baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn. By 1981, plans were drawn up to start a Negro Leagues Hall of History in Ashland, as many Negro Leagues veterans were displeased with the representation of Black baseball on display at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.
That idea never quite took off, at least not in Ashland, as it was simply too remote and had no real tie to the Negro Leagues to sustain public interest. By the mid-1980s an agreement was reached to have any artifacts that had been collected turned over to the Hall of Fame to augment their display. Many of those artifacts remain on display there now.
More importantly, the idea of a museum dedicated to Negro Leagues history didn’t die in Ashland. It was re-born in Kansas City several years later, and the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum is now a thriving organization that recently launched plans to renovate and add on to the historic Paseo Y.M.C.A. building where the Negro National League was founded by Rube Foster in 1920.
And that happened in very large part simply because Clint “Hawk” Thomas was a really good man and a really good baseball player that his friends, peers, and community didn’t want to forget.