Time and again, when I look at players who played their entire careers in the Negro Leagues, or at least started there, I’m struck by the startling gaps in their statistical records.
Sometimes entire years are missing. They are always missing dozens, even hundreds, of games that we know were played but for which no box scores exist. Sometimes the leagues they played in aren’t yet recognized at “major league.” Then there were the years they spent in the minor leagues for no good reason, trapped behind lesser players for no reason other than the color of their skin. Often they had already spent time in leagues now known to be major league in quality, only to be relegated to the minors again once integration finally happened.
All of these circumstances apply to the career of Jim “Junior” Gilliam, and it impacts the way he’s now viewed.
It’s important to note that Gilliam was a baseball prodigy. Given a glove for the first time when he was 14, in just three years he was a reserve infielder on the Baltimore Elite Giants, teammates with legendary players like Willie Wells, Sammy Hughes, and Bill Byrd. A year later he was their starting second baseman at the age of 18, and a year after that he hit .333 in the championship series of the Negro National League against the famed Homestead Grays.
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