Friday Stuff
Underappreciated Managers Edition
Monday
When the Negro National League was founded in 1920, Dave Malarcher was just a third baseman.
He was a very good one, for a very good team. Malarcher wasn’t a great hitter, though he was a good one in many years, batting over .300 three times and leading the league in runs and steals one season. But he was an excellent defender who regularly led the league in putouts, assists, and fielding percentage. One top of that, he was a good guy, known as “Gentleman Dave,” an educated man who wrote poetry in his later years and interrupted his baseball career to serve his country in World War I.
His team, the Chicago American Giants, was the best in the league in those early years. It was the franchise owned and operated by the league’s founder, Rube Foster, who had recruited to Malarcher to play for him after seeing him play for the Indianapolis ABCs and Detroit Stars before the NNL started play. He saw in Malarcher the exact type of player he tried to create, a smart, disciplined, aggressive player with some speed.
It surprised no one, then, that it was Malarcher who took over the managing responsibilities for the team in 1926 when Foster had to step away from the team due to his failing health. He never returned, and Malarcher led the team to a 30-7 record over the final half of the season and then won the Negro Leagues World Series over the Altantic City Bacharach Giants. It was the first World Series win for the franchise, and then they came back the following season and won it again.
Unfortunately, Foster’s illness had eventually resulted in the team being sold to William Trimble, and he proved to be a pretty awful owner who was more interested in the racetrack he operated than the ball club he’d bought. Trimble routinely paid low salaries to his players, and refused to pay Malarcher for his managing duties, claiming that his salary as a player was more than enough. After the 1928 season, in which Malarcher guided the team to the league’s second half championship, he walked away from the club and spent the next two seasons working in insurance and real estate.
In 1931, he decided to re-enter baseball with a startup team called the Chicago Columbia Giants, but they were awful and the NNL was on its last legs, so that lasted only one year. Malarcher was going to go back to real estate and semi-pro ball when he was contacted by Robert Cole, an undertaker in Chicago who had just purchased the American Giants from Trimble and decided the best way to revive them was to hire Dave Malarcher to be the team’s manager again.
Malarcher agreed, and promptly guided the Giants to the pennant of the new Negro Southern League, which only lasted for that one season. But in 1933 the Negro National League was re-formed, and the Giants joined up again. Despite Malarcher leading them to a 41-22 record, the team barely lost the pennant to the Pittsburgh Crawfords. A year later they won the league’s second-half title again before losing in the championship series to the Philadelphia Stars.
At this point, Malarcher was just about to turn 40, and in part of seven seasons as a manager he’d won three pennants and led two other teams to the playoffs. He had a .628 career winning percentage, which is the highest mark in history for any manager with multiple World Series titles to his credit. If he’d wanted it, he had a long future ahead of him as the premier manager in Black baseball since Foster was dead, Bullet Rogan was retired, and Vic Harris hadn’t started managing yet.
But then he just walked away.
Malarcher didn’t like the direction baseball was going, both in terms of failing sportsmanship and poor management of the league. For one year only, 1940, he returned as the American Giants’ business manager, but otherwise he went back to working as a successful real estate broker and erstwhile poet.
Before he died on this date in 1982 at the age of 87, Malarcher joined the Society for American Baseball Research and used his poetry skills to pen an ode to the great Oscar Charleston, his former teammate, who has an argument for being the best player in baseball history. That’s fitting, because Malarcher had not only played with or managed Charleston and many of the best players in the history of Black baseball, but has an argument for being the best manager in Negro Leagues history as well.
Maybe one day the Hall of Fame will realize those great Negro Leagues teams didn’t manage themselves and will finally elect someone from that great group of managers. If so, Dave Malarcher would be on the very short list of those who should be considered.
