Late Bloomers: Bill Byrd
Unlike most ballplayers who eventually made a final ballot for consideration for the Hall of Fame, not much is known about the early life of Bill Byrd. It seems that no one was paying much attention until it became clear that they should have been all along.
Byrd was born in Georgia in 1907, and was part of the Great Migration with his family early in his life. Trapped in the limited opportunities allowed to Black families in the Jim Crow South, Byrd’s parents made the decision others had made before them, and even more would make after: Head North. After a brief, barely documented stop in Riley, Alabama, the Byrd family landed in Columbus, Ohio, in 1919, just after the end of World War I.
From a self-completed player profile and a couple of interviews given much later in life, we know that Byrd didn’t graduate high school and may not have even attended one. He loved baseball at an early age, but his instruction in the sport came from playing with other kids and teens in unorganized sandlot games instead of formal leagues. It seems, for the most part, that he left school simply to go to work, and that any time spent on baseball was pure recreation.
Still, he was good at it. Like many kids his age, including Satchel Paige, he developed a strong, accurate arm by throwing rocks at smaller and smaller targets, and learned to hit with a series of tree branches. But there was no Negro Leagues team in Columbus when he became old enough to think about playing professionally. The closest team in the Eastern Colored League was in Harrisburg, PA, and while the Negro National League had clubs in both Cleveland and Indianapolis, there wasn’t much formal scouting taking place that would allow them to find someone like Byrd 150 or more miles away in Columbus.
But in 1932, he got lucky. The Negro Southern League, a minor league that had been around since 1920, had a team in Louisville, the Black Caps, that struggled financially and elected to move to Columbus for the final six weeks of the season. Rebranded as the Columbus Surfs, they recruited cheap local talent to complete their roster for the season’s final few weeks, including twenty-five year old Bill Byrd.
There aren’t any statistics available for the Surfs, so we don’t know how well Byrd performed in his brief time with them. But we do know that when the Negro National League re-formed in 1933, a new team, the Columbus Blue Birds was started as a charter member. Bill Byrd was signed to a major league contract for the first time, and became the team’s primary starting pitcher.
He wasn’t very good that year, and neither were the Blue Birds. He led the team with 13 games, 11 starts, and 95 innings pitched, but lost a league-high 8 games and had a 4.36 ERA as the team went 15-27 in league play. They struggled financially as well, so much so that they were disbanded and much of their roster, including Byrd, was assigned to a new franchise for the 1934 season, the Cleveland Red Sox.
Byrd was even worse in Cleveland than he’d been in Columbus. The team was atrocious, posting a record of 3-22 and disbanding after the year. Byrd was 2-8, again leading the league in losses, and his ERA ballooned to 6.90. Already twenty-seven by the time the season ended, he didn’t appear to have much of a future in the sport.
But, before the 1935 season began, he got lucky again. The Nashville Elite Giants were looking for a new home. They had started in the original Negro National League in 1930, left it to become an independent team in 1931, joined the Negro Southern League briefly and then hopped to the new Negro National League in 1933. After 1934, though, it became clear that they would always struggle in Nashville, so the team relocated to Columbus before the 1935 season, and they were looking to round out their roster.
The legendary Candy Jim Taylor was the team’s manager, and they had a good lineup that included a mix of solid veterans like Felton Snow, Jim West and Roy Parnell, mixed with younger players like Sammy T. Hughes and Wild Bill Wright. Byrd was signed to complete their pitching staff, and while he was improved over his showing in Cleveland the year before, he still struggled. His record for the year was just 2-3 with a 5.66 ERA. He was twenty-eight by the time the season ended and had a career major league record of just 7-19 with a combined 5.39 ERA. In fact, he was a better hitter than pitcher at that point in his career. His 93 OPS+ wasn’t particularly special, but he’d batted over .300 in each of his last two seasons, playing a fair amount in the outfield when he didn’t pitch.
Still, he impressed Taylor enough to be retained on the roster when the team moved yet again the following year. Despite a solid winning record and a finish in the top half of the league, the club had struggled financially in Columbus and looked for a bigger city that could support them better. They turned to Washington, DC, becoming the Washington Elite Giants. Future Hall of Fame Biz Mackey was brought in as their everyday catcher, and though it didn’t help the club much that season as they slumped to a record of 29-34-1, it did help them in the future.
Because Biz Mackey fixed Bill Byrd.
Throwing to Mackey, widely viewed as the best defensive catcher in Negro Leagues history, Byrd was transformed into one of the best pitchers in the league in 1936. He went 9-4 with a 3.38 ERA, with both the wins (2nd) and ERA (7th) being in the league’s top ten among pitchers. His .692 winning percentage was fourth in the league, and he was sixth in the league in preventing walks. He threw two shutouts, the most in the league, and was selected to the East-West All-Star game for the first time in his career. And this improvement on the mound didn’t affect his hitting, as he still managed to bat .311/.354/.443 for the season.
Both Byrd and the Elite Giants slumped in 1937. His ERA ballooned back to 5.37 and the team’s record dropped even further to 23-36-3, prompting yet another relocation, this time to Baltimore. Once there, they became one of the most storied franchises in Negro Leagues history, home to many of the leagues’ finest players and regularly fighting for the championship. And Byrd was their best pitcher that entire time.
In 1938, now managed by George Scales but with Mackey still as the primary catcher and leader of the team, Baltimore went 26-23-3, and thirty-year old Byrd posted a 7-2 record and 3.67 ERA that was 29% better than league average. He was third in the league in wins, and sixth in ERA, fifth in winning percentage and innings, and would be a fixture in the league’s pitching leader boards for the rest of his career.
Byrd made his second All-Star team in 1939, led the league in walks per nine innings, and went 7-2 with a 3.32 ERA. The team faced the Newark Eagles in the playoffs and beat them three games to one, with Byrd winning one of the games. They went on to face the mighty Homestead Grays in the championship series and won that, too, with Byrd again winning a game.
Now a commodity in the Black baseball community, Byrd was lured to play in Puerto Rico in the offseason, a decision that saw him banned by the Negro National League in a move they hoped would halt the exodus of their best players to Latin America. Byrd was excellent in Puerto Rico, earning the nickname “El Maestro” as he carved up the league despite not being able to throw his spitball, which was outlawed there.
Seeing that their ban hadn’t been effective, the NNL reinstated Byrd and others before the 1941 season. He returned to Baltimore, where the club, now managed by Felton Snow, had an excellent 44-24 record. Byrd might have been the best pitcher in the league that season despite being thirty-three and having missed the previous year. He led the league with a 2.23 ERA, again allowed the fewest walks in the league, and was selected to play in the East-West game for the third year.
And that became the norm for the rest of Byrd’s lengthy career. In the eight seasons of his career after returning from his Latin American suspension, Byrd led the league in wins, FIP, and walk rate three times each, in strikeouts, innings, and saves twice each, in strikeout-to-walk ratio four times, and in starts, complete games, and WHIP once each. His combined record in those years was 68-37, which translates to an average season of 20-11 per 162 games. His ERA was 2.81, a mark that was an outstanding 48% better than the league average. And he did all of this despite being well into his late thirties for most of these seasons, finishing in 1948 when he turned forty-one in the middle of the year.
When all was said and done he had a combined major league record of 102-67 that translated to 19-13 per 162 games. His career ERA+ mark of 128 was a touch better than Bob Gibson’s and Tom Seaver’s, and his neutralized pitching record, which takes into account context and projects across full 162-game seasons, amounts to a projected career record of 365 wins, over 5,300 innings pitched, nearly 2,800 strikeouts, and an ERA of 2.78.
Those totals may go up. Byrd was still pitching with the Elite Giants in 1949 when the club was part of the Negro American League, and that entire league has been recommended for recognition of major league status. If that’s granted, it appears from the work being done at Retrosheet and elsewhere that Byrd could be credited with 11 more wins against only 2 losses from that season. We also know that he appears to have pitched 109.2 innings that season and allowed 45 runs, an unknown number of which were unearned. Even if all were earned his ERA for the year would have been 3.69 at the age of forty-two.
Byrd was one of the thirty-nine finalists on the ballot for the Hall of Fame’s Special Committee on the Negro Leagues in 2006, but he was not among the seventeen who were elected. Three pitchers were among those honored, and while it’s easy to see why Ray Brown was elected, or why the long combined record of José Méndez was honored, it’s not as easy to see why Andy Cooper was selected over Bill Byrd.
W/L Record: Byrd, 102-67; Cooper, 118-64
ERA: Byrd, 3.39; Cooper, 3.58
ERA+ : Byrd, 128; Cooper, 122
WHIP: Byrd, 1.216; Cooper, 1.211
K/BB Ratio: Byrd, 4.8; Cooper, 4.0
FIP: Byrd, 2.45; Cooper, 2.40
WAR: Byrd, 25.7; Cooper, 26.6
Then throw in the added value Byrd brought with his bat as a career .262/.327/.391 hitter with 4.9 WAR compared to Cooper at .181/.217/.241 with -0.7 WAR. It seems that, if anything, either both should have been elected or both passed over, and if only one could be selected it would appear that Byrd’s offense should have been the tie breaker.
Alas, that’s not what happened. Bill Byrd remains outside of the Hall of Fame, and there hasn’t been a big push to get him in. Maybe the new focus on including the Negro Leagues in MLB’s official stats will help him.
And maybe if someone had discovered this rock-throwing kid in Columbus before he was twenty-five, he’d have been in the Hall of Fame for a long time now.