A 17-year-old Willie Mays lost the last Negro League World Series ever played. The deciding game was at Rickwood Field in Birmingham — the park where Mays got his start, and where Major League Baseball now gathers every Juneteenth to honor the men the game shut out.
The team that beat him that October in 1948 split its home schedule between Pittsburgh and a ballpark right here in D.C. on Georgia Avenue.
So Washington has a stake in the most sacred ground of baseball’s Juneteenth. Right?
Careful. The two people who know this history best can’t even agree on how big that stake is.
“I’ll say a second home,” Sean Gibson, the great-grandson of Grays Hall of Fame catcher Josh Gibson and president of , told ²ÝÝ®´«Ã½.
Not the home. Pittsburgh was the home, where Cumberland Posey built the franchise into a juggernaut and Josh Gibson built the .372 career batting average that, as of 2024, stands as Major League Baseball’s all-time best. Washington, Sean Gibson said plainly, “never really had their own team.” It had a Pittsburgh club playing half its games down here.
Thom Loverro sees it differently. The longtime Washington Times columnist wrote the book — literally, “The Encyclopedia of Negro League Baseball,” and to him the Grays were “a little bit more than a second home.”
When I asked whether they belonged to Washington, he didn’t hedge: “I really do think it does.”
He’s not inflating the team to make the point. “They’re the New York Yankees of the Negro Leagues,” Loverro said, “the dominant franchise,” and once they came to Washington, a dynasty that “even outdoes what the Yankees did.”
‘I consider DC a home’
Here’s the thing about a second home, though. It’s still home.
I know that math personally. I’m a child of divorce, and a divorced parent myself, and the lesson runs the same from both sides of it: a kid can have two homes and mean it about both. There’s a primary address and there’s the other place, and both are real, both are yours.
When I put that to Gibson, he didn’t flinch. He’s in Washington two or three times a year working with the Nationals, and he’s blunt about what that makes the city to him: “I consider D.C. a home.”
Loverro would just tell you the second house was grander than we let ourselves remember.
Which is exactly where Washington keeps getting it wrong. The argument was never really about the size of the claim. It’s that we’ve barely bothered to honor the one we’ve got.
Start with what most fans here couldn’t tell you. By the time the Grays made Griffith Stadium their Washington home in 1940, they were already a defending champion — in the middle of a run of nine straight Negro National League pennants from 1937 to 1945, 10 in all, and three Negro World Series titles. Gibson and first baseman Buck Leonard, both Hall of Famers, anchored the order.
They wore a “W” on the sleeve for the Washington Homestead Grays. Same franchise, two cities.
And yet, Gibson said, some people still think the Washington club and the Pittsburgh club were “two different teams. It was the same team.”
Loverro has watched that amnesia up close, and it gets under his skin. Ask Washington to name its greatest athletes — the Mount Rushmore argument every sports town loves — and he says he “constantly” has to “chirp and fight to make sure people include Josh Gibson.” A man who is, by the integrated record books, “the greatest hitter in the history of baseball.” He played here for nine years. And he’s an afterthought in his own city’s bar arguments.
Negro Leagues night pays tribute
Give the Nationals their due, because they’ve done the work. A bronze Josh Gibson statue greets you at the home-plate gate, beside Walter Johnson and Frank Howard. Six Grays Hall of Famers sit in the park’s Ring of Honor. Tuesday was the franchise’s second-annual Negro Leagues night. And this spring, — a curriculum Gibson’s foundation helped the District build, one the team and the schools have pledged to run again. The kids are being handed the history. The ballclub remembers.
Now for the honest part, because forgetting is apparently the norm across much of the nation. Loverro points out that most Yankees fans have no idea the New York Black Yankees played in old Yankee Stadium, and that Philadelphia, murals and all, lets its Stars fade. If anything, he says, “there’s probably more recognition” of the Negro Leagues in Washington “than almost any other city in America.”
But here’s where the historian and the family land in the same place: the city itself has done almost nothing. There’s no street named for the Grays, Gibson noted. The grandest civic marker he could point to is a mural in the back alley behind Ben’s Chili Bowl, one he helped put up.
Loverro’s verdict is shorter — “the city has dropped the ball” — and his theory for why isn’t conspiracy, it’s neglect. “I’m not sure there’s been anyone to basically rattle their cage about it.”
A street, honestly, would be generous, because Washington didn’t even keep the ballpark. Griffith Stadium, where the Grays won the 1943 and 1944 Negro World Series, was torn down in 1965. Howard University Hospital has stood on the site since, the spot of home plate marked inside the entrance and a small plaque out on Georgia Avenue. The ground is gone.
It’s worth remembering why the Grays were here in the first place, because it wasn’t civic embrace. Senators owner Clark Griffith brought them in for the gate. Grays games often outdrew his own team, Loverro said. And Griffith, by Loverro’s account, staged “phony workouts” for Grays players “never with the intention of signing them” to the majors.
The city’s white baseball establishment was happy to cash the checks. The honoring is the part that never came.
Deep Negro League roots
Other cities chose differently. Birmingham preserved Rickwood Field, poured money into restoring it, and made it the place baseball returns every Juneteenth. Kansas City built a museum to the Negro Leagues at 18th and Vine. Loverro’s point is that those cities had deep Negro Leagues roots worth enshrining — “and Washington has as deep roots as any.”
Two cities staged the final World Series of an era in 1948 and went opposite directions with the memory: one enshrined its Black baseball ground, the other paved it.
The ballclub built a statue. The city offered a service entrance.
In fairness, that’s not the whole picture. The name still lives on the field: The DC Grays, a nonprofit Loverro is part of, field a college summer team and run a youth program — uniforms, equipment and coaches for more than 250 kids in Wards 7 and 8 — .
The greatness didn’t vanish. It got handed down, in the parts of the city that most need it.
Which brings us back to Juneteenth — and to the thing both men kept circling. It was Gibson who lobbied MLB to move its Negro Leagues legends game, the East-West Classic, to Rickwood, and who pushed hardest that it not be “a one and done type thing.” It worked; the Classic returns there this Juneteenth.
But his bigger point was that the calendar is a trap. Black history gets crammed into 28 days, he said, and now risks getting crammed into a single one. It deserves to be “told 365 days a year, not just 28 days or one day.”
Loverro, who spent years on the kind of research that finally got those numbers into the record book, won’t pretend the stats fixed anything.
“I don’t think anything can fix the forgetting,” he said. The records, like a mural or a street sign, are a symbol — something that sends a 15-year-old online to find out who Josh Gibson was. And they are something more than that. He put it this way: you “can never get full justice for a full segment of the population being denied the same opportunity,” but “it is a sliver of justice.”
Gibson never got even that in his lifetime. He died in January 1947, months before Jackie Robinson took the field in Brooklyn and a lifetime before the record book admitted what he had done.
A Washington team recorded the final out of the Negro Leagues’ last championship, on the ground the whole sport now treats as holy. The greatest hitter who ever lived spent nine years playing in this city. And the man who knows that history best says the only thing still missing is someone willing to rattle the city’s cage about it.
Consider this the first knock.
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