Sunday, May 16, 2004; Page BW06
NEGRO LEAGUE BASEBALL The Rise and Ruin of a Black Institution
By Neil Lanctot. Univ. of Pennsylvania. 496 pp. $34.95

If you know anyone who claims to be up on baseball history -- smarties who know the names of Joe DiMaggio's outfielder brothers or how many years Hoyt Wilhelm pitched in the minors -- ask them for whom Satchel Paige played (the Pittsburgh Crawfords) or Josh Gibson (the Homestead Grays) or Jackie Robinson in his pre-Brooklyn Dodgers days (the Kansas City Monarchs) or Larry Doby before the Cleveland Indians (the Newark Eagles). If they hit it out of the park on those (it's 1,000 to 1 in Vegas they won't), brush them back with this: Name the six teams in the Negro National League and the six in the Negro American League in the mid-1940s.

Bet the farm, or at least the fences around it: No one will know, except those who have just read Neil Lanctot's story of black baseball during its five-decade run to its final innings in the late 1950s. In remarkable detail -- 576 endnotes alone that consume 77 pages -- Lanctot takes us beyond the ball field where the Paiges and Gibsons played in forced segregation, and into the commercial and social realities of baseball in black communities. As much as the Paiges and others may be romanticized for being the equal of any white players, they remained trapped in an industry that was separate but emphatically unequal.