Leland Giants · Chicago, Illinois · 1910

Andrew Rube Foster

April 16, 1910. The Freeman of Indianapolis put out its First Annual Base Ball and Sporting Number, and the man in the middle of the page is Andrew Rube Foster of the Leland Giants, photographed in a bowler hat and bow tie like the executive he was about to become. Ten years later he founded the Negro National League.

On April 16, 1910, The Freeman of Indianapolis published its “First Annual Base Ball and Sporting Number,” and gave the middle of the page to this portrait: “ANDREW RUBE FOSTER, Manager and Captain of the World’s Colored Champions, the Leland Giants.” No uniform, no glove. A bowler hat, a bow tie and the settled look of a man who runs things.

Foster ran nearly everything, in fact. He was the best pitcher of his era, the manager and captain of the Leland Giants, and the author of a long essay on the very same page titled “Success of the Negro as a Ball Player,” in which he sized up the game’s progress and its business with equal confidence. “Baseball is a business just as much so as banking or manufacturing,” he wrote, “and in order to be successful at either, one must follow the rules, laws and principles that have long ago been laid down by men who can spell success in half a dozen different ways.”

A few columns over, the famous humorist George Ade lent his own testimony, “written expressly for The Freeman.” “Experts here told me that Rube Foster has been for several seasons as good as any other player in America,” Ade reported from watching winter ball at Palm Beach, adding that he was “convinced that they play the game as well as the leading teams in the big leagues.”

The 1910 Leland Giants that Foster captained are remembered as one of the greatest teams ever assembled, and the rest of the page introduces them one portrait at a time. Foster himself kept building. In 1920 he gathered club owners in Kansas City and founded the Negro National League, and in 1981 the Hall of Fame put up his plaque. The Freeman had him figured out seventy years early.