The tragic story of a forgotten Negro Leagues phenom

In the old newspaper photo, Walter “Dobie” Moore points to where the bullet struck him.

Sitting on the steps in front of a home with his crutch leaning against the porch, Moore has his left pant leg rolled up, his fingers touching the brace on his shin. We can see he’s wearing slacks, a dress shirt and a newsboy cap. But the image of the man described in the Sept. 11, 1943, edition of the Chicago Defender as “ONE OF THE BASEBALL GREATS” is too grainy to make out his face.

Perhaps that’s appropriate.

After all, the details of Moore’s baseball life -- and the circumstances surrounding its abrupt ending -- are similarly difficult to decipher. Much like Roy Hobbs in “The Natural,” Moore was mysteriously shot by a woman -- possibly a lover -- and cut down in his prime. But unlike Hobbs, he did not have a redemptive ending, a blood-stained blast into the lights.

Instead, Moore, hobbled and no longer able to dominate on the diamond the way he once did, faded into obscurity and died of a heart attack at the young age of 51.

So all we are left with to piece his story together are the memories left behind by those fortunate enough to have seen him play and the scant photos and scattered stats dug up by those dedicated to the important task of Negro Leagues research.

While it might not be much, what we have is enough to conclude that Moore was the best shortstop you’ve probably never heard of -- a legend in his era whose time was much too brief.

“He was an important player,” said Negro Leagues researcher Phil S. Dixon. “At shortstop, I would put him up there with John Henry Lloyd.”

As in Pop Lloyd, the Hall of Famer.

So Dobie Moore is a name you should know. And a story you should hear, grainy though it may be.

Walter Moore was born on Jan. 9, 1895, and died on Dec. 6, 1977, in Mableton, Ga.

And Walter Moore was born on Feb. 27, 1890, and died on April 1, 1963, in Rome, Ga.

Neither of those Walter Moores was Walter “Dobie” Moore. They were both white.

For years, however, the baseball-playing Moore’s Wikipedia page pointed to the birth and death dates of the first erroneous Walter Moore, and his entry in “The Biographical Encyclopedia of the Negro Baseball Leagues” pointed to the birth and death dates of the second.

Finally, in 2007, a reader of researcher Gary Ashwill’s Agate Type blog found an “Old Man’s Draft” registration card from World War II at a National Archives regional facility that lists a Walter Moore born on Feb. 8, 1896, in Atlanta and living at the time (1942) in Detroit, just a few blocks from where Comerica Park now stands.

That’s our Walter Moore.

As you might imagine, if it was that difficult to find Moore’s actual date of birth, details of his upbringing are similarly shrouded in fog. We do know he had five siblings, including a younger brother who played at least a few games for the Birmingham Black Barons and was known as both Allen Moore and Pete Moore, depending on the newspaper source.

According to Moore’s Society for American Baseball Research biography, penned by Sports Reference director of design and project management Adam Darowski, Moore had only a third-grade education and was described by several sources as “illiterate.” Little else is known about him until we get to May 11, 1915, when Moore enlisted in the U.S. Army at Fort Oglethorpe in Georgia.

Eventually, he was stationed on the Hawaiian island of Oahu with the 25th Infantry Regiment, one of four all-Black Army units known as the “Buffalo Soldiers.” This was how, in 1916, Moore came to be a member of the “Wrecking Crew,” or “Wreckers,” the unit’s baseball team.

Four years before the Negro National League (the first of the Negro Leagues) was founded, the Black soldiers playing for the Wreckers enjoyed a steady paycheck and chance to showcase their skills. And the team was stacked, including future Hall of Famer Bullet Rogan and Oscar “Heavy” Johnson, who would become one of the premier power hitters in the Negro Leagues. Wreckers was an appropriate appellation for a club that destroyed virtually every Army and civilian squad that visited its home field, Athletic Park.

“The team had around 15 [future] Negro Leaguers on it,” said Darowski.

While researching Rogan and Johnson, Darowski became fascinated by the Wreckers and began to learn about Moore.

“Interestingly enough, it’s probably easier to find information about his days in the Army than in the Negro Leagues,” Darowski said. “He was stationed there from 1916 to 1918, and almost every box score is in the papers and searchable from Newspapers.com. So I just found them all and tabulated the stats.”

Those stats say the right-handed-hitting Moore, then playing at third base, hit .265 with a .415 slugging percentage in the 79 games for which box scores were found from his time on the island. He was named a Service League All-Star by the Honolulu Star-Bulletin in 1918, but that season was cut short when Moore and the rest of the 25th Infantry were assigned to Nogales, Ariz., to guard the first permanent border wall constructed on the United States-Mexico line.

The trail of box scores runs dry once the Infantry left Hawaii, but Moore became the team’s starting shortstop in 1919, also competing in the broad jump and 440-yard relay at an Army track meet that year.

It was in November 1919 that Moore possibly aced an audition of sorts. Then-Pirates outfielder and future Hall of Fame manager Casey Stengel brought a traveling team of Major and Minor Leaguers to Nogales to play against the Wreckers at Camp Little. The 25th Infantry won three of the five games played, and Moore was described in one report as the “sensation of the afternoon’s playing” on the first day, clubbing a home run in the first game and a grand slam in the second.

It's possible, though unconfirmed, that it was Stengel, a Kansas City native, who recommended several of the Wreckers, Moore included, to J.L. Wilkinson, owner of the charter Negro Leagues franchise known as the Kansas City Monarchs.

Whatever the case, when Moore’s Army career wrapped in 1920, he was Kansas City-bound.

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Formed primarily from Wilkinson’s All Nations barnstorming team and the 25th Infantry Wreckers, the Monarchs quickly established themselves as a power in the nascent Negro National League, a rival of league founder Rube Foster’s vaunted Chicago American Giants.

Moore was still serving in the Army when the Monarchs’ inaugural season began, but he joined the club in early July, after he was discharged, and became their starting shortstop. He was known not as Walter but as “Dobie,” a nickname likely originating as a variation of “doughboy,” itself a nickname for infantry soldiers.

Dobie soon became a star for the Monarchs.

“He was an incredible hitter, incredible baserunner, incredible defender and, of course, he did it all at the shortstop position,” Darowski said. “He was basically the Alex Rodriguez of the era.”

Reports from Moore’s early years with the Monarchs include tales of the times he hit home runs over the scoreboards in Topeka, Kan., and Fort Scott, Kan., as well as the time he hit a pair of homers so deep into the cornfields in Benedict, Kan., that farmers had to wait until harvest time to recover the balls.

Beyond his pure power, Moore could catch up to just about any pitch thrown his way, a classic “bad-ball hitter.”

“I’ve seen them throw a curveball to him, break in the ground, bounce up, and he hit it all upside the fence,” Monarchs catcher Frank Duncan once said.

In addition to his plate prowess, Moore’s play in the field drew raves.

“Moore is one of the fleetest shorts seen at Rickwood [Field] this year,” wrote the Birmingham Herald, referencing the historic ballpark that will host an MLB game between the Cardinals and Giants this summer. “[He] covers all the ground around the keystone and short.”

Moore worked hard on his defensive skills, mastering the position with the help of Monarchs manager José Méndez. Teammates told the researcher Dixon that Moore would play a deep shortstop, positioning himself on the edge of the outfield grass and making the throws with his powerful right arm.

And Moore was tough. In a 1922 game against the Kansas City Blues, he was struck above the heart by a line drive, briefly knocked out and, against the advice of physicians on hand, opted to stay in the game.

There was no letup for Moore. And no offseason, either. In the winters, he played first in the integrated California Winter League, which included many future Hall of Famers from the American and National Leagues, and later for the Santa Clara Leopardos in the pre-revolutionary Cuban Winter League.

With teammates such as Oscar Charleston, Duncan, Johnson, Eddie Douglass, Dave Brown and other Negro League stars, Moore was the starting shortstop on a Leopardos team that is the stuff of Black baseball legend. In the winter of 1923-24, he led the Cuban League in hits and triples while batting .386. It was around that time that he married a woman named Frances Davis.

When the Monarchs reached the first Negro World Series against the Hilldale Club in 1924, Moore made his presence known. He went 12-for-40 in the series for a .300 average that was second only to Rogan’s .350 mark. He helped turn the series around with a 3-for-4 performance in a 6-5 victory in Game 6, had three more hits in a close win in Game 8, and singled and scored the first of five runs to break a scoreless tie in the decisive Game 10. The Monarchs prevailed, five games to four with one tie. Moore would star again in a World Series rematch with Hilldale a year later, leading the Monarchs with a .364 average (8-for-22), though this time Kansas City came up short.

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By 1926, when Moore got off to a hot start by hitting .400 through the Monarchs’ first 17 games, there was no question that he was one of the Negro Leagues’ best and brightest. On May 18, he went 2-for-7 in a 15-inning win over the Cuban Stars. And as was standard practice, the Monarchs went into party mode that night.

“These guys knew how to hang out,” Dixon said with a chuckle.

Here’s where the story gets really hazy.

Monarchs pitcher Chet Brewer told Negro Leagues researcher John Holway that, while most of the team was at a party for the Monarchs players and their wives, Moore was out with “that woman.” He was referring to a 22-year-old named Elsie Brown.

Brown was not Moore’s wife. She’s the woman who shot him.

Accounts of how that happened that night vary. In Dixon’s book “Wilber ‘Bullet’ Rogan and the Kansas City Monarchs,” it is reported that several Monarchs players wound up at Brown’s residence on the city’s East Side. Moore would later tell authorities that he went to Brown’s place looking for a friend and was mistaken for a prowler by Brown, who fired a shot at him.

Brown initially confirmed this story, only to later give a different statement to the prosecutor’s office that she shot Moore in self defense after the two had a fight in which he struck her in the face, eye and back of the head. Moore refuted that story, saying Brown only told it because she believed it would get her out of trouble, even though he had no intention of prosecuting her.

“Why, man, if I had hit her, she would never have been able to lift a pistol,” he is quoted as saying in a Kansas City Call report on the incident.

Dixon said the story “on the street” is that Brown was Moore’s ex-girlfriend. Some reports have claimed that the residence was actually a brothel that Brown owned.

All we know for sure is that Moore was shot in the left leg and his tibia and fibula were shattered into six pieces. We can’t even say for certain if it was the bullet that did that damage or if it happened when he jumped from a second-story balcony to avoid a second shot, as has also been reported.

The conflicting reports from Moore and Brown deeply complicate Moore’s legacy.

“[Brown’s allegation] does impact how I feel about [Moore] as a person,” Darowski said. “This puts a cloud over that. But there’s nothing else in his record before this that would point to Dobie being a terrible person. I have to weigh that, as well.”

Soon after the incident, Brown fled Kansas City and moved 250 miles away to Anthony, Kan.

“She got so harassed she had to move,” Dixon said. “[Moore] was a favorite in Kansas City, especially during that time. The Monarchs were big stuff, and a lot of people were gambling on the games. So he was big stuff, too. So I’m not surprised she changed her story to put more blame on him. But she still left town.”

As for Moore, he told teammates and reporters that he would be able to mount a comeback from the shooting. But it never happened. His leg did not heal properly, and he’s said to have walked with a significant limp for the rest of his life.

“Kansas City actually had some pretty good Black doctors back then,” Dixon said. “But if they couldn’t help him, I don’t think anybody was going to be able to help him. It was a tragic end to a great career. And it really hurt the Monarchs.”

The team stumbled immediately without its star shortstop, losing three of the next five games against the Indianapolis ABCs. Though the Monarchs did claim the first-half pennant, they were lackluster in the second half and fell to the Chicago American Giants in the Championship Series that preceded the World Series. The following season, they finished outside of first or second place for the first time in their history.

Though the Monarchs would recover to be the Negro Leagues’ longest-running clubs -- and one of the most successful and famous ones -- Moore faded out of view. He spent several more years in Kansas City before moving to Detroit to look for work. There were rumors of a “stiff-legged first baseman” named Moore who played semi-pro baseball in Detroit in the 1930s, but that’s not confirmed. While researching another player for a SABR bio project, Darowski stumbled across a report of Moore returning to Hawaii to play, but it's likely another player was confused for him.

To add to the confusion, there were reports in 1948 of Moore serving as a pallbearer at old teammate George Carr’s funeral in Los Angeles and of Moore being robbed on a Chicago street.

These would seem unlikely, considering the records point to Moore passing away a year earlier.

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Moore now rests in a grave in Detroit Memorial Park in Warren, Mich., beneath a tin marker inscribed only with a number (1768). But it is a credit to his importance to the game that so many researchers have poured so much time into uncovering every reference to him, correct or otherwise.

Thanks to this effort, we have a decent statistical snapshot of his career.

The Seamheads Negro Leagues Database includes numbers from 476 of Moore’s games with the Monarchs, crediting him with a .346/.389/.519 slash line, 35 homers, 121 doubles, 398 RBIs and 69 steals. His 151 OPS+ is 51% better than league average. Despite the brevity of his career, his 24.4 Wins Above Replacement, per Baseball Reference, is the fifth highest of any position player in the original Negro National League from 1920-31. And his 8.7 WAR per 162 games played is the highest recorded for a shortstop, ahead of Hall of Famers Willie Wells (7.7) of the Negro Leagues and Honus Wagner (7.6) of the National League.

“The numbers you’re looking at, if you enjoy those numbers, just think how much more you’d enjoy his total story,” Dixon said. “The guy could play.”

Stengel once called Moore “one of the best shortstops who will ever live,” and Hall of Famer Cumberland Posey called him “the peer of all shortstops, colored or white.” Wilkinson’s son, Richard, said Moore was every bit as good as Jackie Robinson.

When a screening committee of prominent Negro League historians convened to come up with candidates for a special Black baseball election for the Hall of Fame in 2006, Moore made the final 39-person ballot. But he was not one of the 17 who were inducted.

“How would you like to explain to the press,” a voter reportedly asked author Steven R. Greenes, “that Dobie Moore’s career ended with a [tragic] shooting?”

And so, a man who quite likely would have been posthumously feted in Cooperstown, N.Y., had his career continued is instead, sadly, reduced to a relative footnote.

“I think he’s a player that needs to be known,” Darowski said. “He is a complicated case, but that makes him interesting and important to baseball history.”

He was “one of the baseball greats,” as the Chicago Defender stated above that grainy image that served as the last accurate reference to Moore in his lifetime -- a tribute appropriate in both its message and its murkiness.