Once compared with Ruth, John 'The Black Bomber' Beckwith is an overlooked legend
John Beckwith stepped to the plate, an unwieldy 38-inch bat hefted on his large, broad shoulders. Standing 5-foot-11 and weighing a muscular 230 pounds, Beckwith had the kind of power that would strike fear into any pitcher's heart. Facing the Cuban Stars inside cavernous Redland Field on May 22, 1921, Beckwith led off the second inning against Claudio Manela. With a mighty swing, the man known as "The Black Bomber" for his prodigious blasts lifted the ball over the left-field fence, clearing it with about 20 feet to spare before it landed atop a factory building across the alleyway. It was the first ball ever hit over the fence at the stadium, which had opened nine years earlier.
The few thousand fans in the stands -- newspaper estimates that day range from 2,000 to 5,000 -- went wild for the smash, with the Cincinnati Post reporting that they collected $65 as an impromptu bonus for Beckwith's history-making shot.
"Of course John Beckwith hit the ball farther than anybody," Holsey "Scrip" Lee, who pitched against Beckwith in the 1920s, told John Holway in 1976. "For power he was the hardest hitter I ever saw. I’d say Babe Ruth and Beckwith were about equal in power. Beckwith weighed about 230 pounds and used a 38-inch bat, but it looked like a toothpick when he swung it."
Ruth himself commented on Beckwith's Herculean power, saying, "Not only can Beckwith hit harder than any Negro ballplayer, but any man in the world."
With all that skill and such luminous words spoken about him, why isn't he remembered alongside players like Josh Gibson and Oscar Charleston? That's a harder question.
It certainly had nothing to do with the slugger's on-field performance. Beckwith was a career .349/.403/.584 hitter in the Negro Leagues, with 75 home runs and 403 RBIs in just 483 games -- numbers that are remarkably similar to those of Hall of Famer Willie Wells. Using Seamheads' similarity scores (their career stats for Beckwith differ from MLB's), Beckwith lines up neatly with three more baseball immortals in Rogers Hornsby, Joe DiMaggio and Alex Rodriguez. He broke the .400 mark in 1925 with the Baltimore Black Sox and reached double-digit home runs twice in his career, with one article -- likely using barnstorming and other games that aren't included in his Major League record -- noting that he led the Negro Leagues with 42 home runs in 1924.
The Afro-American called him "the terror of all pitchers" in 1925, and when he rejoined the Homestead Grays in 1926, his signing was heralded by the New Pittsburgh Courier as making the famous club "the strongest in the club's existence."
Though Beckwith was definitely known for his his menacing bat, he was no slouch in the field, either. Primarily a third baseman, he would also regularly line up at shortstop and catcher. Those are three premium defensive positions -- certainly not spots you'd put someone with an iron glove.
While that multi-position flexibility was surely a boon to each of his ballclubs, it's one potential reason why Beckwith's name has been forgotten by modern baseball fans. Lacking one position where he was traditionally associated meant that when some of the all-time greatest Negro Leagues lineups were constructed, his name was routinely left off.
"A lot of ways that the Negro League players are remembered over time was the all-time team from Cumberland Posey, the all-time team from the Pittsburgh Courier, the all-time team from Sol White, and [Beckwith] didn't have a position," Adam Darowski, the head of user experience at Sports Reference, said on the "Pod of Fame" podcast earlier this year. "In the Pittsburgh Courier poll, he was listed as a utility player."
It didn't help that he moved around so much, either. Though he had two brief stints with the famous Homestead Grays, Beckwith's longest consecutive stint was two-and-a-half seasons with the Baltimore Black Sox from 1924 until the middle of 1926. And that comes to a central issue: Beckwith was a difficult person to get along with, according to accounts from players and others.
"He wasn’t a rowdy guy, but he didn’t take any foolishness," Ted "Double Duty" Radcliffe said. "He would fight in a minute if somebody did something to him."
"He had great hitting power, a strong throwing arm, and a fiery temper," Elwood "Bingo" DeMoss noted.
And though Posey -- owner of the Homestead Grays -- wrote that Beckwith was "one of the easiest men to handle, and one of the game’s greatest players," in 1939, he had also written that "Beckwith was unable to fit into our organization, and we felt that we had to either let him go or ruin the morale of our club," when they released him in 1923.
He was suspended for making contact with an umpire -- the Afro-American noted that he had "several brawls" with umps -- and knocked out pitcher and teammate Bill Holland.
"Beckwith was moody, brooding, hot-tempered, and quick to fight," James A. Riley wrote in "The Biographical Encyclopedia of the Negro Leagues." As a manager, he "failed completely," the Afro-American wrote, and "dissension was soon rampant" among the ballclub.
Perhaps Beckwith wasn't the greatest teammate, but there have been plenty of malcontents, rogues and ne'er do wells in baseball's long history that are still remembered fondly by fans today. And Beckwith? Well, he had all the talent to star anywhere he wanted.
"If you made just one mistake to a man like Beckwith – just one wrong pitch," Bill Foster said, "the ballgame was over."