Earlier this week Wilberforce University President Elfred Anthony Pinkard made an exciting announcement that the long dormant Wilberforce Bulldog baseball program will be resurrected with on the field play beginning in the fall of 2022. For me, that means a…
Lorenzo “Lo” Ogden Now Playing First Base With the Heavenly Host When Lorenzo Ogden stepped on the Tuskegee Institute campus in1968, he was a tall, skinny kid off the sandlots of Birmingham, Alabama. He spent his summer days playing baseball…
Last fall, before the opening kickoff at professional football games played on week one of the season, millions of Americans were introduced to a hymn that has been an inspiration to this country’s African-American population since the early years of…
Major League Baseball has finally decided to recognize the now-defunct Negro Leagues as one of its own. The stigma of being outside of what was called “organized” baseball is no more. In one form or another, the game that has…
Editor’s Note: In conjunction with the timing of what would have been the College World Series season, I was asked by Ryan Whirty to prepare a story for his wonderful website, The Negro Leagues Up Close. This story originally appeared…
This is the third installment during Black History Month of HBCU Baseball Historical Hi-Lites in “trading card” format. In his only year of college baseball, Tommie Agee earned National Intercollegiate Athletic Association (NAIA) All-American honors finishing third in the country…
This is the second installment during Black History Month of HBCU Baseball Historical Hi-Lites in “trading card” format. In July of 1974, in a surprise move to most, it was announced that South Carolina State College (now South Carolina State…
This is the first installment during Black History Month of HBCU Baseball Historical Hi-Lites in “trading card” format. While Johnson C. Smith University and Livingstone College have not supported baseball programs since well before the mid-twentieth century, the two rival…
In spite of baseball’s obsession with statistics, records and “firsts”, I’ve yet to see any documentation about the first individual to transition from HBCU baseball to the Major Leagues. If you know the name Jackie Robinson, then you’ll probably know…
While looking through the Official NCAA Baseball Guide of 1973 for some unrelated material, I stumbled across a stat that I had not included in any of my previous updates on the good old days when HBCU’s dominated NAIA baseball. Inadvertently…
