I've oftentimes talked about the stark parallels between the Negro leagues and historically black

colleges and universities and the deep-rooted connection that the two have. Oftentimes,

Negro League players have been portrayed as vagabonds, hobos, illiterates. They were just doing

whatever they could to try and make a living playing baseball.

Well, that is truly a misnomer. One of the little known but very profound factoids around the

Negro Leagues is that a remarkable percentage of Negro League players were indeed college-educated athletes. Nearly 40% of them

were college-educated athletes. As my friend Buck O'Neill would oftentimes share to the

amazement of those who would be listening to him, less than 5% of

those who played in the major leagues at that particular time during that era of American segregation

had any college education. And there was a reason behind it because the major leagues

quite simply did not want them

to go to college. They wanted to grab you right out of high school, put you into their farm

system, and then have you work your way to the big leagues. Well, the Negro Leagues didn't have

that kind of sophisticated foreign system. So what did they do? They oftentimes trained on the campuses

of historically black colleges and universities,

and thus would play the black college baseball teams and would recruit a great deal of their

workforce from those HBCUs. Names like 1952 rookie of the year with the Brooklyn Dodgers, Joe Black, attended Morgan State

University. Hall of Fame pitcher, one of the greatest left-handed pitchers in Negro

League's history and one of the greatest left-handed pitchers in baseball history, the great

Willie Foster, would attend Alcorn

college at that time. My dear friend, the late great Monty Irvin, who could have been the first

man to walk on the moon in the major leagues, matriculated at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. My dear

...