"King of the Monarchs": Bob Kendrick and Pete Gorton on the great John Donaldson

Black Diamonds

SiriusXM

History, Baseball, Black History, Sports, Negro Leagues, Documentary, Equality, Society & Culture, Civil Rights

4.8 • 617 Ratings

🗓️ 26 August 2021

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Bob Kendrick discusses the life and legacy of possibly the most talented man to ever pick up a baseball, the great John Wesley Donaldson, from his fourteen career no-hitters (3:14) to his 5000 career strikeouts, his electric fastball (5:19) to his arsenal of pitches the world had never before seen, and from his pitching career spanning 38 years and 700+ cities (6:39) to his groundbreaking hire as the Major Leagues' first Black scout (9:10). Then, Pete Gorton of The Donaldson Network stops by (15:42) to discuss his two decades of research into the life of John Wesley Donaldson.

Transcript

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0:00.0	14-0 hitters 5,000 strikeouts.
0:11.0	He's the pitcher whose numbers were almost too dominant to believe.
0:15.1	That poor me a drink, man, make me believe that.
0:20.0	5,000 for a career.
0:22.5	This is the story of the greatest of them all,
0:25.5	the king of the monarchs,
0:27.6	the legendary John Wesley Donaldson.
0:37.1	James Leslie Wilkinson, who owned the Monarchs, and who had a team called the All Nations prior to that,
0:44.5	had always had a stable of great arms in his pitching rotation.
0:50.4	We're talking about players like Leroy Satchel Page, the great Wilbur Bullet Rogan, who we've talked about on this show.
1:02.9	Jose Mendez, Hilton Smith.
1:06.7	They all have something in common.
1:08.9	They're all in the National Baseball Hall of Fame. J.L. Wilkinson
1:12.7	believed that John Donaldson was the greatest of them all. This dominant, left-handed hurler could do it all.
1:20.5	And Wilkinson carried him all over the country. And he might have been a little bit more partisan to Donaldson because Donaldson
1:29.9	became a hard head and made Wilkie a lot of money. But when J.O. Wilkinson says that he was the
1:36.4	best of that bunch, that certainly is caused to pay attention. He played against virtually everybody and anybody he was allowed to play
1:48.2	against, both because he loved it and it was how he made a living. And not many were better at it.
1:57.0	Yet he's a player that most baseball fans have never heard.
2:03.1	Former Negro League's pitcher Robert Scott.
2:06.2	The younger board players that came along behind, I sit around 59, 60,
2:13.4	when the Major League really started to take black players in.
	...

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