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Carl Long

Carl Long
Birmingham Black Barons, Negro League Baseball

Kinston Eagles, Carolina League Baseball

Carl Long is the husband of Ella Long and the father of Cynthia Sparks (James) Teresa Whitfield and Pastor Sotello V. Long (Dee). He loves God, family and baseball!!!

He resides in Kinston, NC. It has been said, that "Carl's a true trailblazer," by North Johnson, Director of Baseball Operations. "A trailblazer in every aspect of the word, not just in what he did for baseball in Kinston, but what he has done and continues to do for the city in so many ways."

Long, who made his debut in the Negro Leagues with the Philadelphia Stars at age 15, is a captivating story teller of his days as a player. The South Carolina native later achieved a high level of success playing the outfield as a star center fielder for the legendary Birmingham Black Barons.

He was named to the Negro League All-Star team in 1953. He set the record for batting in 111 runs in a season for Carolina League baseball. He also played on the Pittsburgh Pirates minor league baseball team. Long eventually broke the color barrier, becoming the first black player to play for the Kinston Eagles in the late 1950's before a shoulder injury cut his career short. He has been inducted into the Negro League Hall of Fame in Washington, DC and He was inducted into the Kinston Indians Hall of Fame!

If you want to find out more about the history of Negro League Baseball, speak with Carl about his experiences during that time or ask him about those other famous players he met we all love.

CARL R. LONG

Born: May 9, 1935

Birth Place: Rock Hill, SC

Position: Outfield

Bats: Right Throws: Right

Carl Long played for the Birmingham Black Barons and was a star center fielder. He was named to the All-Star team in 1953. He set the record for batting in 111 runs in a season for Carolina League baseball. He also played on the Pittsburgh Pirates minor league baseball team. He was the first black player to play for the Kinston (North Carolina) Eagles Triple-A minor league baseball team. He has been inducted into the Negro League Hall of Fame in Washington, DC!!

If you want to find out more about the history of Negro League Baseball, speak with Carl about his experiences during that time or ask him about those other famous players he met we all love.

Negro League Baseball

1951 Nashville Stars

1952-53 Birmingham Black Barons

Prevention League Baseball

1954 St. John’s Quebec, Canada

Minor League Baseball – Pittsburgh, Pirates

1955 Pioneer League, Billings, Montana

1956 Kinston Eagles, Kinston, NC * 1st Black player in the Carolina League

1957 Mexico City

1957 - 58 Beaumont, TX

Professional Accomplishments

First Black Baseball Player in the Carolina League

First Black Deputy Sheriff in the city of Kinston

First Black City Detective in the city of Kinston

First Black Seashore/ Trailways Commercial Bus Driver

Kinston Indians - Carolina League Baseball Hall of Fame Inductee: Feb. 7, 2003

Negro League Baseball Hall of Fame Inductee: May 12, 2003

Played with Willie Mays…against Henry Aaron and Charlie Pride.He was a good long ball hitter with a good strong and accurate throwing arm!

Loo Oates In Uniform

Atlanta Braves Minor League Camp

Loo Oates

Courtesy of News and Sports January 3, 2007

Loo Oates Aboard Big Red With The Indianapolis Clowns

by: John Devard

The early days

Loo Oates traces his early baseball skills to the footsteps of his father, Jack Oates, his uncle, T-Meat Raynor and much older players like Bruce Bennett who taught him the ropes around the sandlots on his way to becoming a member of the Indianapolis Clowns, and his pitching coach, Charles Middlebrooks, who was instructmental in him eventually ending up in the Atlanta Braves farm system.

I played in a summer league in Newton Grove when I was 12 or 13' said Oates. I was playing with guys in the army, in college and guys 18 or 19. They threw me to the wolves and made me play.

Not only was Oates a tremendous hitter, he was the "ace" of the Clowns staff who threw three or four times a week, winning almost 100% of his games. "Oates estimates he won maybe 30 games his first year." In high school (Carver High School) Oates says he only lost maybe two-three games.

Baseball was so important to Oates, that he would help his cousins and neighbors with their chores so they could play ball. Our entertainment on the weekend was church and baseball stated Oates.

Back then baseball was like a religion to black people.

During the summers, Oates, whose father knew he had the talent to be a baseball player, would go to a camp in Ocean City, New Jersey run by the Philles and play, working at his uncle's service station to earn money.

High school

Upon his return to Carver, his desire to play baseball was intensified by a teacher's unwitting remarks.

She said something to me you should never say to a10th-grader. She said. "you should forget about that nonsense of playing baseball. Go down to that pickle plant and get you a job. To this day, I will not eat pickles. I knew I was either going to play baseball or go to college.

Becoming a Clown

Oates arrived at the Clowns camp with 300 other hopefuls, but only 40 made the two teams and a player had to be versitable by playing more than one position. But from the outset, the Clowns owner would not let Oates do anything but pitch. He used him to sell programs and do the PA announcements. The star attraction, Nature Boy Williams, traveled with his own car, a pink caddy convertible.

Oates arrived with a devastating fast ball, a nasty curve and with the break of camp, had been assigned to the Clowns main team. He credits pitching coach, Charles Middlebrooks with teaching him the slider to complete his arsenal, which made him almost un-hittable. Like the Harlem Globe Trotters, the Clowns carried their own team, The New York Stars. That's when the main star, "Nature Boy Williams," made the statement, "O", you got to take it easy on the stars, or you have to pitch for the A team... scolding him about striking out the stars."

Oates and the rest of the Clowns were forced to sleep in jails or wealthy blacks home. Oates very seldom had to do the jail scene, because he was on the A-Team, but like the rest of the team, they would make sandwiches to avoid being denied service in restaurants and most times would time their arrival at their destination shortly before game time. Oates states, that the movie, Bingo Long and The Traveling All-stars was a great take-off of the Clowns, with Sam"Birmingham Sam" Bryson and Dero "The Dwarf" Alston playing roles in the film.

Showing out

The part Oates liked best about playing with the Clowns was, when the seventh, eighth, and ninth batter came to the plate, he would called the infielders/outfielder in and they would lay around the infield chatting while he struck out the side. The salary was okay said Oates, who made between $600 and $800 a month. The showman like Nature Boy Williams commanded much higher salaries.

Oates wanted to be in the minors

From the very beginning, Oates had a contentious relationship with Clowns owner, Ed Hamman. Hamman was known for overpricing the contracts of his players, Oates recalled. He knew that the Braves tried to purchase his contract from Hamman before the Clowns broke spring training camp his first year. Hamman even had me riding with him in his car to games stated Oates. I guess that was a way to keep me close.

Sold to Atlanta

But after playing for the Clowns for two years, Hamman finally sold Oates contract to the Braves for $10,000. Before Oates would report to the Braves camp in Waycross Ga. on the advice of his pitching coach, Charles Middlebrooks, Oates refused to report and Hamman eventually gave him $1.000.00. Oates never spoke to Hamman after his contract was sold, and in conversations, he finds any mention of Hamman distasteful. Another reason Hamman wanted Oates on the A-Team, Oates surmised that he wanted to keep him away from Middlebrooks, still a very good pitcher, but a savvy veteran who knew the ropes and took Oates under his wings. He was accused of favoring Oates, by pitching him more than the other pitchers. Middlebrooks simple explanation was. "He's my ace.

Saying goodbye

Oates eventually developed arm trouble,and finished his career playing in Canada, but had to retire due to arm trouble,"which he contributed" to the many games pitched for the Clowns. He pursued his educational goals at Long Island University in New York and studied anthropology, simply because "people told me I couldn't do it." Oates did do it and, after earning an MBA from Adelphi, and studying law at Brooklyn Law School, he went on to star with the great Brooklyn USA famed softball team in Brooklyn New York in the 70's.

For Oates, playing with the Clowns was the beginning of his education. When I left the Clowns I had played in 40 states, Canada and Mexico," he said. I took away a full understanding of what you had to do, understanding the next level of playing ball and the next level of playing life.

In retirement

Today, Oates is retired due to health problems, from the company he founded in 1989, the Black Pages Today Network, relinquishing the reins to his daughters, but continues to write a weekly column and is working on a book "The Boys of Big Red" a look at the life and times of an Indianapolis Clown. Once you do your best, that's all you can do stated Oates.

On The Internet:

http://www.theboysofbigred.com

The Oates Report: www.loooatesreport.com

Hubert Wooten
Courtesy of The News Argus
Through the eyes of a Clown: Hubert Wooten was among the last of the barnstormers.

Hubert Wooten doesn't have any photos of himself from the old days, when times were tough and glorious all rolled into one. He has no baseball cards that captured the likeness of a much younger Wooten -- Daddy Wooten -- as he was called four decades ago, and no statistics showing that the kid could hit, run and throw.

What he does have are golden memories.

Memories of the long nights on the old bus, Big Red. Memories of the four years he was with the "Harlem Globetrotters of baseball." Memories of playing with and managing baseball great Satchel Paige, the ageless Hall of Famer who was perhaps 50 years his senior.

And memories of a dream.

"If we had any sense, we would have kept stats, and we would have taken pictures of the guys," says Wooten, now 61. "But we were out there just trying to get to the next level. We wanted to make it to the big leagues, and the rest of it didn't matter.

"As long as we played that day."

Wooten, who was born in Goldsboro on Sept. 6, 1944, and graduated from Carver High School, played from 1965-68 with the last of the barnstormers, the Indianapolis Clowns.

The Clowns, best known for their comedy routine, were the longest-running franchise in the Negro League. By the mid-1960s, they were the only team left. So they were always on the move, taking seemingly endless road trips.

"We had this bus called Big Red, I'll tell you we slept on it," he recalls. "We'd play a game, say in Milwaukee, then we'd go like 300 miles, check into a motel long enough to take a shower and go to the field for a doubleheader. We'd play one at two, then played another that started at seven that night. We'd go back to the motel, go to sleep, check out early that morning, get back on Big Red and jump 200, 300 more miles.

"Always on the bus."

Like the Globetrotters, the Clowns always had a big following.

"When we pulled up in a town, people were all around Big Red, wanting to see the Clowns," he says with a smile.

They were there to see the talented players, and they were there for the show. A show where the catcher would perhaps play his position from a rocking chair, where buckets of confetti were thrown into the stands, and where firecrackers found their way behind an unsuspecting umpire.

And there was the world-famous shadow ball, where the Clowns would play the game in slow motion -- with crazy antics, at times -- with an imaginary ball.

"We'd put on a show," Daddy Wooten recalls. "After seven innings, we'd do the shadow ball, we'd do a little dance to the Harlem Globetrotters music, 'Sweet Georgia Brown.' We had special guys who were really good at that, like Nature Boy, Birmingham Sam, Bobo, Steve Anderson, the one-armed fellow. We had firecrackers that we'd light behind an ump, they would explode and he'd jump up.

"It was really comical and people really enjoyed it. We also had a good time, and we had a chance to play every day."

He always

had power

Daddy Wooten wasn't a big man by any means -- he stands just 5-foot-8 ("maybe 5-foot-8 1/2," he laughs). But there wasn't a ballpark that could hold him if he got into a pitch.

"I've always had power and people wonder how," he says. "And I'd tell them, 'It happens when you work on a farm.' When I was a youngster, I had to cut wood, I had to walk behind that mule, and I had to take two 50-pound bags of fertilizer, one in this hand and one in the other, and carry them across the field. I didn't get my power in the gym, I got my power on the farm."

Wooten played ball his junior and senior seasons when Carver High started a baseball program.

When he graduated, he went to a baseball school in West Palm Beach, Fla.

He signed a minor league contract with the Vero Beach Dodgers in 1964 where he pitched and played in the outfield.

"I went over there and they said, 'You're raw, you have good talent but you need to play every day,'" he said. "Then they sent a letter to Ed Hamman, who owned the Clowns, and he sent me a ticket to meet me in Chicago.

"After meeting Ed, I signed with the Clowns."

With the Clowns, Hamman helped Hubert Wooten get his nickname.

"Daddy Wooten, that's what they called me," he says. "One time, I hit a ball off the wall, and Ed was standing over there, he was laughing and said, 'That's the daddy.' And Sandy Perkins said, 'Yeah, we're going to name him Daddy Wooten.' And that name just stuck."

Daddy Wooten loved to play every position. Well, almost every position.

"I played all positions except one, and that was catcher," he says with a smile. "They made a mistake once and I had to get back there. All our catchers were hurt and they had one coming in, and I had to get back there. We had a fellow on the mound that day who was about 6-foot-6 and he could throw 95-96 mph and we were in Nebraska. And I'll tell you, he'd throw, they'd swing, I'd close my eyes and the ball would go by. I walked all night. I told Ed, 'The only plate I want to get behind is one with food on it. And when it's gone, I'm gone.'

"So I played all positions in the infield, I'd play outfield and I could come in and relief pitch every night -- It didn't bother my arm."

At the plate, Daddy Wooten was a good hitter with some pop.

"I had good power, good speed, good arm," he said. "There was no park that we played in I couldn't hit it out of. In Pittsburgh, at old Forbes Field, I hit one over the scoreboard in left field, which was about 75-feet high."

He doesn't know what his stats were during his tenure with the Clowns, but Wooten has a pretty good idea.

"If I was rounding it off, I probably batted about .310, .315 in my four years there," he said. "I hit maybe 12, 14 home runs a year. We played a lot of local clubs who were loaded up with All-Stars -- you were going against the best."

But the Clowns were no slouches, either. In fact, Wooten says he can only remember the team losing four times -- in four years.

"We had a good team ourselves, I'd say it would have been a good Double-A or Triple-A ballclub," Wooten says. "We had some outstanding ballplayers."

Managing Satch

During his final two years with the Clowns, Daddy Wooten served as player/manager of the team.

In his first season of managing, one of the biggest names in baseball hooked on with the Clowns -- ageless pitcher Satchel Paige.

The Hall of Famer's birthday is often listed as July 7, 1906 -- which would have made Paige 61 (the age Wooten is now) in 1967 -- but no one really knew for sure.

Not even Daddy Wooten.

"I asked him one time, 'Satch, how old are you?' And he said, 'I'm a good way from 100, but I'm older than 75,'" Wooten recalls.

"He wouldn't tell me."

But no matter how old Paige was, the man could still play.

"He could still throw the ball," Daddy Wooten said. "We were at old Comiskey Park and he told me to get behind the plate and a photographer was standing behind me. He was throwing strikes on the corner and the man said, 'Can you believe his eyesight is that good to see this far?' I said, 'That old man never ceases to amaze me.'

"He had a pretty good fastball still, he could throw the scrooge and he showed that hesitation pitch he was famous for. And he was very knowledgeable about the game, he'd try to help you -- and that was the good thing about him."

Satch had respect for his young manager, too.

"My problem was they were saying I wasn't tall enough," Wooten said. "Matter of fact, Satch told me one time, 'I'll tell you what, if you had been about 6-feet with your power, your speed and your arm, there's no way in the world you'd be out here, you'd be gone. The only thing you weren't gifted with was height."

Paige even compared Wooten with another Negro League legend and a Hall of Famer.

"Another time, Satch and I were sitting on the bus, he took his teeth out and he said, 'Boy, let me tell you something, you are built about like Josh Gibson was,'" Wooten says. "He said, 'But you ain't going to hit as hard as he did.'"

Living on peanut

butter and jelly

Hubert Wooten didn't play for the money, which was a good thing.

"You weren't making any money," he says. "But you weren't thinking about money. All you were thinking about was catching the eye of some scout.

"After every two weeks, you got paid. Depending on what type of ballplayer you were, some would get $150, some $250, something like that."

That type of money didn't lend itself to fine dining and upscale restaurants.

"You see, during that time, you got meal money, perhaps 15 dollars, and made it last all week," Wooten says. "The guys would get together and get some bologna and peanut butter and jelly. People don't understand now, but that bologna and peanut butter and jelly was pretty good back then."

Where the Clowns bedded down at night was also, at times, an adventure. The things we went through during that time, especially in the South, the blacks couldn't stay uptown," Wooten recalls. "One time in Montgomery, Alabama, we slept in a funeral home. Can you believe that? Some places in Mississippi, Georgia, we'd stay with well-to-do black people."

But he wouldn't trade any of it. "It was tough, but it was an enjoyable life. I don't think $2 million could have carried me to the places I went, the things I did and the people I met. "Would I do it again? Sure I would, I'd go right back out there -- hoping."

Kannapolis man recalls seasons in Negro Leagues

Courtesy of the SALISBURY POST REMEMBERING THE GLORY DAYS: Kannapolis resident Willie Sheelor played baseball in the Negro American League some 50 years ago.

KANNAPOLIS — Willie Sheelor just can’t help but smile when he talks about opening the mailbox and finding someone has written asking for his autograph or sent him a baseball to sign.

“Makes me feel like I’m important,” he says, chuckling. “Makes me feel good.”

Sheelor, a 73-year-old Kannapolis native, and men like him have gained importance the past several years as baseball and black America look to reclaim a once-neglected piece of their shared heritage.

Sheelor played four seasons — four glorious, sun-drenched summers — for the Memphis Red Sox of the Negro American League. From 1952 to 1955, he started at second base for one of the last all-black teams in the last all-black league.

Though his playing days came after the heyday of the Negro Leagues, after Jackie Robinson broke in with the Brooklyn Dodgers and broke down organized baseball’s color barrier, the memories lack no luster for Sheelor.

“We played it because we loved it,” he said recently at his home on Beaumont Avenue in the Little Texas Community.

Sheelor graduated from high school in 1947, the same year Robinson became the first black player to take the field for a Major League Baseball team.

Robinson’s success opened the dugout for other black players in the mainstream game, signaling the end of Jim Crow baseball, and with it the eventual demise of organized blacks-only teams.

The once-thriving and profitable Negro Leagues, which at their height included American and National leagues with teams all over the country, immediately felt the blow.

Attendance dwindled as Major League teams siphoned off talent from the Negro Leagues and black fans started following the on-field exploits of Robinson and those who followed him.

By the early 1950s, most Negro Leagues teams had batted around for the final time, leaving a handful to play in a reorganized American Negro League.

For half a century, blacks played in the shadow of organized white baseball.

Teams with names like the Kansas City Monarchs, the Baltimore Elite Giants and the Homestead Grays, as well as the Memphis Red Sox and the Birmingham Black Barons, could count on loyal and proud fans.

For 30 years, they had their own leagues, their own World Series, their own All-Star Games.

Sheelor was born in a section of Kannapolis known then as “Georgia Town.” His father labored at Cannon Mills, the textile giant that built the mill village, and his mother cleaned houses.

Sheelor played basketball at Carver High, the black high school in the segregated system, but Carver didn’t have a baseball team. So he got his hardball experience in local sandlot games.

After graduation, he followed his father to the mill, where for decades just about any young Kannapolis man who wanted to could find work. He spent his days loading boxes onto trucks in the shipping department.

Life wasn’t all work, though. Sheelor joined an amateur baseball league with teams in Concord, Charlotte and other area towns that played on Saturdays. He stayed in that league until the summer of 1952.

A scout walked up to Sheelor after a game in Kannapolis that year and asked if he’d like to play professional ball.

“He just asked me would I be interested in leaving home and playing for the Memphis Red Sox,” Sheelor recalled. “And I hadn’t heard of no Memphis Red Sox at the time.”

He’d never been away from home, either. The offer to travel, getting paid to do something he loved, sounded pretty good.

“I told him I would if my mother agreed to it,” he said.

She said yes, and the next day the scout drove Sheelor to Memphis, Tenn., to join his new team.

Sheelor arrived at the Memphis ball park in April, about a month after the season started, and he played the following day.

Six weeks later, he took over as the team’s starting second baseman.

Summers in the Negro Leagues were busy. The team played almost every day during the March-to-September season and rarely stayed in any town more than a day. After games, the players loaded up on the team bus.

“Sometimes we had to ride all night to get to the next town where we played,”Sheelor said. “I really enjoyed it, though, seeing different towns, how different people lived.”

Before games, the team would ride around town in its bus advertising that day’s contest.

Many teams had their own ballparks, while some shared fields with white minor-league teams, Sheelor said. A black doctor owned the Red Sox, who their own stadium, and a nice one, he said.

Some teams weren’t so fortunate. Sheelor remembers playing in some parks where only a low-lying wire fence marked the end of the outfield, a hazard for players chasing long fly balls.

Pulling into a new town, the team would stay in a boarding house because most motels wouldn’t rent rooms to blacks. Most gasoline stations where they fueled the bus wouldn’t let them use the restrooms, either.

“A lot of times, we had to stop on the side of the road and hit the woods,” Sheelor said.

But Sheelor says he doesn’t recall much more about the racism he and other black players faced, doesn’t really care to. He remembers the game, mostly, and the feeling of being a hero, at least to some. “It seemed like people respected you more,” as a professional ballplayer.

Sheelor doesn’t know if any records of his statistics still exist. A resurgence in interest in the Negro Leagues has hit hurdles because of poor record-keeping.

And though he can’t remember his pay exactly, he knows it was more than he made working in the mill, where he returned to the loading dock during the off-season.

But it wasn’t just the money that kept Sheelor’s mind on Memphis during those winter months hefting heavy boxes. It was baseball.

“I couldn’t wait ’til the summer to go back,” he said.

Sheelor didn’t immediately return home after each regular season. He joined teammates and other black players on barnstorming tours.

A tradition in the Negro Leagues, barnstorming allowed players the chance to make extra money by staging exhibitions and splitting the gate receipts with organizers.

Before integration, teams of black all-stars would travel the country playing white all-star squads. By the time Sheelor broke in, that had ended and only black major leaguers returned for the exhibitions.

During those tours Sheelor played against a young outfielder named Willie Mays, who starred for the New York and San Francisco Giants and is enshrined in the Baseball of Hall of Fame.

Mays reigned on the base paths, Sheelor said.

“He stole bases ’bout all the time, and he could hit the ball good,” he recalls. “We always tried to trick him — pitch out and catch him off base — but we never could.”

Sheelor also wonders at the memory of a young Hank Aaron, who played for the Negro Leagues’ Indianapolis Clowns before moving on to the Milwaukee Braves of the National League.

Aaron already displayed the prowess in the batter’s box that he’d use to hit 755 home runs and set the all-time career record in the Major Leagues.

“He hit the ball out of the park two or three times a game,” Sheelor said. “He was something, I tell you.”

Not all the eventual all-stars Sheelor knew gained their fame at home plate or in the field. A young man named Charley Pride pitched two years for Memphis and roomed with Sheelor for a season.

Sheelor remembers Pride, now a country-music icon, bringing his guitar on the bus and leading the entertainment between towns. He also recalls him as a tough, determined ballplayer.

“If a team beat him today, he’d be wanting to pitch the next day; he didn’t give up,” Sheelor said. “He always told us he was going to be somebody, and it happened.”

It’s not hard to imagine Sheelor patrolling his turf between first base and second, diving to rob a batter of a sure single or snatching up a sharply hit ground ball and starting a double play.

Though gray hair wanders out from beneath his cap and a gray mustache sneaks off to the corners of his mouth, he still moves easily on his wiry second-baseman’s frame.

And he still smiles easily, and laughs often, when talking about his diamond days.

His professional baseball career ended after the 1955 season, but it was effectively over more than a year earlier. In 1954, Sheelor suffered a broken leg sliding into home plate in the eighth inning of mid-season game.

Sheelor scored the winning run but collided with the opposing team’s catcher, who blocked the plate as hard as he could. Sheelor spent the rest of the season in Kannapolis, recovering.

During that time, he met Helen, who would become his wife. When he returned to Memphis the next summer, the leg bothered him all season, and it still hurts sometimes.

After the ’55 season, he came back to Kannapolis for good. He married Helen, they had three sons and he worked for Cannon Mills for another 37 years.

Sheelor came along late in the game, after famed Negro Leagues pitcher Satchel Paige became the oldest rookie ever in Major League Baseball, after black stars like Roy Campanella and Ernie Banks made the leap into the mainstream.

At 5-foot-9 and 160 pounds, he wasn’t much of a long-ball threat. And though he could field with the best of them, he says, the major league scouts were looking for power hitters and great pitchers.

If he has one regret, it’s that he never got the chance to compete against some of those guys and against white players. He would “love to have played against the best.”

Still, he adds, what he didn’t do doesn’t tarnish the few summers he got paid to do something he would have done for free.

And on reflection, he says, “I love the game ... Back then, I was just glad to play.”

Register for the 2nd Annual Negro Baseball Legends Golf Tournament, September 13, 2008 at the Goldsboro Municipal Golf Course in sunny Goldsboro, NC

2007 Winners

1st Place

2nd Place

3rd Place

Tiniest Golfer...Chyna Cox