Nation’s First Black Baseball Team from Babylon

Long Island is known for many things: vineyards, the Hamptons, the Gold Coast, notable luminaries and starlets, but many are unaware that the Island is the home of America’s first black baseball team.

Getting its start in 1885 at Babylon’s Argyle Hotel, a group of young men were recruited to play ball by Frank P. Thompson, who was the headwaiter at the facility. Selecting players from the Philadelphia Keystones, another pro team of that time, to work at the hotel, baseball quickly became a form of entertainment for guests at the south shore getaway.

“Baseball as a game was transforming itself,” says Dr. Raymond Oswald, Vice President of Curatorial Services at the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum. “It was becoming much more of a game than what was being looked at by urbanites. Teams like that traveled across the region, kept the game popular and drew more interest to the sport and fans.

“This is an area of black baseball history that there is still fertile ground for more research. This is technically pre Negro Leagues and this team was an important first step towards the beginning of the Negro Leagues.”

Long before players like David Wright and Derek Jeter made New York baseball fans proud, George Parago, Ben Holmes, Shep Trusty, Arthur Thomas, Clarence Williams, Frank Miller, Billy White, George Williams, Abe Harrison, Ben Boyd, Jack Fry, and a man with the name Allen (records and photos are sketchy with this individual’s name) were Long Island’s stars on the diamond, representing the New York Cuban Giants as they would come to be known.

This “Cuban” moniker did not apply to anyone on the team, but Trenton’s Walter Cook, the team’s original promoter, felt a group of so-called Latinos would draw larger crowds than an all-black squad. In his book, “The Pride of Havana,” Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria wrote, “Lore has it that the original Giants called themselves Cuban to pass as Latinos and thus avoid some of the more virulent discrimination prevalent in the United States.”

He also reported that, “[the players] jived in gibberish among themselves while on the field to make people believe they were speaking Spanish.”

The Giants played games in Cuba in the winter of 1885-1886. Leslie Heaphy, in his book “The Negro Leagues: 1869-1960,” wrote that team manager S.K. Govern lived on the island of St. Croix for part of the year, so he was able to broker a deal to have them play in Cuba for a brief time.

The team’s stay in Babylon didn’t last too long, however. Cook and Govern moved the club to Trenton, New Jersey, suggesting that “they took advantage of the existence of teams of genuine Cubans, made up of players drawn from the substantial Cuban populations in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and other boroughs of New York City,” Echevarria wrote. 

The Argyle

Babylon, which still has a great vintage appeal, especially in its downtown main street area on Montauk Highway, was just out of the reach of Long Island’s resort range in the mid to late 1800s. When the Long Island Rail Road was developed and had stops at Babylon as early as 1867 that changed.

Long Island’s south shore began to build up and Babylon became a hot spot. Storefronts were erected, businesses began to boom and hotels rose in the dozens. The Argyle, which had 350 rooms, was the last of the hotels to be erected and was funded by a company run by Austin Corbin, who doubled as the president of the Long Island Rail Road. It was built on the property of Brooklyn railroad tycoon Electus B. Litchfield, who named his estate Blythebourne, and enjoyed acres of land, including a pond that eventually became Argyle Lake, according to the Babylon Historical Society.

Where does the name Argyle come from? One of the hotel’s original investors was the son of the Duke of Argyll, a title given to the head of Scotland’s most noble family for centuries.

By 1885, the hotel was a success, the staff was ready for something different and history was made when the team was formed.

Playing Ball

The members of the Giants made salaries equivalent to the money they made in their hotel jobs; pitchers made $18 per week, infielders $15 and outfielders $12. “For many players their salaries represented more money than they could make at more conventional jobs or even in some organized leagues,” Heaphy wrote. According to Dr. Oswald, there are many instances of baseball being a medium for social welfare at workplace facilities. From Birmingham to Pittsburgh, multiple teams were created for company purposes.

An Aug. 22, 1885 edition of the now defunct South Side Signal, which covered news in Babylon during that time period, reported the Argyle crew put a hurting on the National Club from Farmingdale in a 29-1 win. Another entry from the same paper on Oct. 10, 1885 said, “they were victorious in every game, and, encouraged by their success, on Monday played the celebrated Metropolitan team, and were badly beaten. The score was 11 to 3 in favor of the Mets. Several Babylon people witnessed the game.”

As a result of previous success, white promoter John Lang helped the new professional team from Babylon play an exhibition game against the Metropolitans, which was a professional baseball team in New York City that played at the Polo Grounds in the 1880s. Although the Metropolitans, which the modern day New York Mets were eventually named after in 1962, beat the non-Cuban Giants, the boys from Babylon went on to beat Bridgeport, the Eastern League champions at the time.

Babylon was home to the Cuban Giants from 1885 through part of 1887, when the team eventually left for Trenton. Riley wrote that the Cuban Giants won the world colored champions in 1887 and 1888, and annexed the eastern championship in 1894. “They were considered the top ball club of the era,” he wrote, “often playing as representatives of a host city in that city’s regular league. They were the first and most successful black professional team and remained a top attraction for the remainder of the century, generating imitation teams who copied their success and who appropriated a variation of the Cuban Giants’ name as their own.”

The Cuban Giants set trends, made the most historical history and built a legendary status on the Island of Long. Last year a stone was placed on the north side of Argyle Lake commemorating the men who played ball there some 125 years ago.