Negro League Career
He began his Negro league career in 1933 with the Brooklyn Royal Giants, then moved to the legendary Homestead Grays in 1934, the team he played for until his retirement in 1950. The Grays of the late 1930s through the mid-1940s are considered one of the greatest teams of any race ever assembled. Leonard batted fourth in their lineup behind Josh Gibson. Since Gibson was known as the "Black Babe Ruth" and Leonard was a first baseman, Buck Leonard was inevitably called the "Black Lou Gehrig." Together, the pair was colloquially known as the "Thunder Twins" or "Dynamite Twins". From 1937 to 1945 the Grays won 9 consecutive Negro National League championships. Leonard led the Negro leagues in batting average in 1948 with a mark of .395, and usually either led the league in home runs or finished second in homers to teammate Gibson.
In 1952, Leonard was offered a major league contract, but he believed that at age 45 he was too old and might embarrass himself and hurt the cause of integration. He may well have underestimated his own longevity, however, since he batted .333 in 10 games in the Class B Piedmont League the following year, and played in Mexico through 1955, where the level of play was very high.
Read more about this topic: Buck Leonard
Famous quotes containing the words negro, league and/or career:
“If the worker and his boss enjoy the same television program and visit the same resort places, if the typist is as attractively made up as the daughter of her employer, if the Negro owns a Cadillac, if they all read the same newspaper, then this assimilation indicates not the disappearance of classes, but the extent to which the needs and satisfactions that serve the preservation of the Establishment are shared by the underlying population.”
—Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979)
“I am not impressed by the Ivy League establishments. Of course they graduate the best—it’s all they’ll take, leaving to others the problem of educating the country. They will give you an education the way the banks will give you money—provided you can prove to their satisfaction that you don’t need it.”
—Peter De Vries (b. 1910)
“Like the old soldier of the ballad, I now close my military career and just fade away, an old soldier who tried to do his duty as God gave him the light to see that duty. Goodbye.”
—Douglas MacArthur (1880–1964)