Meet a Negro League All-Star who spent his twilight years in Milwaukee
Milwaukee has had a major league baseball team for all but four years since 1953, the year the Braves left Boston for the Midwest. After a short gap from 1966-69, the Seattle Pilots moved to town in 1970, became the Brewers, and the rest is history.
However, 1970 was not the first season that a professional baseball team called the Brewers was operating in Milwaukee. In fact, it wasn’t even the first major league team called the Milwaukee Brewers. A quick history lesson: in 1901, the American League, in its inaugural season, featured a Milwaukee Brewers team managed by the 34-year-old future Hall of Famer Hugh Duffy.* The Brewers finished dead last at 48-89-2, and after one year they moved to St. Louis, where they became the Browns. The Browns were a staple of the AL for 52 years, and in 1954 moved to Baltimore, where they became the Orioles team that we now know.**
*Aside from Duffy (who is the answer to a famous baseball trivia question, as he holds the highest single-season batting average in AL/NL history, .440 in 1894), there was no one on the 1901 Brewers that anyone except the most die-hard baseball history nerds would recognize. The position player with the second-most career WAR (after Duffy) was also its best player in 1901, an outfielder by the name of John Anderson, who had a solid career from 1894-1908 and had his best season by WAR (4.4) with the 1901 Brewers. The player aside from Duffy with the most career WAR was pitcher Emerson Hawley, known by his middle name, Pink. He won 167 games in his career and had a 10-WAR season in 1895 for the Pirates, but by 1901 he was washed up, even though he was only 28 (maybe because of the league-leading 444 innings he threw in that 1895 season), and he never played in the majors again.
**It should also be noted that the first Negro National League had a team called the Milwaukee Bears in 1923. The Bears went 11-42 (!) in their lone season in the NNL. They were managed by the 40-year-old Pete Hill (who is now in the Hall of Fame), who also occasionally played the outfield. The only other real notable player on this team was pitcher and outfielder Joe Strong, who had a good 15-year career in the Negro Leagues as a solid pitcher who also hit at about a league-average level, but he was only 20 in 1923. Even so, he led the Bears in innings pitched. The team could not hit at all: they had one player with an OPS+ over 93 who had more than 15 plate appearances.
But when the American League left them behind in 1902, the Brewers did not disappear. Instead, they established a team in the American Association that would stick around for 51 years. The minor leagues operated differently then, so the AA Brewers were independent for most of that time except for a brief run as the Browns’ Triple-A team from 1929-33. In 1946, they were acquired by Boston Braves owner Lou Perini, and they served as the Braves’ Triple-A team until the major league club moved to Milwaukee in 1953. (An entire other article could be dedicated to the years in the early 1940s in which the AA Brewers were run by the eclectic Bill Veeck. Maybe someday.) For fun, here’s a list of notable players who played for the American Association Brewers at one point or another:
- Hall of Famers Eddie Mathews, Al Simmons, Ray Schalk, and Ed Walsh
- “Happy” Felsch, one of the eight players banned in the Black Sox scandal
- Jim Thorpe, an Olympic gold medalist in the decathlon and pentathlon
- Al Dark, who had 43.9 WAR as a player (mostly as the Giants’ shortstop) and as a manager won a World Series (1974 with Oakland) and another pennant (1962 with San Francisco)
But the AA Brewer I want to discuss today is a hidden gem of a player, little-known today because of the color of his skin. Buster Clarkson, who was commonly referred to as “Bus” or “Buzz” during his playing career, was a legitimate star of the Negro Leagues in the 1940s. His major league career began in 1938 with the Pittsburgh Crawfords of the second Negro National League, and he stuck with them as they played in Toledo and Indianapolis over the next couple of seasons before settling in as the starting shortstop for the Newark Eagles in 1940.
As anyone who has tried to learn about Black baseball knows, numbers are tricky. But what we can tell from what we have is that in the early 1940s, Bus Clarkson was tearing up the Negro National League. After his switch to Newark shortly into the 1940 season, Clarkson has eight logged home runs in 22 games, which led that league. He spent 1941 in Mexico, where he finished second in the league in home runs (19 in 84 games) to the great Josh Gibson (who had 33 in 94 games). In 1942, Clarkson was back in the NNL with the Philadelphia Stars, leading the circuit in doubles and runs scored, and hitting .339/.419/.593 for a 179 OPS+. He is credited as that league’s leader in WAR that season.
But, of course, many careers during this period were interrupted by World War II, and Clarkson’s was no different. He spent what would have been his age 28-30 seasons in the U.S. Army. He finally returned to the Stars in 1946 and performed well, but while he had posted a 195 OPS+ from 1939-42, it was *just* 125 in ’46.
After that, Clarkson’s career in the major leagues was nearly finished, but his baseball story was not. When Jackie Robinson crossed the color line in 1947, Clarkson—who was 32 that season—was viewed as too old to be a viable prospect for major league teams, despite his good numbers. So instead, in 1948 Clarkson took his game to the Canadian Provincial League and hit .408 with 31 homers in 88 games.
That earned him a minor league deal with the Boston Braves, who sent him to the American Association Brewers in 1950. Despite Clarkson’s astronomical numbers, the team still didn’t view him as a real option at shortstop and instead asked him to move to third and help nurture the young prospect Johnny Logan, to whom he served as a mentor that season. When Logan got the call to the majors in 1951, Clarkson moved back to shortstop, and at age 36 he hit .343 and led the Brewers to the Junior World Series title (with the 19-year-old Mathews at third base).
Through the first month of the 1952 season, Clarkson was hitting .385 for Milwaukee, and the Braves could no longer ignore him. They made him a 37-year-old rookie when he made Boston’s roster, but it was clear that the Braves did not intend to use him regularly. Clarkson played only sparingly, mostly in pinch-hit duty, and he never got a foothold in the majors; he hit .200 in 28 plate appearances across 14 games and was back in the minors before the year was out.
Clarkson’s teammate George Crowe, another veteran of the Negro Leagues, felt that Clarkson wasn’t given a fair shake, and said it was a disservice to ask him to only occasionally pinch hit when he’d been an everyday player for nearly 20 years. And with Logan and Mathews on the left side of their infield, the Braves didn’t really have anywhere to play him, anyway.
While his brief encounter with Major League Baseball was a disappointment, Clarkson’s journey didn’t end there. He played in the Texas League in 1953 and hit .330, then hit 42 recorded homers split between two teams in the 1954 Texas League season when he was 39 years old. He finally retired in 1956 after two more years of minor league ball.
Clarkson was compared by Negro League pitcher Bill Greason to Hall of Famer Ray Dandridge, but the available numbers suggest that Clarkson was likely a far better hitter. Seamheads, the prominent database of numbers from Black baseball, gives him a 153 OPS+ across six major Negro League Seasons, while Baseball Reference has that number at 165.
Another way to attempt to evaluate these players is with Major League Equivalencies (MLEs), which try to approximate what a player’s production in one league would be in MLB based on a variety of factors. (It’s important to note that MLEs are not projections, they are simply a transposition of numbers from one league to another; they are widely used today to try to understand how players from, for instance, Korea or Japan might perform in the majors.) The most prominent MLE for Clarkson has his career WAR at 57.3 with a 132 OPS+, over 2,000 hits, and 279 career homers. Had Clarkson actually hit 279 major league homers, he would have been the career leader for home runs by a primary shortstop until Ernie Banks would have overtaken him in the early 1960s.
MLEs should, of course, be taken with a grain of salt, as should things like modern value metrics for players in leagues with sketchy data from 80 years ago. But it is clear that Clarkson was a star, and his time in a Milwaukee Brewer uniform—even if it wasn’t the one we’re used to—is a neat piece of Milwaukee baseball history.
A quick note about the photo that leads this article, which I found to be very cool: this is a 1942 shot of Borchert Field, at the corner of N. 8th Street and W. Chambers Street, which opened for baseball in 1888 and served as the home of the American Association Brewers for their entire existence, as well as the home for the Milwaukee Bears in their lone season of Negro National League ball in 1923 and the Milwaukee Chicks of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League in 1944. With a capacity of only 13,000, the park was deemed too small for a major league team, so County Stadium was opened with the arrival of the Braves in 1953. The site where Borchert Field stood is now underneath I-43.