My name is Sam “The Mitt” Carter, Covering the Negro Nine

My name is Sam “The Mitt” Carter, and if you have followed colored baseball long enough you may have heard that name called out from behind the plate somewhere between Kansas City and Birmingham. For a good many seasons I worked the catcher’s trade, squatting in the dust while pitchers tried to slip fast ones past the best bats our game has known.

A catcher sees a great deal of baseball. From that crouch you watch the whole field breathe — the pitcher’s nerves, the runner’s jump, the batter’s plan before the swing ever starts. You learn the rhythm of a ball club and the quiet courage it takes to keep a season moving from town to town.

The knees grow older in time, as they do for any man who has spent years in shin guards. When the catching days ended for me, I did not step away from the game. I simply changed my seat.

These days you will find me with pencil and paper in hand, keeping account of the clubs and players who make up the Negro National League, and most especially the fine ball club here in St. Louis known as the St. Louis Stars.

This page in Bird Chatter is where that record will live.

Each week I will report what the Stars have done upon the field — the games won, the close contests fought out under summer sun, and the men whose bats and gloves make this club worth the price of admission. The larger daily papers do not always spare much ink for our league, but the crowds at the turnstiles know the truth: the colored game is rich with talent and worthy of careful telling.

So this column, which we are calling The Negro Nine, will serve as the running account of that baseball life.

You will read here of the Stars and their rivals, of the long rail journeys our clubs take across the Midwest, of the lively crowds that gather when a good ball game is promised, and of the men whose skill makes the Negro leagues a proud branch of the national pastime.

I aim to keep the story straight and the ledger honest.

Baseball deserves that much, and the men who play it deserve it more.

So if you wish to know how the Stars fare in this year of 1926, and how the Negro National League unfolds across the summer months, you will find the account here each week.

And remember this:

When you want the true keeping of St. Louis Negro League baseball in this year of ’26, you come here.

— Sam “The Mitt” Carter