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Rube Foster

Baseball is an outdoor sport in which a pitcher pitches a hard, fist sized ball to the hitting area of a batter. The batter hits the hard ball with a tapered, smooth, cylindrical bat made up of wood or metal. The batsman scores by running counter-clockwise within the four markers called the bases arranged at the corners of a diamond. Baseball is sometimes called hardball to differentiate it from similar games such as softball.

Rube Foster was born on 17 September 1879, Calvert, Texas. He was elected to Hall of Fame by Veterans Committee in 1981, Negro Leaguer. He was died on 9 December 1930, in Kankakee, Illinois. Foster then joined the Chicago Union Giants, pitched a shutout in his first start, but soon lost his effectiveness. He regained his form while with a white semi professional club in the Michigan State League, and defeated every team in the circuit.

In 1903 Foster was the top black pitcher in the country. He pitched the Cuban X-Giants to the black championship, and was the winner in four of their five victories over the Philadelphia Giants in the Black World Series. He pitched the Philadelphia Giants to the title, and recorded both victories in a best of three series against the Cuban X-Giants.

A player, manager, owner, commissioner and unsurpassed visionary, Rube Foster was one of baseball's greatest Renaissance men. In his youth, Foster was a star pitcher of the dead ball era, and later as owner manager of the Chicago American Giants, the burly Texan instilled in his players the daring, aggressive, yet disciplined style of play for which the Negro leagues became famous. In 1920, he founded the first successful Negro league, the Negro National League, which flourished throughout the decade.

Foster's last known public meeting was in 1926 with lifelong friends Ban Johnson and John McGraw, through whom it is believed he was trying to schedule white major league teams to play his American Giants. Shortly thereafter he began to lose his mind, and spent his last four years in the Kankakee, Illinois State Hospital.

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