July 2006, V99, n999

Date Posted: Jul 23, 2006

Charlie Smith - Lost in translation

By Patrick Obley

Charlie Smith stepped from the train and drank in the glorious, sun-drenched majesty of Pennsylvania Station. There was nothing like it back home in South Carolina.

It was 1925. America was caught in the embrace of the Roaring Twenties, and New York City was at the heart of the nation's love affair with good times and bad booze.

As a porter at Penn Station, ferrying bags hither and yon, Smith made more money in 1925 than he had in the previous 23 years of his life combined.

But hauling luggage wasn't his day job.

Creative scheduling freed Smith to play for the Pennsylvania Red Caps, a pro ball team in a loosely affiliated league consisting of Negro teams from train stations throughout the Northeast.

Unbeknownst to the baseball world, a star had just stepped into the game's batter's box.

But while history sometimes walks alongside greatness, documenting each stride with bold strokes, there are just as many occasions when history looks the other way.

For Charlie Smith, history was a distracted stranger who listened only half-heartedly while hustling by. Unlike Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, his contemporaries, Smith's wadded-up story had been shoved by history into a forgotten pocket.

Over the years, the facts of his life melted into a mixture of legend and error. What facts remain leave little more than an abstract and incomplete portrait of the man.

Historians believe Charlie Smith was born in Greenwood in 1903. Sports Illustrated in 2000 honored Smith as one of South Carolina's greatest athletes, reporting that he "batted .423 with Negro Leagues' New York Lincoln Giants (1924 to 1931)."

The South Atlantic League's Greenville Drive generously honor Smith as one of the Upstate's favorite sons, a man who figures prominently in the area's rich baseball tradition.

It is believed Smith succumbed to yellow fever, contracted during winter ball in Cuba before the 1931 season, his final resting place unknown.

The facts of Charlie Smith's life are as sketchy as those gleaned from a crumbling desert scroll. As such, accounts of his existence have been built on faulty assumptions.

The real truth, in this case, is far different.  Discarded last year during a special screening process that
represented his one and only chance to be inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame, Smith's real story is now threatened with a further fade into obscurity.

"He shoulda been on that list," said 94-year-old Kansas City Monarchs legend Buck O'Neil, who also was overlooked by the 12-person committee that found room in Cooperstown for 17 others. "He could play. He could hit the ball. An outstanding baseball player." When told of Smith's true history, O'Neil said, "There's a lot of people who need to know about Chino Smith. Tell the story."

He is the best Negro League baseball player you never heard of. A man whose diminutive size concealed a larger-than-life personality. A man who took a racial slur and turned it into a badge of honor. A man who savored a crowd's boos and rode mean spirits to towering heights.

Here, now, meet Charlie "Chino" Smith.