 02/07/2003 2:18 pm ET
Colored Gophers made history
By Mark Sheldon / MLB.com
MINNEAPOLIS -- Awareness about the history of Negro League Baseball and its legacy to the game has increased in recent years, but little is known about some of the teams that were around even before the league formed in 1920.
Exactly 40 years before Jackie Robinson broke Major League Baseball's color barrier and 54 years before the Minnesota Twins came into being, the St. Paul Colored Gophers were formed in 1907.
The Colored Gophers lasted just four seasons as an independent barnstorming club of black players. According to Fred Buckland, a member of the Society for American Baseball Research, the team didn't last long because it had trouble keeping its players from defecting. Many headed south to bigger cities like Chicago.
"It was part of the growing of the league and the formulating of markets -- and which ones worked and which ones didn't," Buckland said. "Chicago worked and St. Paul didn't. They were establishing where they were going to market their trade. They settled on cities where they could make money or least where the players would want to stay."
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