Tournament features auction with items signed by oldest-surviving Negro League baseball players

The auction, held annually the evening before the Stevie’s World of Wiffle Ball tournament in Springfield, raises money to support disabled or ill children and their families and include signed photos, balls, bats or helmets from Fernando Tatis, Jr., and Cincinnati Reds Jake Fraley, Spencer Steer and Jeimer Candelerio.

The Saturday tournament at the Local 402 Park will feature a replica of Rickwood Field, where the Giants and Cardinals played June 20 in a tribute to the Negro League history, adding Rickwood to a Stevie’s collection that includes Fenway Park, Wrigley and Crossley fields and the Dayton Dragons stadium.

Since February’s announcement of the June 20 game in Birmingham, Ala., Greason, a Baptist pastor, said he has signed more baseballs than he did in his professional career.

Among his Black Barons teammates was Hall of Famer Willie Mays, whose death two days before the celebratory game underscored the Negro leagues’ significance in baseball history.

Greason and Mays played together in the final Negro league World Series in 1948, the year after Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier.

He and Mays “started at the same time,” Greason said in a phone interview from his Birmingham home.

Greason said that when the “Say Hey Kid,” started his rookie season with the team, he could run and field with the best of them, “but he had a problem at the beginning with hitting.”

“In less than a year’s time” with the Barons, Greason added, Mays had solved that problem and left his mark his that final Negro league world series, as did Greason, the starting and winning pitcher in one of the games.

And it was at Rickwood Field on Sept. 3, that Greason celebrated his 100th birthday.

Tom Craig, a member of Bethel Baptist Church, where the Rev. Greason has preached for 50 years, said that a new set of pacemaker batteries has revitalized him.

Craig is part of a rotating group of church members who help Greason in his still active daily life, one that has been crucial in Craig’s.

“I was one that really came up without a father,” Craig said, a role Greason assumed.

Four years ago, Craig was named Greason’s power of attorney and stepped in when a flood of baseballs were sent for Greason to sign in the run-up to the celebratory game.

“It just almost overwhelmed him,” Craig said, but now has now slowed to “half a dozen a week.” That’s enough to let Greason know he’s not forgotten at a time when he says, “all the fellas that I played with are gone,” including his favorites, Black Barons teammates Davis and Artie Wilson.

Craig, who takes Greason to his “doctor business and haircuts and outings” says Greason remains “pleasant and jovial about 60 percent of the time” but that he enjoys him on those other days as well. Like the rest of the Bethel congregation, he also listens attentively during the brief sermons Greason continues to deliver each week.

Although he describes himself as “tremendously blessed,” he doesn’t forget that in his brief stay with the Cardinals, Manager Eddie Stanke “only spoke to me once, and that was a little cussing on the mound, adding: ‘I cussed him back. I wasn’t a Christian back then.”

Nor was his brief relationship with fellow teammates like Jackie Robinson’s, whose teammate Pee Wee Reese, famously stuck to his side.

In an atmosphere in which other Cardinals “didn’t want to be seen with a Black … For two weeks I didn’t touch a ball or nothing.”

The experience was similar for Teasley, who this year told the Detroit Free Press “(Negro League legend and Hall of Famer) Buck Leonard spoke to us after we were released, and he told us that Black players were not going to be kept by Major League teams as bench players. “You had to be Hank Aaron or Willie Mays to make it at that time …. and it was devastating at the time.”

Still people in his native Detroit remembered his contributions.

Daughter Lydia Teasley said she was in fifth or sixth grade when r her gym teacher took note of her last name, said “wait a minute” and asked whether she was related to Ron Teasley.

When she said yes, two things happened: She “got away with murder” in gym class and started appreciating her father’s legacy.

She’s now part of the Negro Leagues Family Alliance, a group of about a dozen families, including those of stars Josh Gibson, Buck Leonard, Rube Foster and Satchell Paige – all of whom “just kind of advocate for each other and our legends.”

Ms. Teasley just tied up the details of a Sept.26 visit to a Toledo Mudhens game with Vanessa Ivy Rose, granddaughter of Norman “Turkey Stearns,” a center fielder who hit .348 in 22-year career with six teams, among them the Detroit Stars, Chicago American Giants and Kansas City Monarchs.

Her father, who lives 10 minutes from her, was unable to attend the game because of limitations imposed by age. On the other hand, his .500 season batting average still stands as the record at Detroit’s Wayne State University.

“One of the (Wayne State) seniors had met my dad and said, ‘I’m coming for your record Mr. Teasley.’”

Teasley, who has taught her Montessori kindergarten students about her father over the years is now seeing her the Teasley great-grandchildren do projects on him for Black History celebrations at their schools.

And among the many honors bestowed on him as a star athlete and successful coach of 35-years, his official list of accomplishments also includes “since 2020, (being officially recognized as) a Major League Baseball Player.”