Tom Alston

[GeoPoto]

We have previously highlighted the lives and baseball cards of the men who became the first black men to play for one of the 16 MLB franchises. Several of these men have been inducted into the MLB Hall of Fame. Several others had MLB careers long enough for them to appear on a substantial number of baseball cards, photographs, and other memorabilia. Today we focus on a player from a third group: players whose time in MLB was brief, resulting in a limited number of collectable items. Today's focus is on: Thomas E. "Tom" Alston. First baseman for the St. Louis Cardinals in 1954-1957. 66 hits and 4 home runs in 4 MLB seasons. He only got significant playing time in 1954 as he posted a .317 OBP in 271 plate appearances. He was the first black player to play for the Cardinals.

I only have two cards that feature Alston. Today and tomorrow, I will borrow excerpts from Alston's SABR biography and show the two cards I have. If anyone has Alston items in their collection, I would love to see them. For anyone interested in more on Tom's mostly troubled life and MLB career, I recommend the excellent SABR biography written by Warren Corbett:

Tom Alston tried to hit big-league pitching while hearing voices, battling chronic fatigue, and carrying the weight of being a racial pioneer in a Jim Crow city.

Alston, the first African American player for the St. Louis Cardinals, spent most of his life in torment and poverty. He never escaped the grip of mental illness that ended his baseball career.

Besides the pressure to make it in the majors and to be “a credit to his race,” Alston faced the added burden of being the most expensive black player ever. The Cardinals paid the Pacific Coast League’s San Diego Padres more than $100,000, plus four players, for his contract.

His debut in 1954 came seven years after Jackie Robinson’s. That year, for the first time, a majority of the 16 major league teams had black players, although those players made up less than 6 percent of the rosters. They were no longer an experiment, but not yet commonplace.

The Cardinals were latecomers to integration. Front-office executive Bing Devine said the owner from 1947 to 1953, Fred Saigh, refused to sign black players. There was a widespread belief that St. Louis was, in many ways, a Southern city. In the mid-1950s many of its stores and restaurants refused to serve black customers. The Cardinals, with baseball’s largest radio network blanketing the Midwest and South, had cultivated white Southern fans. Their ballpark was the last in the majors to abolish segregated seating.

When Anheuser-Busch bought the franchise in 1953, August A. Busch Jr. noticed the absence of black faces and ordered his baseball staff to find some. Busch was no civil rights crusader; he was an equal opportunity capitalist who wanted to sell his beer to everyone regardless of race, creed, or color. The Cardinals hired Negro League veteran Quincy Trouppe as a scout and signed more than a dozen African Americans in the first year of the Busch regime. The talent search eventually led to Alston. . . .

[Collectorsince62]

That's a lot of pressure to put on a young man. The Cardinals opened the 1954 season at home for one game. Alston played first base for all nine innings that day. I have the scorecard but I couldn't get the scan to upload. He made an error on the very first batter of the season. He also went 0-3 at the plate. (Wally Moon had a better debut, homering in his first career at bat.) After another one-game series in Milwaukee in which Alston did not play, the Cardinals headed to Wrigley for a pair of weekend games against the Cubs.
Alston must have liked the Friendly Confines since he homered in both of those games. His Sunday homer was a three-run pinch hit.

[GeoPoto]

Alston appeared in four games in the first weeks of the 1957 season, but his behavior had become too erratic to ignore. “I felt people were looking at me funny,” he said later. He had lost 15 pounds, down to about 175. Musial said, “The poor guy is so weak the bat seems to be swinging him.” The club sent him to a doctor, who put him in a hospital for treatment of what was described as “a nervous condition.”

The first time he saw a psychiatrist in the hospital, Alston recalled, “He didn’t ask no questions or nothing, just administered shock treatment.” He rejoined the team in September and went 4-for-13 in five games.

The Cardinals wanted him to stay in St. Louis for additional treatment, but he went home to live with his father. He never returned to baseball. In early 1958 he was charged with assault with a deadly weapon and served 30 days on a chain gang before the balance of his sentence was suspended.

After midnight on a September night, Alston went to the New Goshen Methodist Church, splashed kerosene around the sanctuary, and burned it to the ground. He gave several explanations over the years. Once he said the voices told him to burn the church because the congregation needed a new building. Another time he said he had argued with one of his sisters and torched her church out of spite.

When daylight came, police arrested Alston and a judge ordered a psychiatric exam. He was found mentally incompetent to stand trial. Dr. John W. Turner testified that the defendant was schizophrenic and was dangerous during his “paranoiac phase.”

Alston spent the next eight years in a state psychiatric institution. His discharge in 1967 turned out to be premature; two months later he set fire to his apartment and was committed again. Released in 1969, he continued taking medication and making regular visits to a mental health clinic for the rest of his life. In interviews in his later years, Alston was sometimes lucid, sometimes rambling and barely coherent. He never married or held a steady job, subsisting on Social Security disability benefits.

North Carolina A&T inducted Alston into its sports hall of fame in 1972. He occasionally showed up on campus to give batting tips to varsity players. By 1990 the 64-year-old was living in a nursing home when former Cardinal Joe Garagiola heard of his hardships. “When I called Tom Alston, he could hardly believe it,” Garagiola said. “He was so lonely.” Garagiola was one of the founders of the Baseball Assistance Team (B.A.T.), which provides financial aid to needy players and their families. With B.A.T.’s help, Alston was able to move into an apartment of his own.

As a result of Garagiola’s outreach, the Cardinals invited Alston to throw out the first ball at a game in June, recognizing his place in their history. Fans welcomed him with a warm ovation. The club also arranged for him to earn some money at an autograph show. “I had more fun that visit than I ever had when I was playing,” he said.

Alston contracted prostate cancer and spent his final months in hospice care. He died at 67 on December 30, 1993. . . .

. . . Alston never said publicly that he had been mistreated in baseball. His tombstone celebrates his time in the game; it is decorated with two birds on a bat, the Cardinals logo.

[Chris Counts]

I picked up this piece not for the presence of Tom Alston, but Charlie Peete — an even more elusive Cardinal from that era who also had a tragic story.

[GeoPoto]

That's a great item, Chris, thanks for posting.

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