Download or read book Early Black Baseball in Minnesota written by Todd Peterson and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2014-01-10 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Though they played in the years before Rube Foster formed the first Negro League, the St. Paul Gophers and their bitter crosstown rivals, the Minneapolis Keystones, had the talent, bench depth, and determination to rival many of those later, better known teams. (The Gophers, in fact, beat Chicago’s celebrated Leland Giants in 1909, laying claim to blackball’s western championship.) Focusing on these two clubs, author Peterson lays out the early history of African American baseball in the Upper Midwest. Included are new statistics and more than 50 rarely seen photographs.