Sol White Marquee Hall of Fame 2006

His playing record here is 74 hits at .303 across 63 recorded games between 1891 and 1907, and it is a fragment. He played for a decade and a half in the years before any Negro league existed, when a season was whatever bookings a club could get, and none of it falls inside the leagues the archive counts.

He was an infielder who moved between shortstop, first base and second. He also managed, most successfully the Philadelphia Giants of the early 1900s. The record is thin because these statistics were not kept with the resources the white major leagues had, which is the same reason his book mattered.

The History of Colored Base Ball came out in 1907 and is the reason a good deal of the nineteenth-century record survives at all. He died in Harlem in 1955, poor and largely forgotten. The Hall of Fame elected him in 2006 through the special Negro Leagues committee, fifty-one years later.