Ten Who Missed: No. 7, Turkey Stearnes
Happy Friday! Today we continue our “Ten Who Missed” series. “Ten Who Missed” is a companion to The Baseball 100 — it will feature 10 players who just missed The Baseball 100 (those 10 players were chosen by you in a survey that Tom Tango and I did a while back). We’ll have a new “Ten Who Missed” essay every Friday. Here are the ones we’ve had so far:
Bonus essay: Zack Greinke
No. 10: Vladimir Guerrero
No. 9: Eddie Murray
No. 8: Shoeless Joe Jackson
Everybody said they called him Turkey because of the way he ran. Norman Stearnes was apparently a sight to see when he was in full flight; he would bob his head and flap his arms a bit. After watching Stearnes run, there really was nothing else for the other players to do but call him Turkey.
Of course, nicknames were a vital part of the Negro leagues. A quick tour through James A. Riley’s essential Biographical Encyclopedia of the Negro Baseball Leagues gives you a nice sample — Fat Barnes and Skinny Barnhill, Ready Cash, Piper Davis, Strangler Forbes, Jelly Gardner, Jeep Jessup, Tin Can Kincannon, Ice Cream Linares, Biz Mackey (so named for giving hitters “the business” while they tried to hit), Satchel Paige (obviously), Double Duty Radcliffe (for pitching one end of a doubleheader and catching the other), Mule Suttles, Satan Taylor (though his mother loathed the nickname, so out of respect teammates started calling him Jelly Taylor), Trickshot Washington, Shack Pappy Young and the best nickname of them all, Cool Papa Bell.
The names meant something extra for many — some of the players would talk about how their nickname was like a second identity in that difficult time. They would suffer horrifying indignities off the field, but on the field, they were Monarchs and Giants and Stars, they were Bullet Joe Rogan and Smokey Joe Williams and Pop Lloyd and the Black Babe Ruth.
Turkey Stearnes, in an interview he gave late in his life, would say he did not get his famous nickname from the way he ran but rather from the potbelly he had as a boy. I asked Buck O’Neil about this once, and he said it was possible Stearnes first got the nickname as a child but then “it was quite a coincidence that he ran like a turkey.”
Here’s the thing about Turkey Stearnes and real turkeys — they’re both much faster than you would expect. Turkeys apparently can run 25 mph. And Turkey Stearnes, though he built his reputation as a power hitter, was one of the fastest players in the Negro leagues. There were some who thought he was as fast as Cool Papa Bell himself, the man so fast he could turn out the light and be under the covers before the room got dark.
“Cool Papa WAS faster,” Double Duty Radcliffe said. “But Turkey could go get those fly balls better than even Cool Papa. You couldn’t hit a ball over his head.”
At the plate, Stearnes had this crazy, wide-open batting stance. Remember Tony Batista’s wild stance?
Apparently, Stearnes’ stance was a little something like that, but from the left side. Plus he would dig his left heel into the dirt, the way kids do when they’re trying to create a makeshift football tee. It was like playing Baseball Twister. Turkey looked a bit like he had arrived at the game by accident and asked a spectator, “Pray tell, what sport is this?” And that someone then handed him a bat and told him to try and hit the ball.
But with that stance, Stearnes became one of the greatest power hitters in the history of baseball.
Negro leagues statistics are, as everyone knows, still incomplete. They can conceal as much as they reveal. But according to the brilliant research from the folks at Seamheads, the top five home run hitters in the Negro leagues were: