Jim Lamarque

Jim ("Lefty") Lamarque was regarded as one of the best southpaws in Negro league baseball during the 1940's (The Negro Leagues Revisited by Brent P. Kelley). Jim was born in Potosi on July 20, 1920. In an interview, he said that in Potosi, "We had a black club and a white club. The white club's pitcher hurt his arm some kind of way, so they asked me--a black boy--if I would pitch for the white club. We only played a few games a season, but I played two seasons with them and we won most of our games. The Kansas City Monarchs heard of me and they wondered why a black boy would be pitching on an all-white team, so they got in touch with me and I came to the Monarchs in 1942" (Kelley 164). Jim Lamarque played for the Kansas City Monarchs for the next eight years. He said in an interview, "I almost quit the Monarchs my first year. I was 19 years old, homesick and tired of being the youngest player on a team of older players. Tired of being taunted as 'Dizzy's boy,' after Mr. Dizzy Dismukes, the road secretary of the team, the man who hired me. We were playing in St. Louis , just 72 miles from the tiny town where I was raised, Potosi, Missouri . So I stashed my bag under the bed and hid until the team bus was gone. Just as I was getting the bag out, Satchel Paige walked in. He was our top pitcher, and I had been living with him since I joined the team. He drove his own automobile to the games, and he told me just to throw that bag in his car and to get in and hurry up about it. So I did. And I'm awfully glad.

(Above) Kansas City Monarchs, 1946. Jim Lamarque, top row, 3rd from left. "Satchel taught me other things too. I got to be a pretty good pitcher because of him. Except once. See, I had this pitch, a drop pitch I called it. Never seen anyone else throw it. You grab the ball between your fingers and thumb and throw it hard as you can, and it turns end over end and drops just as it crosses the plate. Nobody wanted to hit against me because of that pitch. I'd throw it on 3-2 because I knew it would work. Well, one time I was facing Josh Gibson of the Homestead Graysthe best hitter I'd ever seen. They told me he had hit 75 home runs in a season. Well, I faced him twice, and I struck him out twice with that drop thing. Next time up, I had two strikes on him, and Satchel signals to me from the dugout, waste one. So I throw one shoulder high and out, but it was too close in. Gibson took that thing over the stands, over the park, over everything. Satchel just shrugged at me. 'Don't worry,' he said. 'He does me like that too" (Sports Illustrated, July 6, 1992).