“I said, ‘Is your grandpa Jim Proctor who played for the Detroit Tigers? And he also played in the Negro League for the Indianapolis Clowns and New York Black Yankees in 1955?’”
He said the surprised, young right hander smiled and asked: “How did you know that?”
Besides being a retired Air Force master sergeant and now a programmer at Wright Patterson AFB, Osborne is a lifelong aficionado of the Negro Leagues and has a considerable collection of former players’ autographs and league memorabilia.
Proctor had just joined the Dragons from the Daytona Tortugas, where, despite an injury that sidelined him six weeks, he’d had an impressive campaign with the Cincinnati Reds Low-A team in the Florida State League..
“My daughter and I were at the Dragons game and James was pitching and I looked at her and said, ‘Honey, he looks like somebody I know. That name is so familiar,’” Osborne recalled. “And halfway through the game, it hit me: ‘That’s got to be Jim Proctor’s grandson!’”
He was right and a couple of days later Osborne was back at the ballpark with a gift.
“He gave me a scrapbook – a full binder, really, with like 100 pages of info on my grandpa’s playing career,” Proctor said. “It was the best thing ever. It’s the most information I’d ever gotten on my grandpa.
“I looked through it all night. It was awesome!”
Among other things, Osborne had a 1955 program from a Clowns and Black Giants game and also the 1960 Topps rookie card of Jim Proctor in a Tigers’ uniform.
A couple of weeks later – when the season was over – James brought the book back home to St. Louis and gave it to his 86-year-old grandfather, who, he said, “loved it, too” and called Osborne.
As he had studied all the facts and stories in that binder, James’ appreciation of all that his grandfather had not only done, but endured, led to an even deeper respect.
Jim Proctor played in the days when Jim Crow laws enforced racial segregation in the South and took root in many places here in the North, as well.
“My grandpa had some rough experiences,” James said. “He’s told me stories over the years. He couldn’t stay in the same hotels as his teammates or eat at the same restaurants. People screamed and yelled all sorts of things at him during the game. They threw black cats on the field when he was pitching and there were threats before and after some games.
“When he finally made it to Detroit, he was one of the first blacks to ever play for the Tigers (following only Ozzie Vigil, Sr. who joined the team in 1958, a year before him.)
“My grandpa went through a lot. He’s got quite a story.”
The other day, Jim Proctor said the same thing about his grandson:
“He’s quite a guy. I’m really proud of what he’s done.”
After a stellar prep career, James – who was as good in the classroom as on the mound – went to Princeton University. But his career there was riddled with injury and he finished with a 2-16 record in college. Things had begun to turn around his senor senior, but COVID canceled that campaign.
Although he said he heard people say he didn’t have the stuff to be a pro ballplayer, he thought otherwise, as did the Reds’ scout in the Northeast, Lee Seras.
Cincinnati signed him as a free agent in 2020 and after the minor league season was mothballed because of the pandemic, he was sent to the Daytona Tortugas, overcame the oblique (abdomen) muscle injury and complied a 3-0 record with an impressive 1.60 earned run average over 45 innings.
That brought him to High-A ball in Dayton on Aug. 31. He started four late-season games and finished with a 4.41 ERA in 16 innings.
Now he’s part of the Dragons six-man pitching rotation and will make his 2022 debut Wednesday at Lake County in northeast Ohio.
Tom Nichols, the Dragons’ director of media relations and broadcasting, said Reds personnel have told him Proctor was throwing as well – if not better – than any of the Dragons’ starters, all of whom are high draft picks or valued trade acquisitions.
Jim Proctor was right about his grandson:
“He’s got a heck of a story, too.”
‘A horrible experience’
Jim Proctor – whose dad was a farmer and mother was a domestic worker – grew up outside of Brandywine, Maryland, and went to Maryland State University, an HBCU now known as the University of Maryland Eastern Shore.
A standout baseball player for the Hawks, he began his professional career in 1955 with the West Palm Beach Indians, a Florida State League affiliate of the Milwaukee Braves.
This was the time of segregation in Florida and he and Gilbert Hernandez Black were the only two black players on the team.
“We were riding in station wagons to a game and when the rest of the team went in to eat at a restaurant, we weren’t allowed to come in,” he said. “We’d only been there a short while and the manager says ‘Jim, you’re a real problem. We’ve got to stop different places to get you food. You’re too much trouble. We’re just gonna let you go.’”
The team did the same to Hernandez Black.
“I was really disappointed,” Jim said. “I had gone to college to help me do this and, even though it wasn’t for the right reasons, I felt I had failed.”
It wasn’t long before he got a call from the Indianapolis Clowns. They invited him to join their barnstorming tour and initially assigned him to the team that travelled with them, the New York Black Yankees, a revival of a Negro National League club from a few years earlier.
Eventually he became part of the headlining Clowns and it’s an experience he won’t forget.
“I remember we played once in a place in North Dakota where they’d never seen black people before,” he said. “When we got off the bus, the little kids at the ballpark starting running away, saying ‘’The (n-word) are here! The (n-word) are here!’ They were just seven or eight years old and they got all their friends to come down and look at us.”
Although it doesn’t sound very funny, he said, “I had to laugh.”
There were other times in his career where he wasn’t amused.
By 1956, he was back playing affiliated minor league ball and over the next six years he often found himself on teams based below the Mason Dixon line: from Augusta, Georgia, and Charleston, West Virginia, to Knoxville, Tennessee, and both Houston and Victoria in Texas.
Not only could he not stay in the same hotels and eat at the same restaurants as his teammates, but he couldn’t use the same water fountains and sometimes was banned from dressing in the same clubhouse or using the same ballpark shower room. On the team bus, he sat alone.
In 1959, he had a terrific season with the Knoxville Smokies in the South Atlantic League (Sally League.) He went 15-5 with a 2.19 ERA, striking out 131 batters and 181 innings and pitching 15 complete games.
“I was named the league’s pitcher of the year, but I got booed by the (home) crowd when I went to home plate to pick up my trophy,” he said.
The following year he said he was walking down the street in Houston when he saw the real trophy – a much bigger version than the one he’d been handed – he was supposed to have gotten. It had his name engraved on it and was being displayed in a department store window as part of a baseball promotion.
Late in the 1959 season he was called up by the Tigers, but he said it was “a horrible experience.”
He was told he was going to be used in relief and, even though he never got in games, he threw hard during bullpen warmups several days in a row in Washington, Boston and New York.
“Satchel Paige told me not to do that,” Proctor said. “He didn’t believe you should throw full speed in the bullpen. He said you should save it for the game. But I didn’t do that.”
When the team returned to Detroit, he ran one morning, but then at the last minute was told he’d be replacing Jim Bunning as the starter that day against the Chicago White Sox.
He wasn’t ready physically or mentally – and he also was battling a shoulder injury and was getting regular cortisone shots – and he didn’t pitch well in that first inning. It didn’t help when a veteran Detroit outfielder let a ball drop in for a hit when it should have been the inning-ending out.
Proctor was pulled from the game. After two outings at the end of that 1959 season, he never returned to the big leagues.
He did play a couple of more seasons in the minor leagues and had an interesting stop in Victoria.
When he wasn’t pitching well, the team owner asked what the problem was and he said: “You have no idea what my life is like off the field.”
He told of waiting in the bus, unable to eat with his teammates.
The owner then began to find restaurants outside of each town the team played in and would rent the entire place so the whole team – Proctor included – could eat together.
He said one other time in his career he was afforded such consideration: Buddy Hicks, a veteran white teammate in Charleston, routinely brought him sandwiches from the restaurants where the team ate.
After retiring from baseball, Proctor, his wife Peggy and their two sons lived near Washington, D.C, and he worked 23 years for Kodak.
In 1986, he moved to St. Louis and bought various properties and a McDonald’s restaurant.
One son, Michael, played basketball at Cornell, while the other, Mark – who is James’s dad – got his undergrad degree at Bradley and a masters at Purdue.
Mark’s wife, Dr. Linda Proctor, is a radiologist. And along with James, the couple has a daughter, Olivia, who is a lacrosse player at Harvard.
With that emphasis on academia, where does the baseball come from?
James started to laugh: “The family joke is that I’m my grandfather’s child.”
Ready to blossom
When he signed his contract with the Reds, James said the first person he called was his grandfather.
“I reached out to him and we had a moment on the phone,” he told a reporter afterward.
With the minor leagues shut down by COVID following his signing, he said he worked one-on-one with a pitching coach for several months: “I decided I was just going to try to outwork everyone and get better.”
The strategy paid off. His first month with Daytona, he was named the Low-A league’s Pitcher of the Month.
Now in Dayton – Proctor, who’s called “Proc” by his teammates – has two people who especially believe in him.
“I have a feeling he’s going to do well this year,” Osborne said. “He came in late last year and looked good. He’s a quiet young man, but I think his pitching will do the talking for him.”
Jim Proctor – who was a sidearm pitcher and at 6-feet and 165 pounds was much smaller than his 6-foot-5, 225-pound “monster” (his words) of a grandson – thinks James is ready to blossom:
“He’s running 95 to 96 on his fastball now, He’s got an unbelievable slider – they call them a cutter now – and he has a good curve.
“He’s got three strong pitches that are as good as any Major League pitcher’s right now. The question is: Can he put it where he wants to?’”
As for James, he knows one thing.
“It’s great to follow in my grandfather’s footsteps. Knowing what he went through, he’s been a big inspiration in my career. Now it’s my dream to go beyond what he did.”
His grandpa hopes that happens:
“He’s keeping the family legacy alive.”
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