Baseball
The Avon Park Black Tigers
The town's own team in the years of segregation
Before Avon Park sent anyone to the major leagues, it had a team of its own that the record books nearly forgot. The Avon Park Black Tigers, reported in the papers of the day as the Avon Park Tigers, were an all-Black town team that played in central Florida’s segregated semi-professional circuits through the 1940s and 1950s.
The team
The club was a community team, not a franchise in the Negro major leagues, playing regional opponents on weekend circuits. Its manager and one of its players was Willie James McRae, a citrus grove worker who lived on Castle Street. Documented opponents include the Bradenton Nine Devils, an established Black club in Manatee County, and the Florida Giants of Miami, a barnstorming semi-professional team that came to Avon Park for a two-game series on Saturday night, 7 June, and Sunday, 8 June 1952. That notice, in The Miami Times, also tells us the Tigers played night games under lights, which means a fenced, lit diamond fit to host a travelling club.
Where that diamond was is still an open question. None of the town’s modern fields, Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Field, the MLK Sports Complex or the Durrah Martin Complex, has yet been definitively linked to the team’s games. If you know, the Society would like to hear.
The sandlot on Castle Street
Under segregation, Black youths in Highlands County were barred from the white Little League and high school programmes, and learned the game on neighbourhood sandlots. The best remembered is the diamond at Delaney Avenue and Castle Street, beside Mrs. Austin’s yard, where Willie James McRae’s son Hal learned to hit to the opposite field. Hal McRae went on to a long major-league career and to manage in the majors; his son Brian followed him. Castle Street, where the family lived and the team was organised, was later renamed Hal McRae Boulevard.
In the museum, and in the archive
The Black Tigers have their place in the Baseball Museum, alongside the McRaes and the town’s other major leaguers. The archive holds the entries the museum draws on: the Avon Park Black Tigers, Willie James McRae, Hal McRae, the finding that Avon Park had a Black baseball team, and the report Avon Park in the majors. Each states its sources and its evidence grade; this article follows them and claims nothing they do not.