The field was never just about balls and strikes. Not in Philadelphia. Not when the Pythians took the field at Broad and Wharton, not when Slim Jones dropped to a knee and prayed before mowing through the Grays, and not today, when memory, movement, and meaning collide under the banner of Juneteenth.
This is a city that has always known how to carry contradiction. Where Liberty Bells crack and neighborhoods remember. Where a Black man named Octavius V. Catto could teach Greek philosophy at the Institute for Colored Youth by day and swing a bat in a pressed white collar by dusk, daring the world to recognize Black excellence long before the world was ready.
Catto’s club, the Philadelphia Pythians, wasn’t just a baseball team in 1866. It was a quiet rebellion dressed in flannel. Their stage: the Parade Grounds at Broad and Wharton, a site meant for military drills, turned by Catto into something far more enduring — a public demonstration of Black dignity. They played because they loved the game. But they also played to say, “We belong.”
In 1867, the Pythians attempted to integrate white baseball’s Pennsylvania Base Ball Association. The answer, of course, was no. The color line had been drawn. But the statement had been made. Even in rejection, the Pythians made headlines and history. Catto would go on to help desegregate Philadelphia’s streetcars. He would be gunned down on Election Day, 1871, for fighting to get Black men to the ballot box.
Baseball didn’t stop.
Fifty years later, Ed Bolden, another visionary, built a powerhouse of his own out in Darby — the Hilldale Club. If the Pythians were Philadelphia’s original protest, Hilldale was its validation. Their ballpark, Hilldale Park, sat tucked between rowhomes and trolley lines. But in the 1920s, it was the epicenter of Black baseball in the Northeast.
Hilldale’s roster reads like a Hall of Fame plaque: Judy Johnson, Louis Santop, Biz Mackey. Men who could hit .330 and teach boys how to carry themselves. In 1925, Hilldale defeated the mighty Kansas City Monarchs to win the Colored World Series, the kind of triumph that doesn't always make the textbooks, but should.
Then came the Philadelphia Stars, born during the Great Depression, still under Bolden’s watchful eye. They played at Passon Field near 48th and Spruce, and later at 44th and Parkside, where the echoes still bounce off the rowhouses on warm summer nights.
In 1934, led by 21-year-old southpaw Slim Jones — who threw like Lefty Grove and had the poise of Satchel Paige — the Stars captured the Negro National League title. Jones went 20–4 with a 1.29 ERA that season, pitching with a kind of violence and grace that still gets whispered about by old-timers who never actually saw him, but swear they know someone who did.
They say he would kneel and pray before games. They say he was the next big thing. But we know how those stories end — the line between promise and pain in Black baseball is too thin. Slim Jones was gone before he turned 26. But the memory remains, stitched into the seams of the city.
Juneteenth is not just about emancipation. Not here. Not in Philadelphia. It’s about recognition of those who dared to play when society said they couldn’t, of men like Catto who saw a field and made it a platform, of teams like Hilldale and the Stars that showed the world what Black baseball could be, even when the world looked away.
Baseball in Philadelphia has always mirrored the city itself, flawed, brilliant, bruised, and hopeful. The stories don’t always end in Cooperstown. But they matter. They matter every time a kid laces up cleats at Marian Anderson Rec Center, or visits the Philadelphia Stars Memorial Park, or learns about Octavius Catto not just as a name on a statue, but as a man who swung a bat to fight for freedom.
Today, Major League Baseball is working to incorporate Negro League stats into the historical record. It’s a start. But the deeper truth is this: the game’s soul has always been found in the places it tried to forget. On Juneteenth, we remember not just what was taken, but what was built in defiance of that taking.
Philadelphia’s Black baseball legacy doesn’t need a spotlight. It is the spotlight. Always has been.
