Si Simmons, Baseball’s Oldest Old-Timer, Dies at 111

nytimes.com ^ | October 31, 2006 | ALAN SCHWARZ

[lunarbicep]

Si Simmons, the former Negro leagues baseball player who was believed to be the longest-living professional ballplayer in history, died Sunday in at a retirement home in St. Petersburg, Fla. He was 111.

His death was announced by a spokeswoman for the retirement home.

A Philadelphia native, Simmons was a left-handed pitcher for the local Germantown Blue Ribbons beginning in either 1912 or 1913, in the primordial and poorly recorded days of organized black baseball. He played for Germantown and other clubs for many years after that, including the New York Lincoln Giants of the Eastern Colored League in 1926 as well as the Negro National League’s Cuban Stars in 1929.

The fact that Simmons was still alive was unknown to baseball’s avid research community until the summer of 2006, when a genealogist discovered he was living in the St. Petersburg, Fla., nursing home.

“I had a good curveball and a good fastball,” Simmons told The New York Times in September. Paid about $10 a game to play, Simmons added that he might have been good enough to play in the major leagues, but did not consider even asking for a tryout. “It was useless to try,” he said.

“A lot of good black players, but they couldn’t play in the league,” he said. “So that was it. After Jackie Robinson came up, they found out how good they were and started recruiting. You have to give them a chance to play.

“Negroes had a lot of pride. They felt like baseball, that was the greatest thing in the world for them. You had some great players in those days. Biz Mackey. Pop Lloyd. Judy Johnson. Scrappy Brown, the shortstop. We played against all those players.”

[Charles Henrickson]

Born around the same time as Babe Ruth!