Peter Gorton is a middle-aged white historian. He speaks with a rapid cadence. He ends his sentences with strong inflections. His verbal meter indicates what he’s trying to convey is important, if only someone will listen — if only fellow admirers of baseball history could understand for themselves. If only they could know what he knows after 25 years of research, after filling his basement with 60,000 pieces of paper stuffed in boxes and file cabinets. If only they could see the mental picture that has emerged through more than 9,000 newspaper clippings and legions of box scores.
All that stuff in Gorton’s New Brighton, Minn., basement represents the meticulous march of a slow and steady quest. This quest is centered on John Donaldson, one of the best pitchers in baseball history, a Black player ahead of his time, a legend whose legacy was mired in obscurity for far too long.
“Every day for 25 years I’ve done something to work on this project,” Gorton said recently. “Countless numbers of hours, always in the back of my mind. It’s impossible for me not to relate anything to John Donaldson stories.”
Gorton is self-aware about the niche nature of his Melvillian obsession. “That nutty guy in Minnesota,” he called himself last week. But this venture has not been an aimless crusade. Gorton and other researchers in the aptly named Donaldson Network have stitched together the story of Donaldson’s career. There is proof he struck out at least 5,295 batters, threw 14 no-hitters and registered 428 wins, many of them in barnstorming contests held across the country.
Twenty-five years of work has led to another culmination. In 2021, Donaldson received 50 percent of the vote from the Early Baseball Era Committee for induction to the National Baseball Hall of Fame. The threshold for induction is 75 percent.
This year, Donaldson again has a shot at the Hall of Fame, as one of eight names on the Classic Baseball Era Committee’s ballot. The results will be unveiled Sunday at 7:30 p.m. ET.
“People today need to understand that this is a Goliath of baseball history,” Gorton said. “Just because he missed the Ken Burns documentary doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.”
Even now, Donaldson’s story remains obscure and his name largely unknown because he was born in 1891. He played professionally for more than a decade before the Negro National League was established. He was a barnstormer whose exploits took place in more than 781 cities, Gorton says. He played on integrated teams well before Jackie Robinson broke the Major League Baseball color barrier. He was a forerunner to better-known icons such as Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson. Even Bob Kendrick, president of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, Mo., says he was mesmerized when he met Gorton and began learning more about Donaldson’s career.
“I was blown away by how they completely dedicated themselves to this athlete and unearthing his legacy so that the rest of the world could know who John Donaldson was,” Kendrick said. “It became so apparent to me of his greatness.”
Donaldson went on to become the first Black scout in MLB, when he worked for the Chicago White Sox. He died in 1970, when Gorton was 6 years old.
For 34 years, he rested in an unmarked grave.
When people ask Gorton what he does for a living, he says he is a Negro Leagues historian.
Speaking on a video call recently, he wore a Jackie Robinson hoodie and a Kansas City Monarchs hat. He got odd looks this summer when he went around wearing socks up to his knees. The unusual attire was a personal, subtle nod to Negro Leagues players who are just now beginning to get their due.
“One of the things I was taught at an early age,” Gorton said, “is when you find something unique, hold onto it. Baseball has always been that for me.”
Gorton has a degree in broadcasting. He works freelance gigs as a speech consultant and a marketing adviser. A few years ago, he was driving Uber to help make ends meet. His real life’s work is the cause of John Donaldson.
The fixation on one man’s story began in 2000, with an assignment. One of Gorton’s former high school teachers, Steve Hoffbeck, was compiling a book on Black baseball in Minnesota. He called Gorton, whom he knew as an avid baseball fan. Gorton’s initial research led him to a small history center in Bertha, Minn. This was 13 miles from Gorton’s hometown of Staples.
Gorton entered the building and approached a picture on the wall. It featured Donaldson as part of an integrated baseball team. Gorton asked a curator if he could take the picture down and inspect it more closely. He says he set the picture down on a pile of scrapbooks. One book just happened to be opened to a picture of a high-school basketball team — Peter Gorton’s high school basketball team.
If that were not fateful enough, Gorton began learning more about the man in the other picture. How he often played with or against white teams. How he traveled around Minnesota and beyond, striking out anyone who came in his path. How he had brief stints with the likes of the Detroit Stars and Kansas City Monarchs. How baseball dignitaries such as John McGraw and J.L. Wilkinson touted him as the best pitcher they had ever laid eyes on.
“If Donaldson were a white man or if the unwritten law of baseball didn’t bar Negroes from the major leagues, I would give $50,000 for him and think I was getting a bargain,” McGraw said in 1915.
Accounting for the full story of Donaldson’s career, however, was a hardened task. There was no repository of online information. Statistics were hard to compile because Donaldson played in so many different places. Gorton began scouring newspaper clippings, visiting libraries and history centers in his vicinity. What he found was a paper trail of an early baseball celebrity, one who had largely been forgotten because of the color of his skin and the time and leagues in which he played.
“It hit me in the head like a brick,” Gorton said. “How can this be? My whole origin story of Black baseball is Jackie Robinson, because that’s what they taught us when we were in third grade. We also have to understand there were other people who turned the tides and made it possible for Jackie Robinson to do that.”
Thus began the creation of the Donaldson Network. Gorton started a website to compile and share the records of Donaldson’s achievements. Other historians across the country became interested. They began their own research and sent Gorton whatever articles or box scores they came across. They even discovered rare video footage, previously stored beneath a man’s bed for 60 years, that shows 39 seconds of Donaldson pitching. Little by little, the full nature of a remarkable career came into focus.
Donaldson’s career spanned 33 years. He pitched and played outfield. He played on Wilkinson’s All Nations team, which featured players from Hawaii, Cuba, Japan, Latin America and also a female player who went by Carrie Nation (her real name was Mae Arbaugh). Donaldson played in cleared corn fields and mentored Satchel Paige long before most knew who Satchel Paige was. “He showed Satchel the way,” Buck O’Neil once said. He dominated farmers, shut down local All-Stars and reportedly struck out Ty Cobb twice in the same game.
He even rejected an offer from McGraw to go to Cuba, change his name and return as if he were Cuban rather than African-American.
“One of the agreements was that I was never again to visit my mother or to have anything to do with colored people,” Donaldson had said in a 1932 interview. “I refused. I am clean morally and physically. I go to my church and contribute my share. I keep my body and mind clean. And yet when I go out there to play baseball it is not unusual to hear some fan cry out: ‘Hit the dirty n—.’ That hurts.”
It was 2004, still early in Gorton’s research odyssey, when Jeremy Krock of the Negro League Baseball Grave Marker Project called. Donaldson died at age 79 in Chicago, reportedly a postal worker in his later years. Krock had learned Donaldson was buried in the unmarked grave at Burr Oak Cemetery in Alsip, Ill. White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf agreed to help pay for a proper headstone.
Gorton traveled to the ceremony. There he met other interested parties but also realized how few people truly understood the magnitude of Donaldson’s greatness. Accompanying him on that trip was his then-girlfriend Kelly, now his wife. As Gorton recalls, they sat on barstools as he expounded on why this mattered.
“We have the opportunity to change history,” he said. “This is knocking on my door. In fact, it’s really bumping me on the head.”
Kelly replied: “Let’s do this.”
Peter Gorton and his wife Kelly. (Courtesy of Peter Gorton)
Restoring Donaldson’s legacy has become a family venture. Instead of trips to Disneyworld, Peter, Kelly and their two teenage children turn historical treks into camping trips. Peter and Kelly spent at least one anniversary at a baseball field. He speaks at ceremonies and conferences. The kids have taken their own interest in the cause. Their oldest recently wrote about it all in a college admissions essay.
“We don’t really use the ‘h-word,’ hobby, for this thing in the house because it’s way more than that,” Kelly said. “I like to just be with him when he’s speaking. He’s very charismatic. He’s very passionate. He’s brave, I think, in many ways for all the things he does.”
There have been sacrifices along the way. The odd jobs and the 1099 forms, worrying about the freelance tax bill every year. “What it has amassed is a huge debt,” Gorton said. “We’re trying to pay this off all the time. But we’re constantly working on this because it’s the right thing to do.”
Often, Gorton thinks back to that grave site, how the grass covering Donaldson’s resting place was long and thick. The dirt was difficult to dig into. Even the process of adding a beautiful new headstone required work.
“It’s sort of a metaphor,” Gorton said, “for how hard it was to find his career.”
Inscribed on Donaldson’s headstone is the phrase: “A man before his time.”
Two weeks before Cheryl Boone’s great aunt died, she gave Boone a photo of John Donaldson. The small picture resembles a baseball card, though Boone says it was actually made for one of Donaldson’s birthday celebrations in his hometown of Glasgow, Mo. Her great aunt asked: Do you remember your grandma had a famous brother?
Boone is one of Donaldson’s remaining family members. She was 12 years old when her great uncle died. She does not remember meeting him. But she does remember hearing stories from her grandmother.
It was only a few years ago when another cousin reached out after hearing about the Donaldson Network. The cousin got in touch with Gorton, who asked: Are there any living descendants of John Donaldson?
Even finding extended family was challenging. Donaldson was one of five children, but he and his wife, Eleanor, never had children of their own. Gorton’s best lead in finding family came through Donaldson’s sister, Christine, who took on the married name Carter.
Eventually Gorton connected with Boone, who had the makeshift baseball card, a few stories and not much else. A younger cousin, she says, knew a bit more. Soon the whole family packed on the screen and gathered on a Zoom call with Gorton, who told them more about their famed family member.
Much like Gorton years earlier, Boone and her relatives became equal parts enthralled and curious. The family joined the research effort. They tracked down birth records for both Donaldson and his mother. In a way, it brought them all closer. Boone says she gets near-weekly calls from an uncle, letting her know anytime he learns something new about Donaldson. They’ve even received a letter from the family of Satchel Paige and connected with the family of Bob Gibson. They’re planning a trip to go see Donaldson’s headstone.
“It has been an amazing discovery,” Boone said. “It’s a weekly conversation, and we’re always on YouTube looking at more and reading more.”
Donaldson’s headstone. (Courtesy of Peter Gorton)
One of the great mysteries in Donaldson’s career is why he left the Kansas City Monarchs after only two games in 1924. Some reports state he simply had the opportunity to make more money barnstorming in Minnesota. Donaldson reportedly made $325 per month, more than most Negro League players at the time. His wife also had family near the Twin Cities.
But Gorton has arrived at a different conclusion, based on the fact something else was unfolding around this time. In February of 1924, Donaldson’s brother, James Jr., was one of the last people to see a white girl named Daisy Ashby alive. James Jr. had told police he saw the girl walking with a white man from the school grounds around 11 p.m. James Jr. was held along with other suspects in the murder but eventually released.
But this was Missouri in 1924. There is little documentation to support the theory, but Gorton has come to believe Donaldson may have taken his brother out of the state to avoid the threat of a lynch mob. Donaldson returned to Bertha, Minn., where nearby Lake Adney was known as a vacation sanctuary for African Americans at the time. An unearthed box score shows that on Aug. 6, Donaldson played first base and pitched in a game in Minneota, Minn. James Jr. played shortstop for the same team before dying of an illness only weeks later.
Through the course of his research, Gorton has confronted hard truths and grim realities about history. “Segregation took him away from us,” Gorton said. “They didn’t want him to be known. They wanted him to be forgotten, and it worked.”
This past summer, Major League Baseball officially recognized Negro League statistics as part of its records. This was a major victory for descendants of the league’s legends and historians who worked to compile the numbers. But because Donaldson played only parts of five seasons in major Negro League games, some could argue the statistics work against his Hall of Fame case. On Baseball-Reference, he is credited with a 4.14 ERA in 22 games as a pitcher with the Monarchs. As a batter, he hit .296 with six home runs in 211 games.
“I think it’s interesting the way people quantify his career,” Gorton said. “‘Well, these stats that you found for him are so bad. All these stats are against farmers and losers way out in the middle of Nebraska.’ Well, that is where he could play. I can’t make up history. I can interpret it and tell people how it went.
“What John Donaldson did is he was sleeping on the ground and he was going from town to town and showing people that a Black person could control baseball games. He did that, and he changed history.”
In 2020, Glasgow Public Schools dedicated a new baseball field and named it after John Donaldson, and the town unveiled a statue of the great pitcher. Historians, friends and family all attended.
“I didn’t think Glasgow got nearly the amount of attention as it should have gotten,” said Kendrick, the president of the Negro Leagues Museum. “At a time when we’ve been tearing down symbols of hate, here was this small, Mid-Missouri, predominantly white town erecting a statue of a Black man to celebrate his greatness. It was absolutely amazing.”
For Boone, it was an emotional day, seeing her kin honored with such nobility. “I just wish that we had grown up with this knowledge,” she said. “I think it just would have made a difference in our thinking and outlook on life, in a number of ways.”
In 2021, family gathered at her house to watch the Hall of Fame announcement, to see whether their ancestor would receive baseball’s ultimate honor. Donaldson fell four votes short. This Sunday, Boone is planning to have family over again. They will watch with high hopes.
“We celebrate for him,” Boone said. “We wish he were here to see all of this for himself, but we celebrate for him as a family. To share that with the world would be great.”
In Minnesota, Gorton can still name the voters who left Donaldson off their ballots the last time. He gets angry thinking about it. But Hall of Fame or not, it’s strange for him to reflect on how far this crazy journey of his has gone.
“Never,” he said, “did we think this was gonna turn out the way it did.”
Kendrick will be paying close attention to Sunday’s announcement. He will be rooting for famed Negro Leagues manager Vic Harris, also on this year’s ballot. He will of course be pulling for Donaldson. And in doing so, he will also be thinking of a historian in Minnesota.
“Sentimentally, how could I not be pulling for Pete?” Kendrick said. “Because of the commitment that he’s made and what that would mean to him and all those members of the Donaldson Network.”
(Illustration by Meech Robinson, The Athletic. Photos: Courtesy of The Donaldson Network)
