Star In Negro Leagues Dies Of Heart Attack At 79

Lorenzo “Piper” Davis, a star in baseball’s Negro Leagues, was remembered as a versatile, inspirational player who helped launch black stars such as Willie Mays into the newly integrated majors.

“He was a superstar player like Pete Rose,” former teammate Artie Wilson said. “He could play any place you put him and he wanted everybody else to hustle like he did.”

Davis died Wednesday at a hospital after suffering a heart attack. He was 79.

Born in 1917 in Piper, Ala., where he got his nickname, Davis played first, second and shortstop for the Birmingham Black Barons in 1943-44 and managed the team in 1948-49.

Among the players he developed on the Barons was Mays, from nearby Fairfield who was brought up to the New York Giants shortly after Jackie Robinson had broken baseball’s color barrier with the Brooklyn Dodgers.

If Davis was embittered about never making the majors, which sought a younger generation of black players like Mays, he didn’t show it openly.

“I did what I wanted to do,” Davis said in 1993. “I started playing baseball so my children could get the education I didn’t get. I made $350-$400 a month and that was big back then.”

Davis was a star of the Negro American League, along with Josh Gibson, Cool Papa Bell and Satchel Paige. In 1950, Davis became the first black signed by the Boston Red Sox. He never made the majors.