Cuban X-Giants

The Cuban X-Giants were an African-American professional baseball team for about ten seasons around 1900. Originally most of the players were former Cuban Giants, or ex-Giants.

Like the Cuban Giants, the members were not Cuban, the name simply indicating that they were an African American team. Many members were former Cuban Giants. They began to rival that top black team in 1895. E. B. Lamar Jr. piloted a team which included 2B Sol White and pitcher George Stovey. In 1897 they beat the Giants 2 games to 1 in a series. With Frank Grant joining in 1898 the club continued to establish themselves as the new powerhouse in the east. Grant and White left in 1900 and Bill Monroe joined at second base; both the Giants and X-Giants claimed to be the champions, a situation that was duplicated a year later. In 1903 the club boasted Rube Foster on the mound and a middle infield of Charlie Grant and Home Run Johnson. They played in the integrated Tri-State Independent League and then took 5 of 7 games from the Philadelphia Giants for the title as top black team in the east. Foster won 4 games in the series and also was 6 for 17 at the plate.

For the 1904 season Philadelphia hired Grant and Foster, and later beat the X-Giants in the series 2 games to 1, as Foster was 2-0 against his old teammates. (Grant and Foster replaced Frank Grant and Harry Buckner as regulars.) In 1905 the X-Giants became the first black team to beat a Major League Baseball team, when they took one of two games from the National League's Brooklyn, outscoring them 7–2 in the first game and losing 2–1 in the second.^[1] Pop Lloyd played for the team in 1906, right before it folded for good.

See also

• Cuban Giants
• Negro league baseball

Notes

1. ^ Holway, p. 50.

References

• This article includes some material from the Baseball Reference Bullpen. The original is available here. It is available under the GNU Free Documentation License.

• Holway, John B. (2001). The Complete Book of Baseball's Negro Leagues: The Other Half of Baseball History. Fern Park, FL: Hastings House Publishers. ISBN 0-8038-2007-0. 
• Lomax, Michael E. Black Baseball Entrepreneurs, 1860-1901.
• Riley, James A. (1994). "Cuban X-Giants". The Biographical Encyclopedia of the Negro Baseball Leagues. Carroll & Graf. pp. 203–04. ISBN 0-7867-0959-6. 
• (Riley.) Cuban X-Giants, Team profiles at Negro Leagues Baseball Museum. – identical to Riley (confirmed 2010-04-16)