Negro League great Pete Hill — the real Pete Hill — officially will be honored at the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y on Tuesday, thanks to a historian from Culpeper, Va., who spoke for Hill’s legacy more than a century after he was a baseball star.
Culpeper now can lay claim to its second baseball Hall of Famer (the first being Eppa Rixey, who pitched for the Philadelphia Phillies and Cincinnati Reds from 1912 to 1933). And local writer and researcher Zann Nelson can feel the satisfaction of having righted the records of this great Negro League ballplayer to pay him his proper and accurate due.
“I keep pinching myself,” said Nelson, who researches and writes historical pieces for the Culpeper Star Exponent newspaper. “For a researcher, to have this kind of impact is great. Now Pete Hill’s legacy can be truly celebrated.”
Hill played for some of the great Negro League teams of all time at the turn of the 20th century — the Philadelphia Giants and the Leland Giants. He was one of the most consistent hitters of his era. In one season, against various levels of competition, records show Hill hit safely in 115 of 116 games.
He was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2006 as part of a special election of Negro League candidates nominated by a committee of researchers. But that was Joseph Preston Hill from Pittsburgh, Pa., who was inducted and given a plaque in baseball’s hallowed halls four years ago.
Turns out that’s not Pete Hill — at least in name and origin.
Tuesday, in a rare ceremony, the Hall of Fame will unveil a re-cast of Hill’s plaque with his real name — John Preston Hill — as part of Pete Hill Day in Cooperstown. Also, the official records in the Hall of Fame Library will reflect a change in his birthplace from Pittsburgh, Pa., to Culpeper, Va., on Oct. 12 — the day records indicate Hill was born — though the exact birth year, sometime between 1880 and 1884, remains unclear.
History matters in baseball, so when you have a player like Hill — already denied his place in the game because of the segregation that divided the national pastime for many years — every piece of his history is important. If Hill was not properly recognized at the time he played, the very least that can be done is to get his place in history right.
Nelson did this when a group of baseball researchers had already been working on some questions involving Hill’s past, such as his birthplace. Researchers had reached out to a number of places where Hill might have come from, and one of those requests went to the Culpeper newspaper, where editor Rob Humphreys asked Nelson if she was interested in looking into it.
Nelson dug and dug until she found that Hill indeed had been born in a small African-American village that was part of Culpeper, and published a three-part series in the Star Exponent about her research. Those articles led to the Hall of Fame making a change in Hill’s plaque — a rare step for Cooperstown.
“It’s very gratifying,” Nelson said.
Examiner columnist Thom Loverro is the co-host of “The Sports Fix” from noon to 2 p.m. Monday through Friday on ESPN 980 and espn980.com. Contact him at [email protected]
