page_title: Sol White
section_title: Managerial career
hierarchical_section_title: Sol White / Managerial career
caption_attribution_description: English: A team photo of the 1904 Philadelphia Giants Negro league baseball team, including Hall of Famers Rube Foster, Sol White, and Pete Hill.
context_page_description: King Solomon "Sol" White was an American professional baseball infielder, manager and executive, and one of the pioneers of the Negro leagues. An active sportswriter for many years, he wrote the first definitive history of black baseball in 1907. He was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2006.
context_section_description: Along with Walter Schlichter, a sportswriter for the Philadelphia Item, and Harry Smith, a baseball writer for the Philadelphia Tribune, White founded the Philadelphia Giants in 1902. He served as the team's captain and manager. The Giants were at first paid on a profit-sharing "cooperative plan," but in 1903 White reorganized the team and put all the players on salary. The Giants lost a playoff for the colored championship to the Cuban X-Giants and their ace pitcher, Rube Foster. The following season White signed Foster, outfielder Pete Hill, and second baseman Charlie Grant, and the Philadelphia Giants won a championship series from the X-Giants, five games to two.
  For 1905 White brought in Home Run Johnson of the X-Giants, and made the Philadelphia Giants into what he considered "the strongest organization of the time." The Giants went undefeated against New England League teams and swept four games from the Newark International League team. The Giants played a total of 158 games, winning 134, losing 21, and tying 3. The powerful baseball promoter and team owner Nat Strong declared the 1904-1905 Philadelphia Giants "the best team in the history of the game."
  Despite losing Johnson to the Brooklyn Royal Giants in 1906, the Giants won both the informal "colored championship" and the pennant of the racially integrated International League of Independent Professional Base Ball Clubs. More player losses followed in 1907, as Rube Foster defected to the Leland Giants of Chicago. But White brought in eventual Hall of Famer John Henry Lloyd to play shortstop along with catcher Bruce Petway, and the Giants finished first in the National Association of Colored Baseball Clubs of the United States and Cuba, an all-black league. This marked the fourth consecutive year in which the Philadelphia Giants claimed the black professional championship.
  The Giants lost Pete Hill to the Lelands in 1908, and in 1909 Sol White left the team after a disagreement with Schlichter. White managed the Philadelphia Quaker Giants for a year. In 1910 he was hired to manage the Brooklyn Royal Giants, but had trouble controlling some of the players, and left after the season. For the following season Jess McMahon and his brother Eddie hired White to manage their new team, the New York Lincoln Giants. White assembled another collection of top players, including John Henry Lloyd, Spot Poles, and Bill Francis. In July 1911 he raided his old team, the Philadelphia Giants, for their star rookie battery, Dick Redding and Louis Santop. As a result, Schlichter could no longer keep the team running, and disbanded it. However, White quit the Lincolns before the season was over, replaced as manager by Lloyd.
  White was next hired to manage the Fe club of the Cuban League for the 1911-12 winter season. He brought along Rube Foster and a number of American black players, but the team lost five of its first six games, and White and most of his players were released. After a year managing an obscure team called the Boston Giants, White retired from baseball, and returned to Bellaire.
  He returned to baseball to serve as secretary for the Columbus Buckeyes of the Negro National League in 1921, and helped bring in his old player, John Henry Lloyd, as player-manager. White  then took on his last two managerial jobs, both in Cleveland: in 1922 he guided an independent club, the Fears Giants of Cleveland, and in 1924 he managed the Cleveland Browns of the Negro National League. His last job in baseball was as a coach for the 1926 Newark Stars of the Eastern Colored League.
caption: 1904 Philadelphia Giants
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