page_title: John Donaldson (pitcher)
section_title: All Nations
hierarchical_section_title: John Donaldson (pitcher) / All Nations
caption_attribution_description: English: A very widely published photo of the All Nations Baseball team. The photo was taken prior to 1914 and was used by many newspapers all over the upper midwest of the United States from 1913 to 1917, and possibly as late as the 1920s when the All Nations toured again as a farm league team for the Kansas City Monarchs.
context_page_description: John Wesley Donaldson was an American baseball pitcher in Pre-Negro league and Negro league baseball. In a career that spanned over 30 years, he played for many different Negro league and semi-professional teams, including the All Nations team and the Kansas City Monarchs. Researchers so far have discovered 667 games in which Donaldson is known to have pitched. Out of those games, Donaldson had over 400 wins and 5,081 strikeouts as a baseball pitcher. According to some sources, he was the greatest pitcher of his era.
context_section_description: He contracted to pitch for the World's All Nations team based in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1912, for a reported sum of $150 per month. Donaldson went on to star for the team, which included a female player named Carrie Nation, as well as players of several different races.  The experiment of an interracial ball club was successful as the All Nations thrived traveling throughout the Midwest and Upper Midwest from 1912 to 1917.
  During Donaldson's 1915 season, he struck out an average of 18 batters a game and fanned 30 in a marathon 18-inning contest. Donaldson not only struck out more than 500 batters that season, but did it three years straight. Most of his accomplishments were against semi-professional competition, but Donaldson also did very well in his relatively few contests against highest level professional baseball teams, and there were a number of first-person reports of his talent from such opposing managers and players.
  Donaldson and his ball-clubs prior to the organization of the Negro National League in 1920 played ball all year round, both in the Midwest and venues as far west as Los Angeles  as far east as Palm Beach, Florida.
  In an interview in the Kansas City Call in 1948, J. L. Wilkinson said Donaldson was "one of the greatest pitchers that ever lived, white or black."  He also said Donaldson suggested the name "Monarchs" when Wilkinson was preparing a team for the Negro National League in 1920.
caption: 1914 All Nations Team
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