from "'Dream come true' for excluded blacks"
by Mel Antonen

excerpt from USA Today Sports Weekly (Spring 2008, p. 17)

When James "Red" Moore was growing up in Atlanta in the 1920s, he learned how to play baseball with a stick and a tennis ball.

He also read newspaper accounts and heard radio broadcasts of baseball games played at Yankee Stadium.

He never dreamed of playing on the same field as Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig.

But in May 1938, as a Negro league first baseman with the Baltimore Elite Giants, Moore saw Yankee Stadium for the first time. He was in awe.

"It looked so different than any other stadium," says Moore, who hit an inside-the-park home run there in 1941. "I had always wanted to see the 'House that Ruth Built.' We went down on the field and started taking infield practice. It was a dream come true."

. . .

Moore, who was honored in February by the Georgia state legislature, grew up the son of a railroad worker -- his dad wasn't a baseball fan -- and learned to play the game with sticks, tennis balls and rags that he tied together for a ball.

He played seven seasons with the Black Sox [sic Elite Giants], Newark Eagles and Atlanta Black Crackers. Moore has saved some of his memorabilia, but he has the one memory that can't be lost or stolen: "I got to play in Yankee Stadium," he sayd. "It was the thrill of my life."

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