How many Pirates fans even noticed that the seven bronze statues honoring the great Negro League stars are gone from PNC Park?
If you want to see Josh Gibson, Buck Leonard, “Cool Papa” Bell and Oscar Charleston now, you’ll have to get an appointment with the gent who owns the Sports Museum of Los Angeles. Gary Cypres just spent $132,250 in an auction that will send those four statues west. The other three went for a combined $94,700 to other bidders.
The life-size statues once lined the left field gate entrance to PNC Park. They arrived with some fanfare just before the All-Star Game in 2006, but largely unreported went the Pirates’ announcement this past April that Legacy Square was to be “refreshed’’ with banners of Negro League and Pirates greats replacing the statues.
Memorabilia collectors noticed. They dropped nearly a quarter of a million dollars on the statues at a Cincinnati auction the day of the All-Star Game there. Proceeds are going to Pittsburgh’s Josh Gibson Foundation, which sponsors youth academic and athletic programs.
The huge size of the haul was unexpected. The Hunt Auctions brochure listed expected bids for the statues of Gibson and Satchel Paige at $5,000 to $10,000, and they respectively went for $34,500 and $46,000, including a 15 percent service fee. Price points were similarly blown away by bidders on the other statues, with the lowest — Buck Leonard — going for $25,875.
When I began to ask Mr. Cypres if the high bids surprised him, he answered before I could finish.
“The answer is yes,’’ said Mr. Cypres, 71, who has been seriously collecting for 25 years and who opened his appointment-only sports museum a dozen years ago. “I was shocked. Yes, yes, yes, yes with an exclamation point!”
Ed Reynolds set the auction’s tone when he went all in for the statue of the legendary pitcher Paige. Mr. Reynolds is putting that inside his Eagle Loan Co. office in Mentor-on-the-Lake, Ohio, where he has a Cleveland Indians display. Paige, who barnstormed across the U.S. and Caribbean in the segregated era and was said to be the highest paid athlete in the world, was an Indians rookie at age 42 in 1948.
Reynolds called the statue sculpted by John Forsythe “absolutely the pinnacle’’ of his memorabilia collection. He went to the auction hoping he could buy all seven statues for $100,000 but the doubling of that figure shows him “a lot of people get it.’’ The Negro Leagues are important to both baseball and American history.
Do we now put the departure of these statues in Pittsburgh’s you-don’t-know-what-you-got-’til-it’s-gone file? I know the names and many of the stories behind these Homestead Grays and Pittsburgh Crawfords players, but I didn’t notice these statues were gone despite my attending at least a dozen Pirates games this year. I don’t use that left field entrance.
It could be these statues got short shrift because they were dwarfed by the revered larger-than-life statues of Roberto Clemente, Willie Stargell, Honus Wagner and Bill Mazeroski that surround the ballpark. Or it could be that modern baseball fans just don’t know the Negro Leaguers’ stories well because so few among us ever got to see them play.
Sean Gibson, executive director of the Josh Gibson Foundation and great-grandson of the slugging catcher, said his family had wanted the statues to stay.
“No dollar amount is more important than our history,” he said.
The foundation board will decide how much of the proceeds will go to scholarships, other programs or to the Josh Gibson Heritage Park scheduled to open at Station Square next spring.
Rob Ruck, the University of Pittsburgh professor of sport history who has written a string of books on black and Latin American baseball, was sad to see the statues go but glad the proceeds are going to the foundation.
Though the original Legacy Square disappeared as unceremoniously as the Negro Leagues themselves did in the late 1940s, Mr. Ruck called the Pirates “the catalyst to MLB’s willingness to confront its past and honor a part of the sporting world that it once excluded.”
When the Pirates’ next homestand begins Monday night against the Chicago Cubs, 14 banners will fly in Legacy Square. They will portray everyone from Dick Groat to Barry Bonds to Satchel Paige. Pittsburgh’s Hall of Fame outfielders Paul Waner and “Cool Papa“ Bell, born a month apart in 1903, can finally wow the same crowds.
Brian O’Neill: boneill@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1947.
First Published: July 30, 2015, 4:00 a.m.
