All Nations Club
baseball team
All Nations Club was a barnstorming professional baseball team that toured the Midwest from 1912 to 1918, and again in 1920 and 1921, and from 1923 to 1925. It derived its name from the fact that its team included players of several nationalities, including blacks and whites, Indians, Hawaiians, Japanese and Latin Americans. The team was founded by the Hopkins Brothers sporting goods stores. One day, however, the team's manager absconded with the daily gate proceeds. J. L. Wilkinson, who played for the team, replaced him as manager, later becoming owner as well. The team was based out of Kansas City and Des Moines.
Under the management of Wilkinson, the All Nations' approach to the game was more serious than that of many teams who followed Abe Saperstein's farcical approach. They did however provide additional entertainment for their audiences, including having a dance band to play before the games and wrestlers like Ben Reeves to perform after their games.
Wilkinson transported the team from location to location in a $25,000 Pullman car, which also held portable bleachers which would be set up for the game. He did not pay for rooms for his players, however, instead having them sleep the night before the game in tents they brought with them on the field on which they would play.
The public source identifies “All Nations Club” as baseball team. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Nations, Club and baseball.
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This entry incorporates text from “All Nations Club” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.