Jacksonville Red Caps
Negro League Baseball team active from 1937-1944; record 75-104-2 (.419); ballparks: Red Cap Stadium and Durkee Field, Jackskonville, FL; League Park and Cleveland Stadium, Cleveland, OH
The Jacksonville Red Caps were a Negro league baseball team based primarily in Jacksonville, Florida. They played the Negro American League from 1938 until 1942.
History
The team was based in Jacksonville, Florida playing at Durkee Field in 1938. They moved to Cleveland in 1939 and became the Cleveland Bears, playing their home games at Hardware Field. They returned to Jacksonville as the Red Caps in 1941 for two seasons, dropping out of the NAL in July 1942. After the war, the Red Caps apparently continued as an unaffiliated Negro league team playing at Durkee Field.
League play
The Red Caps only played seven league games their first season, finishing 3-4. After transferring to Cleveland in 1939, the Bears (according to Negro leagues historian John Holway) had the best overall record in the NAL but were not awarded the pennant, finishing with a 22-4 record in league play. The Kansas City Monarchs finished with more victories, going 25-13, and, as per the tradition of the time, were thereby declared league champions. Later research shows the Bears with a 20-21 record in 1939, third in the NAL.
The Bears fell hard in 1940, finishing last in the league with a 6-16 record.
“Jacksonville Red Caps” enters the record as negro League Baseball team active from 1937-1944; record 75-104-2 (.419); ballparks: Red Cap Stadium and Durkee Field, Jackskonville, FL; League Park and Cleveland Stadium, Cleveland, OH. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Jacksonville, Caps and Negro can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Jacksonville Red Caps” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Jacksonville, Caps and Negro provides the most credible route into that argument.
The strongest evidence will usually combine a dated visual record with documents produced by the authority responsible for the place. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 19, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q6118014. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1938, 1942, 1939 and 1941.
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This entry incorporates text from “Jacksonville Red Caps” 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.