Bunny Downs
American baseball player
McKinley "Bunny" Downs (March 7, 1894 - June 30, 1973) was an American Negro league baseball infielder and manager for several years before the founding of the first Negro National League, and in its first several seasons. While working for the Indianapolis Clowns in 1951, Downs scouted Hank Aaron, leading to a brief stint with the team in 1952.
A native of Chattanooga, Tennessee, Downs attended Morris Brown College in Atlanta, Georgia. He made his Negro leagues debut in 1914 with the West Baden Sprudels, and went on to play for several teams, including a six-year stretch from 1917 to 1922 with the Hilldale Club. His career continued as a field manager and scout for the Indianapolis Clowns (at the time located in Miami) in their early years. He returned to manage them in their championship years with players such as Hank Aaron, Goose Tatum, and Toni Stone. At age 56, Downs received votes listing him on the 1952 Pittsburgh Courier player-voted poll of the Negro leagues' best players ever. He died in Winston-Salem, North Carolina in 1973 at age 79.
“Bunny Downs” enters the record as american baseball player. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Bunny, Downs and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4997849. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1894, 1973, 1951 and 1952.
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This entry incorporates text from “Bunny Downs” 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.