Honoring Louis Sockalexis: a forgotten baseball pioneer

Holy Cross-backed campaign seeks Hall of Fame recognition for the first Native American in Major League Baseball

By Bill Ballou

The Worcester Guardian

February 17, 2025

WORCESTER—There seems to be a lot more legend than fact surrounding the baseball career of Louis Sockalexis, the classic shooting star athlete who first came to prominence at the College of the Holy Cross.

Sockalexis played baseball at the school for just two years. He played a mere 94 games of Major League Baseball, all with the Cleveland Spiders of the National League in the 19th Century.

His place in the game’s history is not statistical. It is transformational. All evidence points to Sockalexis as being the first Native American in the majors.

The school, which has always held the memory of Sockalexis in the highest esteem, would like the rest of the baseball world to do the same. The Pakachoag Project has embarked on a postcard campaign to have the game recognize Sockalexis for the groundbreaker that he was and create a permanent exhibit celebrating him at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.

The Pakachoag Project is a partnership between the Quinsigamond Band of Nipmuc and members of the faculty an student body at the College of the Holy Cross. It has printed up postcards that fans can sign and mail to the Hall of Fame as well as Commissioner Rob Manfred

Author Ed Rice has spent much of his life researching Sockalexis. He has approached the Hall about recognizing his place in the game’s history. Rice spoke at Holy Cross earlier this month about his quest to have Sockalexis honored.

“I think they misunderstand,” Rice said. “This is not about inducting him into the Hall of Fame. It is about recognizing his contributions. He was a Jackie Robinson figure, a civil rights icon. He is not celebrated enough for what he did.”

Sockalexis grew up near Old Town, Maine, and was a member of the Penobscot Tribe. His abilities were well-known locally but not much beyond that. Things changed in the summer of 1894 when some Holy Cross players went north to play ball in Maine.

They saw Sockalexis in action and were impressed with his abilities. They recruited him to play at HC and he began his career there in 1895. Sockalexix was a multi-sport athlete and spent two seasons with the baseball team. Holy Cross was 36-12-3 in those two years.

He batted .436 in ’95, .444 in 1896.

Sockalexis did not attend Holy Cross per se. Rather, he was at Mount St. James Prep, a secondary school run by the college. However, prep school students were allowed to play for the college teams. Sockalexis played baseball, ran track and was on HC’s first football team in 1896.

After his two years in Worcester, Sockalexis transferred to Notre Dame. He never played there, though, as problems with alcohol derailed his stay. They would eventually derail his baseball career and his life.

Before that happened, though, Sockalexis made history by making his Major League Baseball debut with the Spiders on April 22, 1997. One reason he wound up in Cleveland is that one of the Spiders’ best players was future Hall of Fame outfielder Jesse Burkett, a Worcester resident who was familiar with Sockalexis.

Sockalexis made such an impression as a rookie that  Spiders soon became Indians. However, Rice said, the nickname was derisive rather than celebratory.

Sockalexis eventually played in 94 big league games from 1897 into 1899. His batting average was .313, his OPS .770. He drank himself out of baseball, though, and was only 42 when he died on Christmas Eve, 1913.

While active, Sockalexis was subjected to a torrent of verbal abuse and humilation from fans who had grown up thinking that Buffalo Bill’s Wild West shows were reality.

Sockalexis, Rice says, was 50 years ahead of Jackie Robinson in enduring the threats, hatred, insults and disdain of the public at large. He was spat upon. Newspapers described him as a savage.

In retrospect, it seems as though Sockalexis’ happiest years in baseball were the ones he spent at Holy Cross. He was so good, so legendary, that when the school inaugurated its Hall of Fame in 1956, Sockalexis was a charter member.

“What other school,” Rice said, “has a player in its Hall of Fame who was there for just two years?”

Sockalexis was most recently in the public eye when the Indians changed their nickname to Guardians in 2021. Sockalexis’ Indians were a National League team that went out of business. The American League Cleveland team did not become “Indians” until 1915.

Even though Sockalexis had been out of baseball for years at that point, the new nickname came from his time in Cleveland according to Rice. When it was revived in 1915, an editorial in a Cleveland paper specifically credited Sockalexis with the original incarnation.

The nickname is what Sockalexis is known best for, but it is just a small part of his story, and this city and the College of the Holy Cross played a major part in his legacy as a groundbreaker.

Bill Ballou covered the Red Sox for the Worcester Telegram from 1997 through 2018. He has covered pro hockey in Worcester since 1994 and currently does a weekly column for the Worcester Red Sox. Ballou can be reached at vetgoalie@aol.com