[Seamheads.com] [Baseball-Reference Bio]
[Tracking Ted Trent's Tale By BCU Baseball]

The name of Ted Trent, a former Bethune-Cookman baseball player who went on to become the best curveball pitcher in the Negro League 80 years ago, called out during a historical research binge one evening.

Seriously, it does happen like that once in a while. If we were in Iowa, there'd be a baseball diamond under construction out back in the cornfield. Kidding, not kidding.

In this COVID-19 thing inflicted on us, the cursed blessing for us folks is catching up on all the things that fall through the cracks during a regular athletic season. Historical research is one is one of those things, even for the guy with "historian" in the job description.

So, while going through the baseball trough past Brian Rhees and Meryvl Melendez and even Johnny Randolph, two names didn't just show up – they reached out. And it does happen like that.

First was Earl Battey. How the heck does a Minnesota Twins All Star catcher wind up as an assistant coach for a fledgling college baseball program in Daytona Beach? Something said this was going to be good. It was. He married Lynn W. Thompson's cousin.

A friend/former sports editor named Jim Patrick, who is now the sports editor at the Sacramento Bee just happens to be an avid Twins fan. Chomping at the bit to do anything sports related, he jumps at the chance to write about a Twins legend just for fun and for old times' sake. The result speaks for itself.

Trent came next. Completely out of nowhere on an obscure database of baseball players listed by college. Made his debut in 1927. Ladies and gentlemen, Bethune-Cookman's first professional athlete, predating the great Cy McClairen by nearly 30 years.

Uh, oh. Who was this guy?

Oh, the playing stats are readily there – 109 career wins, three pennants, numerous all-star game appearances, registering strikeouts against the white major leagues' big names of the day. Enough for a passable bio, but not for "a first pro athlete."

If this was "Field of Dreams," we'd be headed to Fenway Park right now. (It also kinda feels like that war movie ["Courage Under Fire"] where Denzel Washington is investigating whether Meg Ryan should receive a Medal of Honor. Just wanted to drop another movie reference. Sorry.)

Tracking Ted Trent became a tale of its own. Google can only take you so far. One colleague recommends asking renowned baseball columnist Joe Posnanski, who responded amazingly fast with a useful lead. That was like Jimi Hendrix recommending to you what amplifier makes your guitar sound the best. Negro league historian Larry Lester's phone number was readily available, and the one hour conversation with him is mind boggling on the historian-historian level. Turns out he was an Earl Battey fan, and he would enjoy that article on the BCU web site the next day.

Within hours, the President of the Negro League Baseball Museum reached out, as do several other historians, one of whom will gladly autograph his book when you order it online. The networking was great, but alas, the progress stalled.

Other than the stats, there's precious little else about Trent. Oh, one amusing thing did come up – he would get his own Strat-O-Matic card – it was a baseball nerd dice game (ask your dad) when the company released a Negro League All Star collection back in the day. That was about it.

Battey's story had a life after playing baseball, with him coming to Bethune-Cookman, earning his degree, going on to coach and bringing to Daytona Beach Stanley Jefferson, the first Wildcat to ever be drafted and in the first round to boot. Maybe there's a Moonlight Graham-like story for Trent in his brief post-playing life. Not for now. The compiled data simply shows that the baseball life of the day caught up to Trent and he passed at the unfathomable young age of 40. Not the ending we want for "the first pro athlete."

Eventually, the name of shortstop Dick Lundy turned up, and Lundy's playing days preceded Trent by 10 years. Lundy played at the Cookman Institute before the 1923 merger, so there. Another player named Philly Holmes added to the history, but still….Trent's the first pro pitcher from Bethune-Cookman and deserves to have his story told beyond a passable bio in some forgotten encyclopedia. It's like in Hamilton when Christopher Jackson's George Washington laments that he can't control "who lives, who dies and who tells your story."

Don't all of us want to be remembered?

The question was how? The answer came. It happens like that.

Coach Jonathan Hernandez jumped on the ideal of his players being students of the game and could add the one thing the staff historian couldn't – the perspective of a Bethune-Cookman baseball player writing about a former Bethune-Cookman player. It made for a perfect use of this whatever kind of time it is and their results are exciting to read.

You know, the Daytona Tortugas are rebuilding Kelly Field. It used to be where Bethune-Cookman played some games. Jackie Robinson played there, too. Negro League teams held spring training there as well, so it's a good chance Trent played there, also.

So much for having to build a baseball field. But if you see a historian and a guy with a wicked curve ball having a catch….