Rochester researcher unlocks the mystery behind Black ballplayer Dave Brown's disappearance

Jun. 17—ROCHESTER — The story of southpaw Dave Brown's life has tantalized generations of Negro baseball league historians — like a squirting ground ball just out of reach of an infielder.

Brown was among the first "superstars" of the Negro National League in the early 1920s. But then Brown disappeared — a fugitive of justice, for allegedly shooting a man to death in New York.

He was never heard from again.

Brown's disappearance has been a confounding mystery for the tight-knit community of baseball researchers steeped in the Negro league history. And it remained that way for more than eight decades, until a baseball researcher from Rochester, Richard Bogovich, became credited with solving the mystery.

According to Bogovich and author Frederick Bush, both researchers with the

Society for American Baseball Research,

Brown's ability to disappear and escape the detection of authorities was a fairly straightforward ruse.

He adopted an alias, then moved west, where he lived and raised a family until his death in 1985. His disappearance remained a puzzle, his incomplete memory undisturbed, until Bogovich began working the case, scouring online obituaries, comparing documents and photographs and interviewing surviving family members.

"I've been a fan of Sherlock Holmes. If there was a Negro leagues project that I was going to dive into, it was gonna be the Dave Brown disappearance," Bogovich said.

Bogovich, who works for the Rochester Repertory Theatre Company, says he's been "crazy" about baseball since he was a boy. But his fascination with Negro league baseball history only began to consume him within the last decade.

And for a baseball researcher who enjoys diving into the minutiae of stats and stories, Dave Brown offered rare satisfactions few other ball players did.

"For Dave Brown, the glory (of early success) would fade three years later, when he murdered a man in a bar brawl and lived out his life as a fugitive, never to be found," writes Mark Ribowsky, author of "A Complete History of the Negro Leagues, 1884 to 1955."

Apart from his guilt or innocence, over which there is dispute, Brown had reason to be leery of law enforcement during a time of segregation. Before his star began to rise as a baseball player in Chicago, Brown had a brother, Webster, who was hunted down and shot to death by a Dallas police posse for stealing clothes, Bogovich said.

Brown's career as a pitching ace for the Chicago American Giants was brief but impressive. His stats according to Baseball Reference including stints in the Cuban Winter Baseball League boast a 74-31 win-loss record and 2.39 ERA, numbers that if sustained over time would bring consideration from the

Baseball Hall of Fame

in Cooperstown. But he did not make the cut, likely because his pitching career was so brief.

Adopting an alias was not new to Brown and may have been a survival instinct born of living in an apartheid society, Bogovich said.

After fleeing New York in 1925, Brown re-emerged in the Midwest and pitched for seven years under the alias William "Lefty" Wilson. He played for various semi-pro teams throughout the region, including Minnesota and Iowa. Brown, using his "Wilson" alias, was later hired as a player/manager for a team in Sioux City, Iowa, and alluded to his real past.

Described by the local press as the "greatest southpaw hurler in the game," it noted that Wilson was "formerly a member of the Chicago negro National League." There was never a Lefty Wilson to play for the Chicago Giants. Bogovich said most baseball researchers he knows assume Wilson and Brown were one in the same.

Throughout his early life, Brown was trailed and dogged by stories of criminal behavior. Bogovich argues some of these stories were maliciously manufactured to damage Brown's reputation. When Brown jumped to a new Black league to play for the New York Lincoln Giants, it reportedly angered the owner of the team and league that Brown left behind, Rube Foster.

Foster began circulating a story that he had secured Brown's release from prison after being convicted of highway robbery, "though no evidence exists to corroborate this tale," Bogovich said.

Brown's ending up on a "Wanted" poster for murder complete with baseball cap and uniform was the result of a night of carousing in New York after a successful Opening Day doubleheader in 1925. Brown was reportedly with two other players when a man named Benjamin Adair was shot in their presence. The three ballplayers, including Brown, fled the scene and disappeared, making them suspects in the crime.

But in an article, Bush, Bogovich's partner in researching Brown's life, said that the two ballplayers Brown was with were apprehended, questioned and cleared by police. Yet, the ever-wary Brown never turned himself in.

"It does not appear that any of the ballplayers had a role in the Adair shooting," Bush states in his article. "If so, all three should have been charged with a crime. Perhaps, Brown saw himself as a potential scapegoat since he was the only identified witness, or suspect, left. He may also have called to mind the shooting of his brother Webster in Dallas and had a distrust of the police and how he would be handled if he turned himself in."

Bogovich said his ability to shed light on Brown's fugitive life after his disappearance began with a search of online obituaries. Bogovich found an obit for Felix Brown, Dave Brown's brother, and among the list of survivors was an Alfred Brown, a name that had never appeared previously in documents about the family.

Other pieces of evidence began to align the identities of Alfred Brown and Dave Brown. Signatures of their last names on documents bore an uncanny resemblance. Their birthdays were on the same day, but had different years.

When Alfred Brown's grandson sent a photo of his grandfather during his playing days, any last doubt vanished. It was a well-known picture of Dave Brown in the uniform of the Cuban Winter League's Santa Clara Leopardes.

One of the grandchildren said his father used to boast that their grandfather was a "famous baseball player," but it was dismissed as a tall tale.

"They can't believe all of this about their grandfather," Bogovich said. "He did in fact have this life and that he was such a highly regarded Negro League pitcher."