Editing Negro league baseball (section)

===Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, and Gus Greenlee===
Just as Negro league baseball seemed to be at its lowest point and was about to fade into history, along came [[Cumberland Posey]] and his Homestead Grays. Posey, Charlie Walker, John Roesnik, George Rossiter, John Drew, Lloyd Thompson, and L.R. Williams got together in January 1932 and founded the [[East–West League]]. Eight cities were included in the new league: "Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Detroit, Baltimore, Cleveland, Newark, New York, and Washington, D.C.".{{sfn|Hauser|2006|pp=71–72}} By May 1932, the Detroit Wolves were about to collapse, and instead of letting the team go, Posey kept pumping money into it. By June the Wolves had disintegrated and all the rest of the teams, except for the Grays, were beyond help, so Posey had to terminate the league.

Across town from Posey, [[Gus Greenlee]], a reputed gangster and [[Numbers game|numbers runner]], had just purchased the [[Pittsburgh Crawfords]]. Greenlee's main interest in baseball was to use it as a way to [[money laundering|launder money]] from his numbers games. But, after learning about Posey's money-making machine in [[Homestead, Pennsylvania|Homestead]], he became obsessed with the sport and his Crawfords. On August 6, 1931, [[Satchel Paige]] made his first appearance as a Crawford. With Paige on his team, Greenlee took a huge risk by investing $100,000 in a new ballpark to be called [[Greenlee Field]]. On opening day, April 30, 1932, the pitcher-catcher battery was made up of the two most marketable icons in all of black baseball: Satchel Paige and [[Josh Gibson]].

In 1933, Greenlee, riding the popularity of his Crawfords, became the next man to start a Negro league. In February 1933, Greenlee and delegates from six other teams met at Greenlee's Crawford Grill to ratify the constitution of the [[National Organization of Professional Baseball Clubs]]. The name of the new league was the same as the old league [[Negro National League (the second)|Negro National League]] which had disbanded a year earlier in 1932.{{sfn|Hauser|2006|p=75}} The members of the new league were the Pittsburgh Crawfords, the [[Columbus Blue Birds]], the Indianapolis ABCs, the Baltimore Black Sox, the Brooklyn Royal Giants, Cole's American Giants (formerly the [[Chicago American Giants]]), and the Nashville Elite Giants. Greenlee also came up with the idea to duplicate the [[Major League Baseball All-Star Game]], except, unlike the big league method in which the sportswriters chose the players, the fans voted for the participants. The first game, known as the [[East–West All-Star Game]], was held September 10, 1933, at [[Comiskey Park]] in Chicago before a crowd of 20,000.{{sfn|Hogan|2006|pp=284–85}}