[chucksabr]

Black African to Make Diamond Debut

On the squad of the Ramblers of Stoke now resides the very first exotic player in the history of the game, a young man from Jamestown in the Gold Coast who will be contending for the club's first base position in 1898.

His Christian name is Gerald Davies, and he has been in England for seven years now. He picked up the game straight away, and has returned occasionally to his African home during which he has done his part in spreading the game among his young friends, but now he has been conscripted by the Ramblers who hope to find a place for him in Stoke-on-Trent.

The twenty year old native has a fair amount of work to do to displace Frederick Magee, who has been an eight-year mainstay at first, and who at the still young age of twenty six doesn’t figure to be going anywhere else just yet. But Davies has a smooth left handed stroke which could win the day in the early going. His success would bode well for the spread of the game throughout the Empire, and most optimistically might presage our challenging for world baseball supremacy with the Americans, if all goes well.