Could Oscar Charleston be the best player of all time?
The question is a big one, perfectly straightforward and ultimately, not even the real subject of this story. For now, just keep an open mind and take this as a jumping off point: it’s a reasonable one to ask.
Bill James once wrote, when comparing Charleston to legendary center fielders Mickey Mantle, Joe DiMaggio and Willie Mays, “Oscar Charleston probably rates right with them. Some say he was better. It’s hard to imagine how anyone could have been better, but Charleston, in a sense, put Mays and Mantle together.”
Charleston hasn’t been completely overlooked. He is after all a member of the Baseball Hall of Fame, having been inducted in 1976, 22 years after his death. Yet, like so many other greats from the Negro Leagues of Charleston’s time, he fell so far off the historical radar that the first comprehensive biography about him, written by Dr. Jeremy Beer, was not published until 2019. Fittingly, Beer chose the title, “Oscar Charleston: The Life and Legend of Baseball’s Greatest Forgotten Star.”
