Spot Poles

CTL-E-7004 · Person · other · 1887–1962

VERIFIED evidence grade — build store (JSON graph)

Combined Graph record U-07876 · provenance: build store (JSON graph), record CTL-E-7004.

Spottswood "Spot" Poles (November 27, 1887 – September 12, 1962), born in Winchester, Virginia, was a fleet center fielder of Black baseball's early professional era — a contemporary of Dick Redding — who starred for the Philadelphia Giants and the New York Lincoln Giants and Lincoln Stars in the 1910s. Poles was celebrated for his speed and bat control; surviving statistics are fragmentary, and he is credited in contemporary and later accounts with batting marks (including a .487 figure for 1911 in some compilations) that this record reports as attributed claims rather than settled statistics. When the United States entered the First World War, Poles enlisted and served with the 369th Infantry Regiment — the Harlem Hellfighters — earning a Purple Heart and decorations for his service in France, one of several Black ballplayers whose prime years were divided by the war. He returned to baseball briefly after the war and later worked in New York. His SABR biography treats him as one of the outstanding outfielders of the pre-Negro leagues generation.

The record

• Also known as: Spottswood Poles

Notes

Sports Encyclopedia roster CTL-SPE-0319. Firsts disposition: NO batting average asserted as fact — the .487 figure is carried expressly as an attributed compilation claim, the fragmentary-data rule from the brief. Military service per SABR and Wikipedia. Curator's Judgment (DRAFT): Poles's file pairs the two archives segregation left thin — the box scores that weren't kept and the service record that was. Photo: CLEARED (1913 Lincoln Giants portrait, public domain; file description names Spottswood 'Spot' Poles expressly).

Sources

• SABR BioProject. "Spot Poles." Accessed 2026-11-03. (primary source · build store)
• Wikipedia. "Spot Poles." Accessed 2026-11-03. (build store)

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Record CTL-E-7004 · Combined Graph record U-07876 · CultureTechLens Knowledge Graph · 2 sources.
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