1940 New York Yankees Corporate Lease Assignment - Ed Gottlieb Negro National League Agreement, Tied to Satchel Paige's Historic 1941 Return to New York
This is an original 1940 legal document from the American League Baseball Club of New York, Inc., the corporate entity behind the New York Yankees, assigning its rights under a lease agreement to the New York American Exhibition Co., Inc. Dated December 23, 1940, the document is signed by the club's president and bears its corporate seal.
The underlying agreement, dated December 16, 1940, was between the Yankees and Ed Gottlieb, a central figure in Black baseball and basketball history. Gottlieb served as booking agent for the Negro National League, and this document formalizes the terms under which the league could use Yankee Stadium on Sundays from May 1 through October 1, 1941. Sunday rentals were especially significant in this era, as blue laws and scheduling restrictions kept the Yankees off the field on Sundays at times, opening the Stadium to Negro League tenants.
That window of Sunday dates produced one of the most celebrated moments in Negro League history. On May 11, 1941, Satchel Paige, on loan from the Kansas City Monarchs, took the mound at Yankee Stadium for the Black Yankees in the Negro National League's season opener. Kansas City Monarchs owner J.L. Wilkinson staged the event with help from Broadway writers Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman, and New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia threw out the first pitch. Paige pitched a complete game, defeating the Philadelphia Stars 5-3, in front of a crowd estimated between 20,000 and 34,000 fans.
The same 1941 season saw the New York Cubans host the Homestead Grays at Yankee Stadium for the Negro National League pennant, a series that featured Hall of Famers Josh Gibson and Buck Leonard, with Grays pitcher Ray Brown, also a Hall of Famer, closing out the pennant-clinching win.
What sets this document apart is its apparent rarity. A SABR (Society for American Baseball Research) article on Black baseball at Yankee Stadium states that no written agreements between Gottlieb and the Yankees organization are known to survive, and that historians have had to reconstruct the terms of these deals from financial records rather than an actual surviving contract. If that holds, this document may be the only one of its kind known to exist publicly, a rare piece of the paper trail behind one of the most significant chapters in the history of Yankee Stadium and Negro League baseball.
SABR Article: Black Baseball at Yankee Stadium: The House That Ruth Built and Satchel Furnished (with Fans)
