In the decades before professional baseball was integrated, North Brentwood residents cheered their own hometown team.
The Brentwood Flashes were part of a national network of African-American teams, sometimes referred to as sandlot baseball, that flourished from the 1920s to the 1950s. The teams were a central part of the community at a time when professional baseball was segregated.
Games were played in the summer on Sundays after church. The $1 ticket for admission and fundraisers paid for uniforms and equipment, while team members paid their own way to face off against other sandlot teams in Prince George’s County such as the Lakeland White Sox, the Laurel All-Stars, the Oxon Hill Azetcs and the Glenarden Braves.
The teams were a source of pride for residents, with one former fan telling a historian that just about everyone came to the games because “we didn’t have anything else.”
The high point for the Brentwood Flashes came in 1946 — the year before Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in professional baseball — when they became the first sandlot team to play in Griffith Stadium, then home of the Washington Senators.
At the time, Griffith was one of only two major league ballparks in the country used by both black and white teams.
The neighborhood teams in Prince George’s County died out after the Tri-State League was formed in 1957, recruiting semiprofessional players from around the county instead of within each community.
If you want to follow in the footsteps of the Brentwood Flashes, you can visit the renovated Blacksox Park in Bowie where they played other sandlot teams and sometimes faced off against traveling teams from the Negro League.
