Outfield
Greensboro
Full Name: David Monroe Barbee
Birth: May 7, 1905 Death: July 1, 1968, Albemarle
Burial: Guilford Memorial Park, Greensboro
Education: Pomona High School, Greensboro; Oglethorpe University, Atlanta, Ga.
Bats: R Throws: R Height and Weight: 5-11, 178
Teams and Years: Philadelphia Athletics, 1926; Pittsburgh Pirates, 1932
Career Summary
G AB H R RBI HR BA. OBP. SLG. WAR
116 374 92 44 60 6 .246 .290 .393 0.3
My book, The Tar Heel Boys of Summer: North Carolina’s Major League Ballplayers, will be published later this year. It will feature 34 biographical profiles of the more than 500 state natives who played in major-league baseball. I’ll post here some profiled that didn’t make into the book.
On this Opening Day of the major-league baseball season, let’s celebrate a time when they played the game for its sheer pleasure. It was a time before free agents and millionaires at each position, before $2,000 box seats and $15 hot dogs, when a man like Dave Barbee could scratch out a living while becoming a legend for the Greensboro Patriots, the Seattle Indians, and even for the Burlington Bees and the Sanford Spinners.
To be honest about it, Barbee didn’t amount to much in the major leagues, but he set home-run records in the minors and absolutely terrorized the competitive industrial leagues that flourished last century amid North Carolina’s textile mills and tobacco factories. To those blue-collar, lunchbox-toting workers struggling through the Great Depression, David Monroe Barbee was a star.
Even in his day, no one flocked to Shibe Park or Forbes Field to watch Barbee play during his two brief stints in the majors. But over on the West Coast, he was a major draw. Fans packed little Dugdale Field in Seattle and Wrigley Field in south L.A. – Gary Cooper, George Raft and William Powell among them – to watch Barbee launch towering shots into the grandstands while setting minor-league home run records.
Dave Barbee set records in the minors with his home runs.
Later, back in North Carolina, Barbee became something of a legend among factory workers from Wilson to Wilkesboro. They’d crowd into little municipal parks and fenced-off pastures to watch Barbee tear through the opposing company team.
Though he appeared in less than 200 major-league games, Barbee would until the day he died always consider himself to be a ballplayer.
He was the second of three children born to Ada and Joe Barbee. The 1910 and ’20 censuses have them living in Morehead, a township in Guilford County that now makes up most of southwestern Greensboro. Joe Barbee listed his occupation in the 1910 count as “spraying trees with a machine.” Ten years later, he reported being a railroad inspector.
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His son, David, attended old Pomona High School, a historic Classical Revival style building that’s now apartments on Spring Garden Street in Greensboro. Its shining moment came in 1923 when little Pomona, led by Dave Barbee, won the state baseball championship. Barbee hit a home run and pitched a three-hit shutout in the title game.
He played two seasons in the outfield at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta and, as a freshman, had a key role in the school’s conference championship in 1924.
Signing on with his hometown Greensboro Patriots in the Class C Piedmont League in 1926, Barbee became the “Gate City Crasher,” hitting .372 with a record 29 homers. Connie Mack, the manager of the Philadelphia Athletics, acquired him on July 24 and inserted him in the lineup five days later against the Cleveland Indians. Barbee belted a triple on the second pitch he saw. But it was downhill from there. He hit .190 with one homer in 19 games, and Mack released him.
Barbee returned to the minors and became one of the most fearsome hitters in the Class A Pacific Coast League. From 1928-31, he hit .325 with 146 doubles, 26 triples and 126 home runs. He led the league in homers twice and would be inducted into its hall of fame in 2014.
The Pittsburgh Pirates bought Barbee’s contract, and he became the Bucs’ starting leftfielder in 1932, his only full season in the majors. Though he had a respectable year -- hitting .256 with five homers and 55 RBI – Barbee found himself back in the minors where he would remain until he quit professional baseball in 1935.
Barbee and his family -- wife, Annie, and their young son, David Jr. – settled in Burlington where Barbee was an inspector for Burlington Mills. One suspects, though, he was really hired as a ringer for its baseball team.
For at least the next five years, Barbee dominated the industrial leagues, his exploits reported in newspapers across the state. He even caught the attention of far-off, big-city journals. Washington’s Evening Star reported in October 1937 about a series of games pitting Barbee’s Burlington team against McEwen Hosiery Mills for the industrial-league championship. Barbee, the paper noted, went 10 for 14. Half his hits were home runs. “Sportswriters down there swear the series is on the level,” the paper concluded.
Such hitting lines were the norm. At the mid-point of the 1940 season, for instance, Barbee was hitting .491 with 10 homers in just 39 at bats.
His trail then disappears, re-emerging years later in Stanly County. There, a death certificate filed with local health authorities notes that David Monroe Barbee, 63, died on July 1, 1968 of a cerebral hemorrhage. In the form’s space for Usual Occupation, are these words: “PLAYER, OUT FIELD.” In the Industry field is this: “BASE BALL.”
