Celebrate Black History Month with Big Train: Pint Isreal Bobblehead Giveaway at Juneteenth!

As part of our celebration of Black History Month, Big Train baseball has announced that we will give the first 500 fans at our June 19 Clarence “Pint” Isreal Juneteenth Classic a bobblehead of Montgomery County’s greatest Negro League star. June 19, 2025 will be the Big Train's Fourth Annual Juneteenth Classic. At the inaugural Classic in 2022, the giveaway was a t-shirt with the logo of the Classic’s inaugural game. In 2023, the Big Train players wore a replica jersey of the 1954 Scotland Eagles, the Black Sandlot team located closest to our Shirley Povich Field. We gave fans attending the game a t-shirt version of the Eagles jersey. In 2024, we gave fans a baseball card telling the history of Pint Isreal. 

In 2025, Big Train is stepping up our giveaway game with a bobblehead of Pint Isreal, a member of the 1946 Negro League Champion Newark Eagles, in the famous pose we used for the card giveaway in 2024. “Big Train fans really enjoyed our bobblehead giveaways in 2024 of our beloved batboy Owen Lieber and of former Big Train volunteer and now Assistant General Manager of the Baltimore Orioles Eve Rosenbaum,” explained Big Train founder and president Bruce Adams. “This Pint Isreal bobblehead with Pint spearing a line drive over his head will upgrade every bobblehead collection it joins. We are grateful to Big Train historian Bill Hickman for his research preserving the story of Pint Isreal and his support of the bobblehead giveaway.”

Big Train historian Bill Hickman published the definitive biography of Pint Isreal for the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) in 2019: Clarence Isreal. With a nomination from Bill, Isreal was inducted into the Montgomery County Sports Hall of Fame in 2022. 

In an article in the 2022 Big Train souvenir program, Bill introduced Clarence Isreal this way: “He beat out an All-Star second baseman to win a starting job with a Negro League baseball team. He held off a Hall of Fame third baseman from taking away his spot at the hot corner on his Negro League team. He was a starting third baseman in the 1946 Negro League World Series. He was penciled into starting lineups by three managers who now reside in the Hall of Fame. He was a local man who spent his whole life in Rockville.” In 2024, Major League Baseball announced that the statistics of more than 2,300 Negro Leagues ballplayers from 1920 to 1948 would be recognized in the MLB record books including those of Pint Isreal.

As with other Negro League stars from the county like Russell Awkard who realized that segregation denied them the opportunity to play at baseball’s highest level, Pint Isreal returned home to raise a family and compete in Montgomery’s Black Sandlot games. Isreal devoted his life to helping Montgomery’s youth through the Black Angels Boys Club and other organizations. He became a valued mentor to Billy Gordon and other youth. Isreal worked as a biological laboratory technician at the National Institutes of Health and was player/manager of the integrated NIH baseball team. In 1988, the year after he died, the Mayor and Council of Rockville dedicated a park in his name in the Lincoln Park neighborhood.

On February 6, 2025, at the invitation of Big Train fans John and Linda Daniel, Bruce Adams spoke about the Black Sandlots of Montgomery County before nearly 100 people at the Keese School of Continuing Education at Asbury Methodist Village in Gaithersburg. In the last half of the nineteenth century, when Blacks made up four of every ten residents of Montgomery County, formerly enslaved people formed more than three dozen communities across the county. Two thirds of these communities had baseball teams that were at the center of civic life of the Black community during Montgomery's Jim Crow era. "This is a complicated story of how something undeniably wonderful resulted from something completely inexcusable,” Bruce told the Asbury audience.

“On a Sunday afternoon, the entire African American community was there,” one of Rockville’s finest athletes and now Big Train Board member Billy Gordon explained to Bruce for a 2021 Montgomery History conversation. “The folks who had gone to church were there. But everybody else who loved the game showed up from infants to the elderly. It was quite a scene. The preacher would be at the game, and the bootlegger would be there dispensing beverages.”