October 7 in Ohio History: The Catcher Who Caught Without Signals | On This Day in Ohio

In 1884, Toledo's pitcher crossed his own catcher's signals on purpose, and the catcher caught everything anyway. He was Moses Fleetwood Walker, born in Mount Pleasant, Ohio, on October 7, 1856, and the first Black major leaguer, 63 years before Jackie Robinson. So who shut the door behind him?

Also on October 7: the king's line of 1763, Wayne's Legion marching out of Cincinnati, the 1872 election-eve riot in Cincinnati, Benjamin Arnett's fight against Ohio's Black Laws, and Toni Morrison's Nobel Prize.

Chapters:
0:00 Cold open
1:12 Lines on the map
2:02 The catcher
3:07 Lines in the street
4:21 Round two

Photos: Library of Congress, Wikimedia Commons and the U.S. Bureau of American Ethnology (public domain and Creative Commons; individual credits appear on screen).
Maps: U.S. Census Bureau and Natural Earth.
Music: "Beautiful Ohio" (1918), public-domain recordings via the Library of Congress National Jukebox and UCSB Cylinder Archive.