Alphonso "Piggy" Gerard (June 26, 1916 - July 14, 2002) was a

baseball Baseball is a bat-and-ball sport played between two teams of nine players each, taking turns batting and fielding. The game occurs over the course of several plays, with each play generally beginning when a player on the fielding t ...

outfielder An outfielder is a person playing in one of the three defensive positions in baseball or softball, farthest from the batter. These defenders are the left fielder, the center fielder, and the right fielder. As an outfielder, their duty is to c ...

in the

Negro leagues The Negro leagues were United States professional baseball leagues comprising teams of African Americans and, to a lesser extent, Latin Americans. The term may be used broadly to include professional black teams outside the leagues and it may be ...

. He played professionally in the United States from 1945 to 1948 with the

New York Black Yankees The New York Black Yankees were a professional Negro league baseball team based in New York City; Paterson, New Jersey; and Rochester, New York. Beginning as the independent Harlem Stars, the team was renamed the New York Black Yankees in 1932 and ...

Indianapolis Clowns The Indianapolis Clowns were a professional baseball team in the Negro American League. Tracing their origins back to the 1930s, the Clowns were the last of the Negro league teams to disband, continuing to play exhibition games into the 1980s. Th ...

, and the

Chicago American Giants The Chicago American Giants were a Chicago-based Negro league baseball team. From 1910 until the mid-1930s, the American Giants were the most dominant team in black baseball. Owned and managed from 1911 to 1926 by player-manager Andrew "Rube" F ...

. He was born and died on

Saint Croix Saint Croix; nl, Sint-Kruis; french: link=no, Sainte-Croix; Danish and no, Sankt Croix, Taino: ''Ay Ay'' ( ) is an island in the Caribbean Sea, and a county and constituent district of the United States Virgin Islands (USVI), an unincor ...

. Gerard was the only native of the Virgin Islands to play in the Negro Leagues. The bulk of Gerard's pro career took place in the Puerto Rican Winter League. He played there from the 1944–45 season until retiring after the winter of 1957–58. He also played professionally in Mexico (1946) and the Dominican Republic (1953).

References

External links

an
SeamheadsSABR biography
1916 births 2002 deaths New York Black Yankees players Chicago American Giants players Indianapolis Clowns players People from Saint Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands United States Virgin Islands baseball players 20th-century African-American sportspeople Baseball outfielders 21st-century African-American people {{Negro-league-baseball-outfielder-stub