The late Howard “Pen” Muse, a township native and star athlete, will be inducted into the Hot Stovers Baseball Club of South Jersey’s Hall of Fame on Saturday.
Muse was born in Mount Laurel in 1897 and raised in Moorestown. The youngest of 12 children, he attended Moorestown High and pitched for three years on its baseball team. According to a 1922 story in the Courier-Post, Muse had a record at the school of “never having lost a game in three years.”
After he graduated from high school, Muse joined his older brothers Joe, also a pitcher, and Cliff, a catcher, on the Moorestown Crescents, sometimes referred to as the Crescent Giants. They played games against both all-white and all-Black teams, including the likes of the Pennsauken Giants, the Camden Giants, the Linden All- Stars, the Maple Shade Tigers, the Philadelphia Black Sox, the Trenton Elks and the East End Tigers.
The first newspaper article found by Moorestown resident Lenny Wagner – who nominated Muse for the hall of fame – was from July of 1920, when Muse pitched a one-hitter against the Salem Giants, a 7-3 victory for the Crescents.
Game after game, box scores revealed a consistently great pitcher, and it seemed as if Muse pitched for almost every game the team played. In 1925, for example, he pitched both doubleheaders against the Newton Stars and won both.
Wagner’s original intention was to nominate the Crescents for the hall, but as he started to read about the team, Muse’s name stood out.
“ … The more I read, the more I said, ‘This guy is special,’” Wagner recalled. “This guy was like Moorestown’s answer to (famed baseball player) Satchel Paige.”
Early in 1921, Muse held the Philadelphia Quick Stops to five hits, not allowing a run until the ninth inning, when his team had already scored 19. A few days later, he pitched a shutout against the team from Camden’s Seventh Ward A.C., allowing the opponent just five hits and striking out 11.
Among other highlights was a game Muse pitched against the rival Maple Shade Tigers in September of 1920. The Courier-Post reported that Muse left the Tigers without a hit or run, and the Crescents took the first game of a three-game series by a score of 3-0. On Oct. 19 of that year, he pitched a one-hitter against the Medford A.C. in a 1-0 win.
In September of 1921, Muse was the losing pitcher in a 14-inning game against the East Side A.A. that ended with a score of 3-2. He pitched all 14 innings and struck out 23 batters in the process. A few days later, he suffered another loss, this time by a score of 2-0 to the Emerson A.A.
The following year, Muse joined the Hilldale Daisies, a team considered among the best in the Negro League. The Daisies were a charter member of the Eastern Colored League (ECL), a rival of Rube Foster’s Negro National League.
The ECL was made up of teams that included Hilldale, the Cuban Stars East, the Brooklyn Royal Giants, the Atlantic City Bacharach Giants, the New York Lincoln Giants and the Baltimore Black Sox.
Muse’s stay with Hilldale was short, and he would go on to pitch for teams like the Woodbury Giants (Muse pitched Woodbury to a 4-0 win in the Gloucester County League against Westville), the Camden Sports (their win over the Philadelphia Red Caps broke the Caps’ 17 game winning streak) and the Merchantville Grays (in 1935, the Grays went for the South Jersey Colored Championship and Muse struck out 12 of its batters, allowing only five hits and two runs in the Grays’ victory).
He pitched for the Camden Giants in 1944, when the team was sponsored by heavyweight boxing contender Jersey Joe Walcott. In 1959, Muse and other Moorestown High alumni played against that year’s varsity baseball team. He was 63 at that time, but still pitched the first two innings and held the young players scoreless.
Muse passed away in 1975, but his legend lives on.
“Things that are right in front of us get overlooked,” Wagner observed. “But… this guy was a big deal.”
