TimeStamped with Robert Barbieri

In 1946, Jackie Robinson played his first season of integrated organized baseball — not in Brooklyn, but in Montreal. Eight years later, a 19-year-old Roberto Clemente did the same. Both wore the uniform of the Montreal Royals, the AAA franchise that called Delorimier Stadium home for thirty-two years and produced one of the most consequential pipelines in the history of the sport.Then, fourteen years after Robinson, six years after Clemente, the Royals folded. And almost nobody remembers them.This is the story of the team that integrated the minor leagues, the team that briefly held the kid who’d become a 15-time All-Star, and the city that loved them both — until baseball stopped loving the city back.I’m Robert Barbieri. This is TimeStamped.

In 1925, a football team from a coal mining town in Pennsylvania went 10-2, beat the best team in the league head-to-head, and had their championship stripped by a commissioner. Their best player was a coal miner who’d been underground since he was eleven. Red Grange called him the best he ever faced. This is the story of the Pottsville Maroons — the most dominant team in early NFL history, the championship the league stole, and the hundred-year cover-up that followed.

In 1921, three football teams from Western New York were among the founding members of what would become the NFL. One played a single game and vanished. One held the best record in the league and had its championship stolen. And the third was run by a teenager who invented the first team logo in professional football, helped redesign the ball itself, and lost his house trying to keep his franchise alive. This is the story of the Buffalo All-Americans, the Tonawanda Kardex, and the Rochester Jeffersons — the teams that were there before any of it was worth anything.