The Legendary John "Mule" Miles...Passes at 90 Years Old in his Home...Rest in Peace

Ex-Negro League Baseball Player...John "Mule" Miles passed away at 90 years old in his home.

In failing health over the past few months, gregarious former Negro Leagues baseball player John “Mule” Miles died at his home in San Antonio on Friday morning.  He was 90.

“I wanted to inform you that my father, John Miles, Jr., passed away quietly at home this morning of heart complications,” his son, Ralph Miles, wrote in an email. “We will miss (the) stories of the game he loved, baseball.”

A 1940s-era ball player with the Chicago American Giants, Miles didn't get any recognition for his career until decades later, when some of the league's former athletes started receiving invitations to major league games and other public functions.

Miles relished the opportunity to renew acquaintances and tell stories.

“He got energy from that,” Ralph Miles said in a telephone interview. “It lifted him. I'd travel with him to some of those things. I'd see him talking to the old-timers, getting excited.

“I could hear those conversations. When those guys reminisced, it was just like yesterday.”

John Miles said in an interview with the Express-News last month that he went to work in 1942 as an aircraft mechanic trainee at Tuskegee, Ala., home base for the famed “Tuskegee Airmen,” America's first black military air unit.

His baseball career in Chicago began four years later. Online records indicate he was a two-year player for the American Giants in the 1946 and 1948 seasons.

But Miles insisted in his most recent interview that he played four seasons in Chicago from 1946-49.

“Sometimes people, they say, 'Miles, you mean to tell me you were with the Tuskegee Airmen and you also played baseball? How did all this happen?' Miles said.  “I'd say, 'I don't know.' I don't know. But I did it. I made it.”

An inductee into the San Antonio Sports Hall of Fame in 2003, Miles told stories of good times and hard times in baseball in segregated America.

For instance, he said public restroom facilities and restaurants were off limits to black athletes traveling by bus in the 1940s.

But Miles also beamed in relating how he got his nickname.

“Candy Jim Taylor, the manager in Chicago, he told me that I hit a baseball harder than a damned mule kicks,” Miles said. “That's what he told me one day. That's how the name stuck.”

jbriggs@express-news.net