Playing America's Game: Baseball, Latinos, and the Color Line

PLAYING AMERICA’S GAME AMERICAN CROSSROADS Edited by Earl Lewis, George Lipsitz, Peggy Pascoe, George Sánchez, and Dana Takagi Playing America’s Game Baseball, Latinos, and the Color Line

Adrian Burgos Jr.

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley Los Angeles London University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more informa- tion, visit www.ucpress.edu.

University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd. London, England

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Burgos, Adrian, 1969–. Playing America’s game : baseball, Latinos, and the color line / Adrian Burgos Jr. p. cm. — (American crossroads ; 23) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-520-23646-2 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn 978-0-520-25143-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Hispanic American baseball players—History. 2. Baseball—United States—History. 3. Racism in sports—United States—History. 4. United States—Race relations. I. Title. gv863.a1b844 2007 796.357—dc22 2007002883

Manufactured in the United States of America

16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 10987654321

This book is printed on New Leaf EcoBook 60, containing 60% post-consumer waste, processed chlorine free; 30% de-inked recycled fiber, elemental chlorine free; and 10% FSC-certified virgin fiber, totally chlorine free. EcoBook 60 is acid-free and meets the minimum requirements of ansi/astm d5634–01 (Permanence of Paper). In memory of those who entered the U.S. playing field and were not recognized, and for Dolly, Miranda, and my parents, Aida Burgos and Adrian Burgos Sr.

Contents

List of Illustrations / ix Preface / xi Acknowledgments / xvii

Introduction: Latinos Play America’s Game / 1

PART ONE THE RISE OF AMERICA’S GAME AND THE COLOR LINE

1 A National Game Emerges / 17

2 Early Maneuvers / 34

3 Holding the Line / 53

PART TWO LATINOS AND THE RACIAL DIVIDE

4 Baseball Should Follow the Flag / 71

5 “Purest Bars of Castilian Soap” / 88

6 Making Cuban Stars / 111

7 Becoming Cuban Senators / 141

8 Playing in the World Jim Crow Made / 162 PART THREE BEYOND INTEGRATION

9 Latinos and Baseball’s Integration / 179

10 Troubling the Waters / 198

11 Latinos and Baseball’s Global Turn / 227

12 Saying It Is So-sa! / 243

Conclusion: Still Playing America’s Game / 261

Appendix: Pioneering Latinos / 269 Notes / 275 Selected Bibliography / 321 Index / 345 Illustrations

1. Esteban Bellán with the 1869 Troy Haymakers 18 2. Vincent Nava in an 1884 Providence Grays team photo 40 3. The 1888 Chicago Ball Club with its black mascot, Clarence Duval 60 4. Alex Pompez’s 1921 Cuban Stars 117 5. Martin Dihigo of the 1935 New York Cubans 119 6. The 1943 New York Cubans 125 7. Adolfo Luque 142 8. Roberto “Bobby” Estalella 154 9. Osvaldo “Ozzie” Virgil 182 10. Orestes “Minnie” Miñoso and Luis Aparacio 195 11. Vic Power and Al Lopez 205 12. Orlando Cepeda and Juan Marichal 209 13. Felipe Alou and his brothers Mateo (Matty) and Jesus 211

Preface

Baseball was never far away as I was growing up in northern New Jer- sey and southern Florida. My earliest baseball memory is of a game I at- tended at Yankee Stadium in 1976, the year the stadium was reopened. There were also Sunday afternoon games where church members would congregate after morning service. The sounds of people conversing in Spanish and English, bats striking balls, and gloves popping have been forever etched in my childhood memories. After we moved to Florida, I could be found on about any afternoon playing baseball, whether in a league, on a school team, or dueling with my neighbor in our own ver- sion of the game. He turned out to be quite a ballplayer, winning Broward County’s high school player-of-the-year award and starring in Division I college ball while I played at the Division III level. Baseball provided a forum among my relatives to discuss broader is- sues about sports, history, and community. My grandmother Petra Mal- donado’s dinner invitations to watch Yankee games were opportunities to talk baseball and family history as she shared stories of old-time players and of her experience living in Puerto Rico during the ﬁrst half of the twentieth century. My grandmother Mercedes Rivera imparted similar historical lessons during the year I lived with her while I taught high

xi xii PREFACE school in Spanish Harlem. Listening to her recollections as a Puerto Ri- can woman who participated in the migration to New York City during the 1950s was truly a seminar in Latino history. Together, my grand- mothers exposed me to the lived experience of cultural continuities and change, Latinidad, and transnational practices before these terms were part of my academic vocabulary. My passion for baseball and history ultimately led me to a more eas- ily attainable goal than a big-league career—writing a history of Latinos in America’s game. My interest in this history started in my youth when I followed the game in local and national publications, caught whatever games came on radio or television, and collected baseball cards. Base- ball cards taught me the geography of baseball. The cards of Ed Figueroa, Luis Tiant, Dennis Martínez, John Candelaria, Mike Torrez, and Ren- nie Stennett taught me that baseball was popular throughout much of the Spanish-speaking Americas: Cuba, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Mexico, and Panama. These players provided a connection with gener- ations of Latino players, and their professional achievements sparked a sense of pride. The extent to which Latinos participated in the Negro leagues, however, remained hidden to me until much later. The oral history of the feats performed in black baseball has made it hard to separate lore from actual events. These stories have captured the imagination of baseball fans everywhere—recall how Negro leaguer Buck O’Neill’s appearance in Ken Burns’s PBS series Baseball transformed the retired player into a national spokesman. The hundreds of Latinos who performed in the Negro leagues have not been so fortunate. Predomi- nantly foreign-born and overwhelmingly Spanish speaking, Latinos have been rendered mute in the retelling of baseball’s racial saga despite the efforts of baseball historians and exhibit curators. Barred from the major leagues and overlooked by chroniclers of black baseball, Latino players like José Méndez, Cristobal Torriente, Martin Dihigo, Francisco “Pan- cho” Coimbre, and Horacio Martínez have remained on the sidelines of history.

Researching and writing this book have involved an intellectual journey that took me from the archives of the National Baseball Library in Coop- erstown, New York, to the sugarcane fields of Cienfuegos, Cuba, and from classrooms at the University of Illinois to the homes of dozens of retired Latino players in the United States, Puerto Rico, and Cuba. At those various stops I gained important insights into the experience of Latino players. Listening to the stories of Latino Negro leaguers and their PREFACE xiii families underscored the importance of re-inserting this vital chapter into the story of baseball. Black Latino players Rodolfo Fernández, Rafael Noble, Charlie Rivera, and Armando Vásquez shared stories that illu- minated how they dealt with the dual impact of their race and ethnicity on and off the playing field. Their memories affirmed the importance of placing their particular experiences, along with those of other Latinos, in a broader analysis about race, Latinos, and the color line. The history of Latinos and baseball is rife with misconceptions. I first grappled with one of them while writing my senior’s thesis at Vassar Col- lege. This early work revealed a flawed working hypothesis, that baseball’s popularity among Caribbean Latinos was primarily an outgrowth of U.S. imperialism. Baseball’s infusion into Latino cultures involved a much more complicated process of transnational exchange among those who moved within the professional baseball circuit, from players and executives to fans, émigrés, and others who followed the sport. In dif- ferent contexts, Latinos adopted “America’s game” and gave the sport meaning that went beyond athletic competition. For them, baseball also became a site for building community, making citizens out of colonial subjects, teaching appropriate class behavior, and displaying masculin- ity. And as the game became professionalized and opportunities to play in the United States increased, baseball also developed into a possible av- enue of escape for impoverished Latinos. This initial investigation revealed another significant misconception: during the Jim Crow era (late 1880s to 1947) nearly all Latinos played in the Negro leagues, not in the major leagues. This stunned me as a life- long baseball fan. Unsatisfied with the explanation that Latinos who gained entry to the majors were simply viewed as fellow whites and that all those who performed in the Negro leagues were black, in my doctoral studies I explored the historical context of Latino participation and the policing of the color line during Jim Crow. This story, I was convinced, revealed the racialization of individuals from the Spanish-speaking Amer- icas in U.S. society and demonstrated how race structured opportunity in America’s game. The timing of my doctoral research was somewhat serendipitous. In 1994 Burns’s documentary Baseball sparked a revival of popular interest in the history of the Negro leagues. After the series, a plethora of Ne- gro league books was published, oral histories were collected, and ad- ditional documentaries composed. Burns was not the first to acknowledge the centrality of the Negro league story to the history of baseball. Ted Williams, in his Hall of Fame induction speech in 1966, called for the xiv PREFACE

Hall to honor black baseball’s greats. Four years later Robert Peterson published Only the Ball Was White, the book that inspired many to pur- sue research on the Negro leagues. A decade later, Donn Rogosin in his book Invisible Men labeled Latinos and the Latin American story the missing link in the story of the Negro leagues. This notion inspired me when I read Rogosin’s book while in graduate school; I noted in the mar- gin of a page, “This is where I enter.” Historicizing the experience of Latinos in the Jim Crow baseball world and beyond proved challenging on multiple levels. The premise that study- ing the inclusion of Latinos in organized baseball would unveil the work- ings of baseball’s color line drew vocal dissenters. My aim, they specu- lated, was to prove a Latino player had surreptitiously “broken” the color line, and thus to diminish the historical role of Jackie Robinson. Much to the contrary, this focus ultimately reinforces Robinson’s role in baseball’s racial saga, revealing how organized baseball officials opened ac- cess to a limited number of Latinos during segregation on the basis of racial ambiguity and plausible deniability. Indeed, I argue that it took Robinson as a clearly identified African American to shatter this ambiguity and begin dismantling the racial barrier. Popular ignorance about Latino participation on either side of baseball’s racial divide has posed a significant hurdle. Rediscovered in the mid-1990s, typical accounts of the Negro leagues continue to minimize the Latino dimension. Attending Negro league conferences, I discovered much myopia to be overcome in broadening understandings about Latino participation. While browsing the vendor exhibits at a conference in 1996, I noticed a T-shirt bearing the insignia of Negro-league teams. The vendor proudly took credit for its design. When I asked, “Why ex- clude the New York Cubans?” he said the Cubans’ franchise was not significant enough in the history of the Negro leagues. This response underscored the public education still needed to recapture the era when African Americans and Latinos joined forces to create a transnational circuit that operated outside of organized baseball. Understanding this circuit, the actors who created and participated in it, the institutions of which it was made, and the communities that sustained it required an approach that stressed the connections, not the differences, between the English- and Spanish-speaking baseball worlds. The quest to understand the everyday lives of migrants who cross national borders as part of labor streams or in response to economic dis- location or political conflict compelled scholars to think beyond nation- states. An international framework would not work. Rather, an approach