Baseball Gets Another Chance to Honor a Legend

4 min readNov 16, 2021

Minnie Miñoso was a pioneering Black Latino star in the 1950s whose greatness and impact have been overlooked by Hall of Famer voters. That may finally change.

Minnie Miñoso was a mentor for generations of Chicago White Sox players. He served many years as a player and a coach, lived year-round in the city and upheld the team’s tradition as a welcoming place for Cuban stars. He liked to offer this advice:

“Be in love with the game,” Miñoso said by phone in 2014. “Do everything beautiful for the game and the people and the country you represent. That’s what I want everyone to do.”

When Miñoso died the next year, he was as young as 89 or as old as 92 — depending on your source — and his place in baseball history was just as confusing. Was he mostly a solid hitter with speed in the 1950s? Was he mainly a carnival act for Bill Veeck, the maverick White Sox owner, who briefly activated him in 1976 and 1980?

http://www.4mark.net/story/4879673/google

Or was Miñoso one of the best and most important players in baseball history?

“To me, Minnie is a legend,” the former pitcher Jose Contreras, who came to the majors from Cuba in 2003, said through an interpreter on Monday. “He was one of the reasons I started playing baseball when I was a kid. I wanted to be like him. He was one of our best representatives, our Jackie Robinson.”

The Hall of Fame is considering Miñoso again this off-season, reviving one of its most curious candidacies. In addition to the annual writers’ ballot — which will feature David Ortiz and Alex Rodriguez for the first time and Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens for the last — two committees will pore over 20 names from the past.

Image

Miñoso executed a perfect slide around Boston’s Sammy White at home plate during a game in 1953.Credit…Mark Rucker/Transcendental Graphics, via Getty Images

Miñoso is on the Golden Days ballot for candidates from the 1950s and 1960s. But his record crosses over to the other ballot — Early Baseball — which is largely evaluating Black players from the era before integration. Miñoso came to the United States in 1945, inspired by Robinson’s signing with the Brooklyn Dodgers, and spent three years in the Negro National League, helping the New York Cubans win a championship.

“I can’t even count the number of times that he and I sat in the conference room adjacent to my office, just talking baseball and talking about life and the joy that he had for this game and why he chose to pass up more lucrative opportunities to come play for the New York Cubans,” said Bob Kendrick, the president of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City. “He wanted to chase the American dream, and he laid down that foundation to so many others, because they knew they would have the opportunity to play this game.”

Many light-skinned players from Cuba had appeared in the majors before Miñoso’s debut in 1949 for Veeck’s Cleveland Indians. Miñoso, however, was dark-skinned. He faced the same kind of racism directed at Robinson and other Black players, without the same command of English to help him get by.

Miñoso was hit by pitches 16 times in 1951, his first full season, and led the majors in that category nine times. He was comfortable crowding the plate, to be sure, but suspected there was more behind it.

“My first year in big league in 1951, one team — I no tell who — always call me names,” he once told The New York World-Telegram and Sun, which quoted him in broken English, as recounted in Jay Jaffe’s “The Cooperstown Casebook” in 2017. They used foul language and referenced his race, Miñoso said, adding: “I think they try make me afraid.”

Miñoso persevered. From 1951 through 1961, he ranked third in the majors in hits, trailing only Nellie Fox and Richie Ashburn. Miñoso had more steals and a better on-base plus slugging percentage than both.

Baseball Gets Another Chance to Honor a Legend

Written by Zikos hrey

No responses yet