Latins Find a Home in the Majors
In the same way that Major League Baseball ignored generations of American-born black ballplayers with an unwritten but very real ban that consigned them to the shadows of the sport for the first half of the 20th century, dark-skinned Latin American players were also kept on the outside.
An institution that could pretend that Satchel Paige, Cool Papa Bell, Josh Gibson, Buck Leonard, Judy Johnson, Oscar Charleston, and many others were not worthy of a place on a major league roster found it no more difficult to exclude the finest Latin players, such as Martin Dihigo, Cristobal Torriente, and others.
Even today Martin Dihigo is not nearly as famous as Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson, but some believe he was the greatest baseball player of all time. The Cuban-born Dihigo, who broke into Latin baseball as a 16-year-old in 1922 and played for more than two decades before becoming a manager, was an all-star in the Negro Leagues and is in the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, as well as in the halls of fame of Cuba, Mexico, the Dominican, and Venezuela.
One year in Mexico, Dihigo went 18–2 as a pitcher with a 0.90 earned run average and led the Mexican League in hitting at .387.
At one point after he retired, Juan Marichal participated in a Hall of Fame fantasy camp organized by Roy Campanella, the great Dodgers catcher. Marichal asked Campanella who was the best player he ever saw. “He said he didn’t know how to pronounce the name correctly,” Marichal recounted, “but it was Martin Dihigo. He was the best player he ever saw.”
Because of his dark skin, though, Dihigo was never welcome in the majors.
The exceptions to the discrimination against Latinos were players who were deemed sufficiently light-skinned. Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Mexico, and even Nicaragua were hotbeds of baseball even before the dawn of the 20th century. Nowhere was the game more beloved and developed in Latin America than in Cuba, and the first Latin American star in the majors emerged from that island nation.
Adolfo Luque, who was born in 1880, was blue-eyed and light-skinned, so by baseball’s definition he classified as “white.” Luque made his major league debut with the Boston Braves in 1914. He became a solid right-hander, at times touching stardom, primarily for the Cincinnati Reds in a career that extended until 1935. In 1923, Luque led the National League in wins with 27 and in earned run average with a tremendous mark of 1.93. He also led the NL in ERA in 1927 and won 194 games in his major league career.
Luque was later the pitching coach for the New York Giants and managed in Cuba. He was known as short-tempered, perhaps contributing to the American stereotype of Latinos as being prone to hotheadedness. His first language was Spanish, and he spoke English with an accent.
Few other Latin ballplayers made their mark until the 1950s, primarily because many of them were dark-skinned and not welcome until after Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier when he suited up for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. Once teams accepted American blacks, they began scouting players in Latin America.
Minnie Minoso, a Cuban who was a hero to many early Latin players, was considered the first black player for the Chicago White Sox when he broke in during the 1951 season, although the White Sox already had light-skinned Venezuelan Chico Carrasquel at shortstop. Dominican Ozzie Virgil Sr. played a couple of seasons with the Giants in the 1950s before becoming the first black player for the Detroit Tigers.
More than a decade passed with dark-skinned Latin players being invited into the majors before Juan Marichal joined the Giants in 1960. Players such as Vic Power, Roberto Clemente, Luis Aparicio, and Felipe Alou preceded him. But Latin players who came up in the late 1950s and early 1960s still had much to overcome. The location and degree of tolerance in the team’s home cities, and how well the player adapted to the English language, dictated the depth of challenge he faced.
The arrival of Latin American players in the majors could be measured as a trickle when Marichal became a Giant. He was one of only a handful of Dominicans at the top of the sport and the first great pitcher from his country to make it big.
WHEN I CAME UP TO THE MAJORS IN 1960, THERE WERE STILL NOT VERY MANY LATIN PLAYERS IN THE LEAGUE, BUT THEY were starting to make a difference. Roberto Clemente was established as a star with the Pirates. Vic Power was with the Indians at that time. Felipe Alou. Luis Aparicio. Chico Carrasquel. Orlando Cepeda. Orlando got big right away. He was the National League Rookie of the Year in 1958.
I knew that times were changing. Things had been improving over the years. There were better opportunities for Latin players, and I was one of those to take advantage of that opportunity. I always say that getting into the major leagues was easy, but the hard thing was staying at the major league level. Back then you knew everyone in the majors who was from a Latin American country. They weren’t all Dominican, but we had a bond together because we shared a common background and language. But there were not so many that you couldn’t keep track of them.
Some Latin players had gone to the United States to play, but they were confronted by some of the racial problems of the time. Some were given just a very brief opportunity to become a major leaguer and then went home. I think the organizations should have had more patience with some of those players and worked with them. I think there were unspoken rules about how many Latin players a team could have, and so not everyone had the same opportunity to make the team. I think they had a quota.
That’s what comes to my mind, because when you talk about the people who went to the United States and came back, some of them could have been great players. They were never given a real opportunity.
I had a lot of respect for Clemente. They wanted to call him Bob when he came to the United States to play baseball. Some of the sportswriters called him Bob. He always said to call him Roberto. He was very proud of being Hispanic.
We were already in the major leagues when I first met him. He was about five years ahead of me when he joined the Pittsburgh Pirates, so he was established when I was a rookie. You knew right away that he was a winner because of how he played. If he hit it back to the mound, you had to hurry or he would beat the throw to first base.
He never quit. He never gave up. That’s how the game should be played. I love to see players hustle like that. Roberto Clemente became a king or an idol for all Latin American players, not just those from his native Puerto Rico. He was a great player and he was very proud. He was a role model, a leader for all Latin players.
Part of it was his timing, because there had not been many Latin stars when he came into the league. But there had been others, and you didn’t see other young players from different countries try to be like them. Clemente surpassed the borders of ball-playing with the way he played the game.
If you just watched him play, you knew he was a leader. That’s why so many players tried to follow his style, and Roberto Clemente became an idol to them. For years, many Latin players from all countries wore No. 21 in his honor.
Of course, I had to pitch to him. He did everything well and he won several batting titles. I had to figure out how to get him out. It wasn’t easy. Sometimes I would luck out against him. And he was such a great fielder with a powerful arm, too—oh my. At that big old field in Pittsburgh, Forbes Field, he played that wall in right field so well. The ball would hit the concrete wall and the hitter thought he had an easy double. Roberto would turn and throw, and the runner had to go back to first base and hope he didn’t get thrown out there.
At that time, in the 1960s, the Giants and the Pirates had the most Latin players and we all knew each other. We would get together in the dugouts and talk before the games sometimes. I was the only pitcher and I listened when they talked about hitting.
One time we got to the park very early for a game and a bunch of the Latin players got together to talk. Orlando and Roberto and Jose Pagan and all of those guys were talking and I heard Roberto say that I was the pitcher that gave him the most trouble, and that it was because of my outside fastball. I was not in a groove at that time. I was far from being in a groove.
I was pitching the next day, and when I faced Roberto I threw him nothing but fastballs outside and I struck him out three times. If you know just a little bit about a hitter, it can help you with your game. He got his share of hits off me, too. He got his share against every pitcher. He was a great player and human being.
Baseball named its Humanitarian Award after Roberto, so that should tell you who he was. And the way he died, flying relief supplies to Nicaragua after an earthquake. He just wanted to help people. It was very sad when he died.
Roberto once said he wanted to be a chiropractor. I was having trouble with my back so he used to give me what they call adjustments. I used to go to the clubhouse to get an adjustment from him. One day he told me, “Oh, if the owner of the team sees me doing this, they’re going to fire me.” But he was a great human being. I was very close with Roberto and Chico Carrasquel and Luis Aparicio.
Vic Power was a very good player. The Yankees would not give him a chance. They told him he couldn’t date white women. Vic Power did whatever he wanted, but he was married to a light-skinned Latin woman. The woman people saw him with was his wife! The Yankees got rid of him and he went on to be a star player for the Kansas City Athletics, Cleveland Indians, and Minnesota Twins. Vic Power liked to drive big cars, typically a Cadillac. The Yankees just didn’t like his style.
Hector Lopez was the first Latin player the Yankees gave a chance to. They liked him better than Vic.
When you see what happened with Cuba, where Fidel Castro wouldn’t let players out of the country and stopped them from playing professionally, you know the Trujillos could have done that to me if they really wanted to keep me playing for the Air Force. But nobody blocked us from going to play baseball in the United States. It certainly could have happened. The Trujillos could have said, “This is what we want. You can’t go.” And there was nothing I could have done about it.
When I was a kid I used to follow Cuban baseball. That general, Jose Garcia Trujillo, who was Alma’s uncle, used to talk about the Cuban ballplayers. My ambition was to make the Dominican national team, but I thought someday I might go to Cuba to play baseball. I thought it would be pretty good to go to Havana. Baseball was the biggest thing in the Caribbean and it was the best in Cuba. But then Fidel took over baseball there. That made it very hard for some of the best Cuban players. Luis Tiant, Tony Perez, Minnie Minoso, and Tony Oliva all had to leave their home country and never go back. They didn’t see their parents, or their brothers and sisters, for years. And there are hundreds of Cuban players over all these years who might have been good enough to play in the United States and make a living to support their families. They grew old playing baseball in Cuba.
When I think about the Cuban players who never had the chance to come to the United States, I get sad. It seems to me the system was so bad, because how can you stop somebody from making a better life for themselves? Any player that came from any Latin country to the United States would have had the chance to make good money. Even when it was only thousands of dollars, that was much more than you would make working a farm. Now the players make millions. That changes your life forever. It can help your family forever.
One guy stops you from being a success—one guy means you are in poverty—because he, Fidel, doesn’t want you to go to the United States to play baseball. I think that’s wrong. It’s been 50 years now. It’s unbelievable.
Look around. Look how many players from the Dominican, Venezuela, Mexico, and Puerto Rico have been successful. When Latins first started playing in the majors, Cuba was No. 1. How many guys would have made it from Cuba? All this time they don’t let players go from Cuba, and now the Dominican is No. 1. Cuba had so many good players. It’s a sad story.
I remember when Luis Tiant was not able to go back to Cuba and his parents were getting old. They finally were allowed to go to the United States to visit him and see him play—Fidel let them go—when Luis was with the Red Sox. But Luis’s old friends and relatives in Cuba couldn’t see him. That really touched my heart. He could have helped a lot of people there if he had been able to go back.
It was an emotional story when his parents got to visit him in Boston. His father threw out the first pitch at a Red Sox game. Luis was crying. His father had been a very good pitcher in Cuba, but he never got a chance to see his son pitch until then. His folks got to see him before they died.
Orlando Cepeda’s father, Perucho, told him not to go to the United States from Puerto Rico because of the racism. Orlando wanted to go, but his father thought he would be hurt by the way things were. It is sad to even have that on your mind. Thankfully, for Orlando it worked out.
I was lucky when I got to the Giants, in 1960, because Felipe Alou was already there and I had known him so long. I lived with Matty as roommates at Mrs. Johnson’s in San Francisco. The Alous are all great people. I knew their mother and father, too. Those kids grew up near the ocean in Haina. They loved to fish and play baseball.
Between the three of them, Felipe made it to the highest level in school because he went to university. Matty and Jesus signed very young and played baseball instead.
What a family. I am so close to them. I baptized one of Felipe’s daughters and he baptized one of my daughters, my first one. I was the best man at Jesus’s wedding. And through the Alous is how I got to know Alma. We have been great, great friends for a long time. It’s pretty lucky to have friends like that.
Felipe was a great, great player. He could play every position in the outfield. He had a great arm and was a good hitter. He was smart. He was the kind of player you wanted on your team. If Felipe had a problem it was that he didn’t hit more home runs, but that was because he hit so many line drives. He hit the ball so hard down the left-field line that the third base coach had to coach outside the box to stay clear of those liners. Felipe played 17 years in the majors, hit 206 home runs, and batted .286. He made the all-star team three times. Just a great ballplayer. He proved how smart he was when he became a manager later for the Expos and then the Giants.
Felipe came up as an outfielder with the Giants in 1958, so he was already there when I came up from the minors. That was very good for me. He helped me so much to get adjusted.
Matty signed with the Giants, too. He played in San Francisco just a few games during my first year and was with the team until 1965. They just didn’t give him the opportunity to play every day. He hit .310 in 1961 but only played in 81 games. He got stuck hitting in the .240s or .260s and they traded him to the Pirates. I was very sad when he left. But right away Pittsburgh saw the potential he had.
The Pirates had a hitting coach named Harry Walker who became the manager, and Walker took Matty and gave him a heavy bat. They used to go the stadium together, and Walker pitched batting practice to Matty. He practiced and practiced, and Walker taught him to hit the ball down, and Matty became a .300 hitter. The first year in Pittsburgh he batted .342 and won the National League batting title, hitting more than 100 points higher than he had in his last year with the Giants. And the following year, 1967, he hit .338 and just missed winning the batting title again.
The third basemen on other teams would always play Matty too far back, so he became an expert at bunting for hits. Sometimes the third baseman would play in and Matty wouldn’t bunt. Then the fielder would back up and Matty would bunt on two strikes, which not too many hitters do. He would drop the ball in there and get on base. That would drive the other team crazy. He was something.
I would say Jesus Alou was a natural hitter. He swung like Vladimir Guerrero. Jesus used to swing at everything, but he made contact. Some hitters swing at everything but don’t make contact with the ball. But Jesus made contact, somehow, wherever the ball was. One time in San Francisco, Jim Bunning was pitching for the Phillies and he threw a pitch about level with Jesus’s head. Jesus swung at it and hit a home run to right field. He was that type of hitter.
Jesus came to the Giants late in the 1963 season and stayed with the team for five years after that. At one point, the Giants had three Alou brothers playing in the outfield at the same time. Jesus was in the major leagues until 1979 and played for two World Series champions in Oakland.
Playing with the Alous on the Giants was lucky for me. Not only did I have other Latin players around to share things with and speak Spanish with, but they were old friends from my home country that I had known most of my life. With the four of us in San Francisco, the Giants were very popular in the Dominican. After that they had other guys to cheer for—Manny Mota for a short time and later a guy named Elias Sosa. That was only the beginning. We started getting a lot of guys who made it. That made the Dominican fans very happy.
Another good thing about being with the Alou brothers was that our wives could be together. Felipe got married first, and then Matty and I got married at almost the same time. All three wives came to San Francisco to live with us. Felipe’s wife, Maria, helped Alma a lot. She didn’t know how to cook and Maria taught her. Alma became one of the best cooks in the world. They helped each other and gradually became less homesick.
Felipe was the smart one of all of us, and that’s why he became a manager. He always knew what he was doing. He had great dignity and wisdom. In the United States they say of this kind of guy, “He has his head on straight.” Matty’s wife, Teresa, and my wife, Alma, used to tell us to follow Felipe because he was a great man. He is the type of man that when he talks, everybody listens. He gives young players good advice.
The bad thing for us was when the Giants traded Felipe away after the 1963 season. They sent him to the Braves for pitcher Bob Shaw.
It hurt all the Giants’ Latin players when Felipe was traded. He was a very good teammate and he was a guide for the Latin players. The way he acted, the way he wanted you to be, and the advice he gave us all was very important. He told you how to act as a big-leaguer and how to play in the field. Felipe was all about being a man. When he got the job as a manager for the Montreal Expos in the minors, he helped so many young kids, and they loved him. Many of those kids became major leaguers, too. They loved to play for Felipe and loved the way he treated them. He even ended up managing his son Moises, in Montreal and later in San Francisco.
When Felipe was traded, we kept asking the team questions. Why did they do it? Why did they trade him? The answer we got was that Felipe wanted to become a religious minister and they were afraid that he would retire and they would lose him and not get anything for him. I don’t know if that is a true story, but Felipe was involved with a wonderful person who used to be a minister of a church in California. They were very close. So the team thought Felipe was going to quit baseball and become a minister. But Felipe didn’t retire from playing until 1974, more than 10 years later, and then stayed in baseball as a manager.
Orlando Cepeda was not Dominican. He was from Puerto Rico. But he was like a brother to us, too. Everybody liked Orlando. Players had a lot of respect for him. Orlando was more popular in San Francisco than Willie Mays. He came from the farm system and joined the big-league club in 1958 when the Giants started in San Francisco. Willie was already established from the New York days. It was like Orlando belonged more to San Francisco.
We were friends with all types of players on the team, but the Latin players had a special bond, a brotherhood. We had so much in common, even if we were not from the same country. We were from the same part of the world with the same kind of climate. We spoke the same language. We had darker skin and we had experienced discrimination in the United States because of that.
We were spread out, and guys lived in different areas of the city, but we did socialize with each other away from the ballpark, especially when other teams that had a lot of Latin players came to town to play us. Sometimes they would come for four games at a time so they stayed for several days, and we would have the Latin players to dinner. It’s not like football or other sports where the team just flies into town, plays a game, and goes home.
We showed the visiting guys some hospitality because we knew it could be lonely on the road as a Latin person in another city. The Pirates had a lot of Latin players, so we always invited them for dinner, and when we went to Pittsburgh they had us over. We ate with Roberto, Manny Sanguillen, Vic Davalillo, and Manny Mota when he was with the Pirates. We went to different houses each time. Chicago was a place that had a lot of Latin residents, so we could go out and have a good time.
The Latin players stuck together when it came to socializing. When Manny Mota went to the Dodgers, we still went to his home and the homes of other Latin players—even if the Dodgers were our chief rivals. Our friendships had nothing to do with the rivalry on the field.
Manny Mota is a great guy, and what a great hitter. He was the best pinch hitter of all time. He kept saying he was going to retire and be a coach. Then, in the middle of the next season, they would put him on the active roster and you would come to town and there would be Manny—hitting again. They kept doing that. He is still with the Dodgers coaching. It has been about 35 years now. I keep thinking one day I will wake up and I will see him batting again.
In the late 1950s and the early part of the 1960s, it was mostly the Giants and Pirates signing Latin players. They had a big jump on most other teams, especially in the National League. They really made an effort, and that’s why there were so many Latin players on those clubs. Then the Dodgers jumped in. The Atlanta Braves, too, after a while. They signed Rico Carty, who won a batting championship. And they traded for Felipe.
Some teams didn’t have any Latin players during the early period of my career. It took quite a while for things to change. We were small in numbers, but I like to think that we helped open doors for other Latin players who came along, the generations that followed us.