SWC75
Bored Historian
- Joined
- Aug 26, 2011
- Messages
- 33,970
- Like
- 65,510
“TOO MANY MEXICANS”
(My primary sources for this are an article by Rob Ruck in the 1989 edition of Total Baseball and Peter C. Bjorkman’s book “Baseball With a Latin Beat”)
My parents retired down south back in the 80’s and I visited them often. They had a bigoted neighbor who once told me that he used to be a baseball fan but didn’t think much of the sport these days. I asked him why. “Too many Mexicans”. What he meant was that the game seemed almost to have been taken over by Latin American players. The history of Latin American baseball and its impact on the majors is interesting.
In “The Missiles of October”, (it’s on You-Tube and I highly recommend it- it’s one of the best dramatic presentations I’ve ever seen), the CIA guy tells President Kennedy that they know the Russians are in Cuba because they saw soccer fields there. “The Russians play soccer. The Cubans play baseball.” We think that the entirety of Latin America must be baseball crazy because of all the Latin players in the Major Leagues but, in reality most of them come from certain countries: Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama and Venezuela, as well as the US territory of Puerto Rico. The rest of the countries are football, (soccer) crazy or, if they were British possessions, they prefer cricket.
The story of Latin American baseball beginnings in the 1860’s. it has two origin stories, both involving Cuba. One has it that a Cuban student named Nemesio Guilliot who went to the US to be educated brought the sport and some of its equipment back home with him. Another has the crew of a US ship teaching the locals to play the game, (one version of that one is that they taught them the game so they could sell them the equipment, which fits in with the way they see us down there). However it started, the Cubans went crazy for the game and they were the primary “carriers” around the Caribbean to the nations they did business with or sent workers to. Dominican sportsman Julio Santana told Rob Ruck “it was much the same as happened with Christianity. Jesus could be compared to the North Americans but the apostles were the ones that spread the faith and the apostles of baseball were Cubans. Even though the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico were occupied by North Americans, the Cubans first brought baseball here and the Mexico and Venezuela, too.”
That was well before the Spanish-American War, when Cuba was still a Spanish colony. When that war came Cuba became a US possession until 1902 and Cuba “fell into orbit around the United States” until the Castro revolution. By then Cuba has already created its own professional league, (1878) and sent its first player to play in the American Leagues, (Estaban “Steve” Bellan, who played in the National Association from 1871-73). Spanish officials had been suspicious of the game, feeling that imported baseball bats could be used as weapons in a revolution. They even imprisoned Emilio Sabourin, the “Albert Spalding of Cuba”, who had formed the league. He died in captivity. But it didn’t halt the spread of the game. After the war, Cuba became a popular place for US teams to tour or hold spring training. It also welcomed black American players who couldn’t play major league ball. With the weather down there, the game could played year around and there were two seasons: summer and winter. It was the winter leagues that were really special. It contained a combination of Cuban stars, Negro League stars and Major League players staying in shape and making some extra money while still playing the game over the winter and some of the best baseball that has ever been played was played there.
It helps that sugar cane is a major crop in the area. “The six month long ‘tiempo muerto’, or dead season, when the cane required minimal attention and most workers were unemployed, contributed to an intense sporting environment, first for cricket and ultimately for baseball.”
Baseball in the Dominican Republic dates from when Cuban refugees from their first attempt at a revolution, called the Ten Years War, (1868-1878) moved there to escape the violence. They helped found the island’s sugar cane industry. “From the outset, sugarcane and baseball have been inseparable in molding the island’s exciting baseball saga…The story of Dominican baseball begins with the story of Dominican cricket…The game of “bats and balls” was inherited in its most primitive from the island’s British rather than Hispanic ancestors and is thus not strictly a product imported directly from Cuban sources alone. Yet the Cubans did play a major role in transporting the American form of the game to Hispaniola and Puerto Rico and numerous other Caribbean ports of call. But first the Cubans brought their sugarcane industry, one that truly revolutionized life on Hispaniola….That war of independence had already succeeded in largely obliterating Cuba’s thriving sugar production at the very time sugar had emerged as an item of highest demand and a new working-class addiction in Europe and most of the Western Hemisphere. “
“In addition to these remnants of a booming Cuban sugar trade, these expatriate settlers brought the game of baseball, which they were soon teaching to Hispaniola’s coastal inhabitants. And, once the sugar mills were up and operating, there was an immediate need for a substantial labor force to carry out the tasks of cutting and processing on which the new industry heavily depended. The small population of the Dominican island itself had easy access to abundant land and thus little incentive to tackle the slave-like conditions in the sugar mills and cane fields. The labor had to be imported from over-populated neighboring Caribbean islands, especially the British Virgin islands and Dutch Antilles…And with this batch came a new breed of ballplayers, those raised on the British game of cricket…By the dawn of the 20th century two new sporting traditions coexisted in the sugar mill towns of the Dominican Republic British Virgin Islanders were as dedicated to their ancient native game of cricket as the Cuban descendants were to their far younger North American version of rounders….But British games and all things culturally English were doomed in a Spanish sphere constantly becoming more ethnocentric….Barnstorming Negro League ball clubs, crack visiting Cuban teams and an occasional contingent of touring big-leaguers also fueled interest in the North American game. “ But the British influence can be seen in the surnames of many of the Dominican stars: Alfredo Griffin, George Bell, Mariano Duncan, Manuel Lee, Juan Samuel and Rico Carty. The earliest teams were formed as long ago as 1907, when the Los Azules (known as Licey) in Santo Domingo was founded, wearing their blue and white striped flannels. There was an annual championship of club teams from 1912. A professional circuit was started in 1951.
The most famous story of Caribbean baseball came in 1937 when Dominican Dictator Rafael Trujillo had assembled a team that may have been the best in the world at that time with Negro league stars Josh Gibson, Cool Papa Bell and Satchel Paige and Sam Bankhead, along with Cuban star Silvio Garcia and Puerto Rican legend Perucho Cepeda, Orlando’s father. He wanted his team, Ciudad Trujillo Dragones, (formed from two prior clubs he had taken over), to win the pennant over Estrllas Orientales, which was owned by a political rival who was running against who had forced a popular election.
“Lofty salaries were further supplemented by luxury accommodations underwritten by the host ballclubs and free from any hint of racial segregation. Black stars roomed in the plushest hotels and penthouse apartments that Havana and the Dominican cities had to offer…..here there were no parking-lot meals on rattletrap buses or bare cots in black-only back-alley hotels….And, if off-field playing conditions were superior, onfield playing conditions were often even more dream-like. First, the schedule of games was a breeze…and those ballgames were played in first rate ballparks of undisputable major-league quality before large and enthusiastic crowds. A typical stateside Negro-League game might draw 10,000 or 15,000 with competitive teams; here throngs of up to 40,000 jammed the downtown ballparks of Havana and Ciudad Trujillo. And a winning hit or game-saving snag often promised to bring extra cash to its author when these enthusiastic partisans would “pass the hat” throughout the grandstand at game’s end to reward their instant heroes.”
But then things got tight. “In the end, the drama came down to one final game for the Dominican championship. Paige and his mates were locked up under house arrest the night before the big game to ensure that they would be ‘in proper playing shape’ to win the title on which Trujillo’s political fortunes seemed to ride. On game day, soldiers supporting each side occupied the opposing grandstands with the appearance of heavily armed firing squads. The contest itself, by all accounts, proved most dramatic. Paige trailed 3-2 in the seventh but Sam Bankhead rescued the game and perhaps his mates lives with an eighth-inning round-tripper. Paige then calmly recorded the final six crucial outs from the hill, 9five on strikeouts), in typical ice-water fashion.“
This illustrates how baseball in Latin America was often connected to politics. So does the famous story of Fidel Castro being a big league pitching prospect. “What famous dictator might have pitched for the new York Yankees if only some bush-league scout had been a better judge of pitching talent? That is how the question is most often phrased. The truth is that the popular legend about Castro’s prodigious hurling talent has little basis in fact. It is well documented that Castro was an arch fanatic who later appeared regularly at Havana Sugar Kings games during the years surrounding his rise to power., often donning the uniform of his informal club the Barbudos, (bearded ones), and tossing a couple of exhibition inning preliminary to Havana’s International league contests of the late fifties. ..yet no documented or believable account suggests that any scout assessed the future dictator as a legitimate prospect….Latin baseball scholars are stone silent on Fidel Castro, failed rookie pitching prospect of the 1940’s One respected Cuban authority- former Havana sports journalist Jorge Figueredo of Tampa, Florida perhaps comes closest to the truth in speculating that Castro likely fostered the popular legend simply to add luster to the dictator’s public image…Castro recognized a near-certain public relations victory to be gained from hitching his rising star to a baseball culture. Baseball, after all, was the national passion of not only his subjugated countrymen but his political enemies and his bothersome gringo rivals.”
In Puerto Rico it was again Cuban immigrants that brought the game to the local population. “The first newspaper reports of an amateur contest on the island dated from 1897, (the year of Puerto Rico’s independence from Spain)….Professional play arrived in Puerto Rico in 1938 with the founding of the island nation’s winter circuit….Throughout the fifties the Puerto Rican winter league earned a reputation as something of a launching pad for major league stardom. Bob Clemente, of course, first earned his wings on hometown turf in the uniform of the Santurace Crabbers. Luis Olmo would emerge from an illustrious Puerto Rican winter career that spanned 15 seasons to earn unique distinction as the first Puerto Rican to stroke a home run in a World Series game. …And Luis Arroyo would learn the craft on his native island that would eventually make him one of the most feared relievers on the 1960’s with the New York Yankees.”
Many young big-league players came down to play in the Puerto Rican winter league and learn their profession. “Future Hall-of-Famer Mike Schmidt would eventually credit his adjustments to major-league pitching to a 1973-74 trip around the Puerto Rican winter circuit. The touted Phillies rookie had batted only .196 in his 1973 rookie campaign but jumped nearly 100 points and paced the National league in round-trippers the very next season. And Rickey Henderson would hone his base-stealing skills on the island in the mid-1970’s.
Baseball came to Venezuela when “Cuban adventurers”, (Bjarkman’s term), demonstrated it there in 1895. The game there developed slowly and it wasn’t until the 1940’s that “the country first tested the waters of international competition with an amateur tournament played that year in distant Hawaii. While the Venezuelans were barely competitive the first time around with a respectable fifth-place finish, their showing indicated that a half century of amateur play at home had developed a fair mastery of the game. The world of amateur baseball was hardly prepared, however, for the surprise performance of the 1941 world-tourney entrant from Venezuela, which upset heavily favored Cuba and walked away with championship laurels in their second international completion. To prove that their sudden arrival on the amateur scene was no fluke, the Venezuelan team captured the 1944 and 1945 wartime world amateur championships.” A professional circuit was founded in 1946 “with local and imported Cuban and US talent”. The New York Yankees made a spring training tour of Venezuela in 1947. Venezuelan players started showing up in the major leagues in the 1950’s.
In Mexico the big man was not a dictator but a businessman, Jorge Pasqual, who bought most of the Mexican League and decided he wanted to make it into a major league. He started offering major league players what were then exorbitant amounts of money to come down to Mexico and play for his teams. Baseball had been introduced into Mexico in 1880’s by Cubans in the Yucatan area and by railroad workers to the north. There was a semi-pro league established by the 1920’s and a formal professional league in 1925. Pasquel , “ A rich man who liked to flaunt his wealth, (Pasquel owned six Lincolns and had a haberdashery in his home)“, began buying up franchises in the early 40’s and importing Negro League stars. Eventually, he became president of the league.
“The New Mexican League President of 1946 was also a man driven by nationalistic fervor and perhaps a smoldering hatred of the Yanqui interests, perhaps fueled by the US Marine bombardments of Veracruz during his childhood years. His personal frontal attack on Yanqui imperialism would come in a plan to build the newly prosperous Mexican League into a full-fledged rival of the major league circuits operating to the North. Un 1946, Pasquel decided to launch a full-scale raid on the majors….The motive for Pasqual’s raid on US talent may have been in part an upcoming presidential campaign by his business partner and childhood pal Miguel Sleman. Aleman’s election promised a windfall of preferential treatment for Pasquel business interests and any bolstering of big-time baseball by the Aleman-Pasquel camp could not fail to impress the baseball crazy Mexican electorate.”
“Max Lanier would later complain that once Aleman had won the 1946 election, Pasquel began reneging on his contracts, salaries of imported players being cut in half. The true fact of the matter may have been that Pasquel, for all his wealth, had over-committed himself and was running out of pocket money to throw at baseball. No capital upgrade in stadiums had accompanied the high-priced player talent. The Mexican population, for all its reported fervor, was not large enough to support a big-time circuit and gate revenues simply did not offset the bloated payrolls.” ”
Pasquel’s most famous offer was to Stan Musial. In two alternate versions of the story Pasqual either dumped $50,000 in cash on Stan’s kitchen table or his hotel room bed. Stan was making $13,000/year at the time. But “I looked at my young son and I just couldn’t say yes”, (a quote which favors the kitchen table story).
But others took the bait: http://www.baseball-almanac.com/legendary/Mexican_League.shtml
These players were banned from the major leagues by Commissioner Happy Chandler. The shady Pasqual’s operation by 1948 had collapsed . The players sought re-instatement to the major but Pasqual filed lawsuits for them to fulfill their contracts. He lost and soon got out of baseball. “With the collapse of Pasquel’s ambitious scheme faded any grand dream of a Mexican baseball tradition on a par with the baseball of Cuba and the United States. That lofty dream would never materialize despite the total reorganization of the Mexican league in 1949 with entirely new management.” Pasquel died in a 1955 plane crash.
It’s interesting to speculate on what might have happened if Pasqual had joined with others to create a Caribbean league and sought major status for a larger and better funded organization. This was about the same time that the PCL was seeking major status as a west coast major league. If they and a Caribbean League could have gotten together to play their own version of the World Series there might have eventually been a clamor to have the win play the major league champion. But that’s an arc of history that was cut off by the collapse of Pasqual’s more limited venture, the integration of the majors and the franchise shifts of the 1950’sand expansion of the 1960’s.Those events led to Latin players seeking stardom in the major leagues and so many of them found it that it caused my parent’s neighbor to conclude there were “too many Mexicans” in the game. At the time of Bjarkman’s book, over 600 major leaguers had been born in Latin America, including 159, (of 1040) on the 40 man rosters of 1992. It could be argued that the influx of Latin players has had at least as great an influence on the talent pool in the major leagues as that of black players and that at present it is much greater.
Negro league players found their time in the Latin leagues appealing because of the lack of racism. Willie Wells wrote to Wendell Smith, the leading black newspaper writer of the time. That he was staying in Mexico because “I’ve found freedom and democracy here, something I never found in the United States. Here I am a man.”
The history of Latin players in the major leagues goes back much farther than Jackie Robinson. They just had to be light enough to “pass”, (which illustrates the absurdity of prejudice: how little African “blood” can you have in you and still make the major leagues?). Estaban “Steve” Bellan has played in the National Association in the 1870’s. In 1911 two Cubans, Rafael Almeida and Armando Marsans, showed up in Cincinnati playing for the Reds. Club president Garry Herrmann “arrived to pick up the imports upon their arrival at the Cincinnati train station, he suffered near heart seizure when he saw a couple of brown Pullman porters disembark moments ahead of the expected ballplayers. Soon, however, Cincinnati newspaper were boasting that the two dark-skinned Cubans were “two of the purest bars of Castilian soap ever floated to these shores” once the ended documentation had arrived.” The documentation were “certifications” by Cuban officials that they were of Castilian, not black heritage. Ahhhh….the good old days…
The Reds later acquired the services of the greatest Cuban pitcher, In terms of career victories), Adolfo, “Dolf” Luque. Luque was 10-3 for the Reds 1919 World Series champs and won 194 games in his career, including a 27-8 mark in 1923. He later pitched for the Dodgers and Giants and went 8-2 for the Giant’s 1933 World Series champions. The “Castilian” looking-Luque:
http://sports.mearsonlineauctions.com/ItemImages/000035/e9843b9d-09bd-4028-b865-8ba5181a2ca9_lg.jpeg
As great as Luque was, he wasn’t any greater that his countryman and contemporary Martin Dihego, who had an image problem:
http://sports.mearsonlineauctions.com/ItemImages/000035/e9843b9d-09bd-4028-b865-8ba5181a2ca9_lg.jpeg
What is interesting is that two other Cubans, Jacinto Calvo and Jose Acosta, played briefly in the majors in the early twenties for the senators and the White Sox and also played in the Negro leagues. But don’t tell anybody.
Ironically, the owner most interested in singing “Castilians” was Clark Griffith of the Senators. Years later his son Calvin would say to a gathering in Minneapolis, (with Rod Carew sitting next to him” that he was glad he moved the club to a town “full of hard-working white people”. His father was interested in hard-playing ball players who wouldn’t ask for too much money and saw the Caribbean as a rich source of them. He hired a legendary scot named “Papa” Joe Cambria who came to know Caribbean baseball as well as anybody and who signed many Latin players for the lowly Senators. Cambria “who had worked his way from sandlot player in his native Massachusettsto controversial minor league club owner in Albany, New York and finally to Griffith’s back-room assistant in Washington), eventually signed over 400 Cuban prospects. He “opened the eyes of competing general managers to a rich and untapped pool of Latin American player talent seemingly ripe for the picking.”
Washington writer Morris Beale “carpingly claimed (Griffith and the Senators) would do even better if he would get over his predication for Cubanolas.” But Bjarkman points out “the thin pool of wartime talent made Cuban athletes all the more attractive. They were not subject to the military draft and they demanded small wages.” 18 Cubans played big league baseball during the war. Bjarkaman says that two of them, pitcher Tommy de la Cruz of the Reds and the oddly-named Hiram Bithorn of the Cubs, were “of dubious racial stock”. Branch Rickey snickered to Red Smith that Clark Griffith “was hardly one to object to Jackie Robinson, given his known propensity for hiring Cuban blacks”. Jackie Robinson integrated a sport that had already been integrated. The problem was, people didn’t know it. Or want to admit it.
Later the Pittsburgh Pirates, also having trouble competing, followed the Senator’s example, hiring Howie Hack to work Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic the way Cambria worked Cuba. They became one of the leading teams in importing Latin talent, including the most famous of them all, Roberto Clemente. “Haak relentlessly conducted the same old-style tryout camps with the same time-worn methods, even though by the 1980s other ball clubs were moving into his well-worked territory to compete head-on with large training complexes and newer recruitment strategies Perhaps the most remarkable fact about the venerable Howie Haak, however was the force and charm of his personality. All that he accomplished from the 1950’s through the 1990’s he had managed with only enough broken Spanish to get by. “
There were some attempts to incorporate Latin baseball into the structure of “organized baseball”. The remnants of Pasqual’s Mexican league were made part of the minor leagues, although they were not formally farm teams of any major league team. In fact, “Mexican teams retain first rights to sign any native amateur. A major League club, therefore, must buy the contract from a player’s Mexican club, usually for more than it costs to sign a prospect elsewhere in the region. For that reason, there are far more Dominicans and Venezuelans in the Major leagues than there are Mexicans.
There was a possibility that the first black major leaguer of the 20th century might have been a Latin player. Branch Rickey had his eye on Cuban star Silvio Garcia in the mid 40’s and sent Walter O’Malley down to look at him. Differing accounts say that Garcia (a) had been drafted into the Cuban army or (b) was on a drinking spree or (c) when asked by O’Malley how he would respond to racist taunts, said “I’ll kill the guy”. Whatever, nothing came of it. Rickey had the idea that because Cubans had played in the major leagues before, a Cuban black might be deemed more acceptable. Instead, he went with Jackie Robinson.
Papa Joe Cambria founded the Havana Sugar Kings, in 1946 as a Class C team in the Florida International league. In 1954, now owned by they made the International League even more international. It proved to be a wild, colorful place to play baseball, especially during the Cuban revolution. The most famous incident occurred in 1959 when celebrating rebels fired guns in the air outside the stadium. Some of the descending bullets landed on the field and Rochester third base coach Frank Verdi, (later the manager of the all-conquering 1970 Syracuse Chiefs), and Havana shortstop Leo Cardenas received minor wounds as they evacuated the field. The Sugar Canes won the 1959 Governor’s Cup. That era ended in 1960, when the Sugar Canes were moved to Jersey City after Castro nationalized all US enterprises in Cuba.
Some Cuban refugees still made their way to the major leagues, Such as Tony Oliva, Tony Perez and Luis Tiant. But from then on the balance of power shifted east to the Dominican Republic as far as producing major leaguers.
Latin players had all of the same challenges playing baseball in the United States that black players had had with the added problem of unfamiliarity with the language and culture. And they received little help from their ballclubs, coaches or teammates. Latin players developed reputations as “hot blooded…showboats…who didn’t play the game with heart, courage or even the proper dose of native intelligence”. Also, they didn’t play hurt, as white players did. Every conflict meant they were all hotheads. Every bit of showmanship by such as Vic Power or Juan Marichal made them showboats. Language problems were made fun of, proving that they were stupid. And, when asked questions about injuries through translators, they answered honestly. It’s hard not to do so through a translator.
They also faced quotas as did American blacks. The Dodgers had Roberto Clemente in their farm system but didn’t call him up because they felt they had enough blacks in their line-up. They held onto him too long and the Pirates were able to claim him. With Clemente, Duke Snider and Carl Furillo in their outfield, they would have had the three greatest outfield arms ever put together for one team and one of the best all-around outfields in history. The Yankees had a chance to acquire Vic Power but “owners Dan Topping and Del Webb were apparently not ready to have a black man don the hallowed Yankee uniform and if they did have a black in uniform, it would certainly not be one who called attention to himself and his individualistic style of play.” They eventually went for the soft-spoken Elston Howard. Their first Hispanic black was the defensively inept Hector Lopez.
Their names often got mangled or anglicized, (which was not too different for them. Victor Pollet became Vic Power. Roberto Clemente was “Bob”, just as Roberto Avila had been “Bobby”. Saturino Orestes Arrieta Armas somehow became “Minnie Minoso”. Minoso was the name of some half-brothers he played with in Cuba. Minnie was either a shortening of that name, a reference to his height or, as “Minnie” tells it, a lady in his dentist’s office who was summoned from the waiting room and he thought they were saying his name.
Orlando Cepeda described arriving in Salem, Virginia in 1955 from ethnically tolerant Puerto Rico after “a nightmare overnight bus trip through Georgia and the Carolina…Cepeda innocently enough strolled through a downtown shopping district only to be strong-armed by shotgun-toting police as soon as he stopped to stare through a shop window. Black males, it turned out, were no permitted to walk the streets of downtown Salem after dark. The terrified youngster could only repeat “Beisbol!”over and over until someone at the local lock-up finally phoned team officials to bail him out of a frightening set of circumstances. Minnie Minoso was shocked to see that he wasn’t allowed to play in a minor league game in Memphis and that when he did play in Dayton, Ohio, fans canceled their season tickets “Knowing little English and frightened by an unfamiliar and often hostile environment, (Tony) Olivia would walk the dozen miles each day from his apartment to the Bloomington ballpark.” . Antonio (Tony) Taylor was stuck in the Texas League and wanted to fly back to Havana but it cost $86 and he only had $84, so he stayed and never went back to Cuba.
The whole thing was summarized by a statement Giant manager Alvin Dark made in an interview: “We have trouble because we have so many Spanish-speaking and Negro players on the team. They are not able to perform up to the white ballplayers when it comes to mental alertness…..You can’t make most Negro and Spanish players have the pride in their team that you get from white players. “ Dark actually banned the Spanish language from use in his clubhouse and discouraged “fraternization” between Latin American teammates.
Power made light of it all. When he saw “whites only” signs he started crossing streets during red lights, insisting that the green light was for whites only. When told a restaurant didn’t serve colored people, he informed the waiter that that was OK, since he didn’t eat them. If people are determined to make you unhappy, smile at them. That’s what Vic Power did.
Meanwhile baseball has continued to thrive in the Caribbean area major leaguers and Negro league stars no longer play “Winter Ball”, although there are still winter leagues for natives and minor leaguers. There are no Negro leagues and major leaguers make too much money. But young Latin players still love baseball and dream of success in the majors. And there’s a “Caribbean World Series”, (or Serie del Caribe) that has existed, with a couple of interruptions, since 1949 where teams from each of the baseball playing countries of the region play each other for a regional championship. It was the brainchild of Venezuelan entrepreneur Pablo Morales and brought together teams from his country, Panama, Cuba and Puerto Rico. Mexico and the Dominican Republic joined later. The series was interrupted when Castro pulled out of it was not held from 1961-69. It was also not held in 1981 due to a strike by the Venezuelan players. The Dominican Republic has won 19 times, Puerto Rico 14 times, Mexico 8 times, Cuba 7 times, (which shows their dominance in that first decade), Venezuela 7 times, and Panama once, (the first tournament in 1950). In the old days, this tournament would have included major league stars, (as when Willie Mays homered with Roberto Clemente on base in 1955), but they are still fanatically popular. “Baseball remains ‘el rey de deportes’, (King of Sports) in the region.
(My primary sources for this are an article by Rob Ruck in the 1989 edition of Total Baseball and Peter C. Bjorkman’s book “Baseball With a Latin Beat”)
My parents retired down south back in the 80’s and I visited them often. They had a bigoted neighbor who once told me that he used to be a baseball fan but didn’t think much of the sport these days. I asked him why. “Too many Mexicans”. What he meant was that the game seemed almost to have been taken over by Latin American players. The history of Latin American baseball and its impact on the majors is interesting.
In “The Missiles of October”, (it’s on You-Tube and I highly recommend it- it’s one of the best dramatic presentations I’ve ever seen), the CIA guy tells President Kennedy that they know the Russians are in Cuba because they saw soccer fields there. “The Russians play soccer. The Cubans play baseball.” We think that the entirety of Latin America must be baseball crazy because of all the Latin players in the Major Leagues but, in reality most of them come from certain countries: Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama and Venezuela, as well as the US territory of Puerto Rico. The rest of the countries are football, (soccer) crazy or, if they were British possessions, they prefer cricket.
The story of Latin American baseball beginnings in the 1860’s. it has two origin stories, both involving Cuba. One has it that a Cuban student named Nemesio Guilliot who went to the US to be educated brought the sport and some of its equipment back home with him. Another has the crew of a US ship teaching the locals to play the game, (one version of that one is that they taught them the game so they could sell them the equipment, which fits in with the way they see us down there). However it started, the Cubans went crazy for the game and they were the primary “carriers” around the Caribbean to the nations they did business with or sent workers to. Dominican sportsman Julio Santana told Rob Ruck “it was much the same as happened with Christianity. Jesus could be compared to the North Americans but the apostles were the ones that spread the faith and the apostles of baseball were Cubans. Even though the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico were occupied by North Americans, the Cubans first brought baseball here and the Mexico and Venezuela, too.”
That was well before the Spanish-American War, when Cuba was still a Spanish colony. When that war came Cuba became a US possession until 1902 and Cuba “fell into orbit around the United States” until the Castro revolution. By then Cuba has already created its own professional league, (1878) and sent its first player to play in the American Leagues, (Estaban “Steve” Bellan, who played in the National Association from 1871-73). Spanish officials had been suspicious of the game, feeling that imported baseball bats could be used as weapons in a revolution. They even imprisoned Emilio Sabourin, the “Albert Spalding of Cuba”, who had formed the league. He died in captivity. But it didn’t halt the spread of the game. After the war, Cuba became a popular place for US teams to tour or hold spring training. It also welcomed black American players who couldn’t play major league ball. With the weather down there, the game could played year around and there were two seasons: summer and winter. It was the winter leagues that were really special. It contained a combination of Cuban stars, Negro League stars and Major League players staying in shape and making some extra money while still playing the game over the winter and some of the best baseball that has ever been played was played there.
It helps that sugar cane is a major crop in the area. “The six month long ‘tiempo muerto’, or dead season, when the cane required minimal attention and most workers were unemployed, contributed to an intense sporting environment, first for cricket and ultimately for baseball.”
Baseball in the Dominican Republic dates from when Cuban refugees from their first attempt at a revolution, called the Ten Years War, (1868-1878) moved there to escape the violence. They helped found the island’s sugar cane industry. “From the outset, sugarcane and baseball have been inseparable in molding the island’s exciting baseball saga…The story of Dominican baseball begins with the story of Dominican cricket…The game of “bats and balls” was inherited in its most primitive from the island’s British rather than Hispanic ancestors and is thus not strictly a product imported directly from Cuban sources alone. Yet the Cubans did play a major role in transporting the American form of the game to Hispaniola and Puerto Rico and numerous other Caribbean ports of call. But first the Cubans brought their sugarcane industry, one that truly revolutionized life on Hispaniola….That war of independence had already succeeded in largely obliterating Cuba’s thriving sugar production at the very time sugar had emerged as an item of highest demand and a new working-class addiction in Europe and most of the Western Hemisphere. “
“In addition to these remnants of a booming Cuban sugar trade, these expatriate settlers brought the game of baseball, which they were soon teaching to Hispaniola’s coastal inhabitants. And, once the sugar mills were up and operating, there was an immediate need for a substantial labor force to carry out the tasks of cutting and processing on which the new industry heavily depended. The small population of the Dominican island itself had easy access to abundant land and thus little incentive to tackle the slave-like conditions in the sugar mills and cane fields. The labor had to be imported from over-populated neighboring Caribbean islands, especially the British Virgin islands and Dutch Antilles…And with this batch came a new breed of ballplayers, those raised on the British game of cricket…By the dawn of the 20th century two new sporting traditions coexisted in the sugar mill towns of the Dominican Republic British Virgin Islanders were as dedicated to their ancient native game of cricket as the Cuban descendants were to their far younger North American version of rounders….But British games and all things culturally English were doomed in a Spanish sphere constantly becoming more ethnocentric….Barnstorming Negro League ball clubs, crack visiting Cuban teams and an occasional contingent of touring big-leaguers also fueled interest in the North American game. “ But the British influence can be seen in the surnames of many of the Dominican stars: Alfredo Griffin, George Bell, Mariano Duncan, Manuel Lee, Juan Samuel and Rico Carty. The earliest teams were formed as long ago as 1907, when the Los Azules (known as Licey) in Santo Domingo was founded, wearing their blue and white striped flannels. There was an annual championship of club teams from 1912. A professional circuit was started in 1951.
The most famous story of Caribbean baseball came in 1937 when Dominican Dictator Rafael Trujillo had assembled a team that may have been the best in the world at that time with Negro league stars Josh Gibson, Cool Papa Bell and Satchel Paige and Sam Bankhead, along with Cuban star Silvio Garcia and Puerto Rican legend Perucho Cepeda, Orlando’s father. He wanted his team, Ciudad Trujillo Dragones, (formed from two prior clubs he had taken over), to win the pennant over Estrllas Orientales, which was owned by a political rival who was running against who had forced a popular election.
“Lofty salaries were further supplemented by luxury accommodations underwritten by the host ballclubs and free from any hint of racial segregation. Black stars roomed in the plushest hotels and penthouse apartments that Havana and the Dominican cities had to offer…..here there were no parking-lot meals on rattletrap buses or bare cots in black-only back-alley hotels….And, if off-field playing conditions were superior, onfield playing conditions were often even more dream-like. First, the schedule of games was a breeze…and those ballgames were played in first rate ballparks of undisputable major-league quality before large and enthusiastic crowds. A typical stateside Negro-League game might draw 10,000 or 15,000 with competitive teams; here throngs of up to 40,000 jammed the downtown ballparks of Havana and Ciudad Trujillo. And a winning hit or game-saving snag often promised to bring extra cash to its author when these enthusiastic partisans would “pass the hat” throughout the grandstand at game’s end to reward their instant heroes.”
But then things got tight. “In the end, the drama came down to one final game for the Dominican championship. Paige and his mates were locked up under house arrest the night before the big game to ensure that they would be ‘in proper playing shape’ to win the title on which Trujillo’s political fortunes seemed to ride. On game day, soldiers supporting each side occupied the opposing grandstands with the appearance of heavily armed firing squads. The contest itself, by all accounts, proved most dramatic. Paige trailed 3-2 in the seventh but Sam Bankhead rescued the game and perhaps his mates lives with an eighth-inning round-tripper. Paige then calmly recorded the final six crucial outs from the hill, 9five on strikeouts), in typical ice-water fashion.“
This illustrates how baseball in Latin America was often connected to politics. So does the famous story of Fidel Castro being a big league pitching prospect. “What famous dictator might have pitched for the new York Yankees if only some bush-league scout had been a better judge of pitching talent? That is how the question is most often phrased. The truth is that the popular legend about Castro’s prodigious hurling talent has little basis in fact. It is well documented that Castro was an arch fanatic who later appeared regularly at Havana Sugar Kings games during the years surrounding his rise to power., often donning the uniform of his informal club the Barbudos, (bearded ones), and tossing a couple of exhibition inning preliminary to Havana’s International league contests of the late fifties. ..yet no documented or believable account suggests that any scout assessed the future dictator as a legitimate prospect….Latin baseball scholars are stone silent on Fidel Castro, failed rookie pitching prospect of the 1940’s One respected Cuban authority- former Havana sports journalist Jorge Figueredo of Tampa, Florida perhaps comes closest to the truth in speculating that Castro likely fostered the popular legend simply to add luster to the dictator’s public image…Castro recognized a near-certain public relations victory to be gained from hitching his rising star to a baseball culture. Baseball, after all, was the national passion of not only his subjugated countrymen but his political enemies and his bothersome gringo rivals.”
In Puerto Rico it was again Cuban immigrants that brought the game to the local population. “The first newspaper reports of an amateur contest on the island dated from 1897, (the year of Puerto Rico’s independence from Spain)….Professional play arrived in Puerto Rico in 1938 with the founding of the island nation’s winter circuit….Throughout the fifties the Puerto Rican winter league earned a reputation as something of a launching pad for major league stardom. Bob Clemente, of course, first earned his wings on hometown turf in the uniform of the Santurace Crabbers. Luis Olmo would emerge from an illustrious Puerto Rican winter career that spanned 15 seasons to earn unique distinction as the first Puerto Rican to stroke a home run in a World Series game. …And Luis Arroyo would learn the craft on his native island that would eventually make him one of the most feared relievers on the 1960’s with the New York Yankees.”
Many young big-league players came down to play in the Puerto Rican winter league and learn their profession. “Future Hall-of-Famer Mike Schmidt would eventually credit his adjustments to major-league pitching to a 1973-74 trip around the Puerto Rican winter circuit. The touted Phillies rookie had batted only .196 in his 1973 rookie campaign but jumped nearly 100 points and paced the National league in round-trippers the very next season. And Rickey Henderson would hone his base-stealing skills on the island in the mid-1970’s.
Baseball came to Venezuela when “Cuban adventurers”, (Bjarkman’s term), demonstrated it there in 1895. The game there developed slowly and it wasn’t until the 1940’s that “the country first tested the waters of international competition with an amateur tournament played that year in distant Hawaii. While the Venezuelans were barely competitive the first time around with a respectable fifth-place finish, their showing indicated that a half century of amateur play at home had developed a fair mastery of the game. The world of amateur baseball was hardly prepared, however, for the surprise performance of the 1941 world-tourney entrant from Venezuela, which upset heavily favored Cuba and walked away with championship laurels in their second international completion. To prove that their sudden arrival on the amateur scene was no fluke, the Venezuelan team captured the 1944 and 1945 wartime world amateur championships.” A professional circuit was founded in 1946 “with local and imported Cuban and US talent”. The New York Yankees made a spring training tour of Venezuela in 1947. Venezuelan players started showing up in the major leagues in the 1950’s.
In Mexico the big man was not a dictator but a businessman, Jorge Pasqual, who bought most of the Mexican League and decided he wanted to make it into a major league. He started offering major league players what were then exorbitant amounts of money to come down to Mexico and play for his teams. Baseball had been introduced into Mexico in 1880’s by Cubans in the Yucatan area and by railroad workers to the north. There was a semi-pro league established by the 1920’s and a formal professional league in 1925. Pasquel , “ A rich man who liked to flaunt his wealth, (Pasquel owned six Lincolns and had a haberdashery in his home)“, began buying up franchises in the early 40’s and importing Negro League stars. Eventually, he became president of the league.
“The New Mexican League President of 1946 was also a man driven by nationalistic fervor and perhaps a smoldering hatred of the Yanqui interests, perhaps fueled by the US Marine bombardments of Veracruz during his childhood years. His personal frontal attack on Yanqui imperialism would come in a plan to build the newly prosperous Mexican League into a full-fledged rival of the major league circuits operating to the North. Un 1946, Pasquel decided to launch a full-scale raid on the majors….The motive for Pasqual’s raid on US talent may have been in part an upcoming presidential campaign by his business partner and childhood pal Miguel Sleman. Aleman’s election promised a windfall of preferential treatment for Pasquel business interests and any bolstering of big-time baseball by the Aleman-Pasquel camp could not fail to impress the baseball crazy Mexican electorate.”
“Max Lanier would later complain that once Aleman had won the 1946 election, Pasquel began reneging on his contracts, salaries of imported players being cut in half. The true fact of the matter may have been that Pasquel, for all his wealth, had over-committed himself and was running out of pocket money to throw at baseball. No capital upgrade in stadiums had accompanied the high-priced player talent. The Mexican population, for all its reported fervor, was not large enough to support a big-time circuit and gate revenues simply did not offset the bloated payrolls.” ”
Pasquel’s most famous offer was to Stan Musial. In two alternate versions of the story Pasqual either dumped $50,000 in cash on Stan’s kitchen table or his hotel room bed. Stan was making $13,000/year at the time. But “I looked at my young son and I just couldn’t say yes”, (a quote which favors the kitchen table story).
But others took the bait: http://www.baseball-almanac.com/legendary/Mexican_League.shtml
These players were banned from the major leagues by Commissioner Happy Chandler. The shady Pasqual’s operation by 1948 had collapsed . The players sought re-instatement to the major but Pasqual filed lawsuits for them to fulfill their contracts. He lost and soon got out of baseball. “With the collapse of Pasquel’s ambitious scheme faded any grand dream of a Mexican baseball tradition on a par with the baseball of Cuba and the United States. That lofty dream would never materialize despite the total reorganization of the Mexican league in 1949 with entirely new management.” Pasquel died in a 1955 plane crash.
It’s interesting to speculate on what might have happened if Pasqual had joined with others to create a Caribbean league and sought major status for a larger and better funded organization. This was about the same time that the PCL was seeking major status as a west coast major league. If they and a Caribbean League could have gotten together to play their own version of the World Series there might have eventually been a clamor to have the win play the major league champion. But that’s an arc of history that was cut off by the collapse of Pasqual’s more limited venture, the integration of the majors and the franchise shifts of the 1950’sand expansion of the 1960’s.Those events led to Latin players seeking stardom in the major leagues and so many of them found it that it caused my parent’s neighbor to conclude there were “too many Mexicans” in the game. At the time of Bjarkman’s book, over 600 major leaguers had been born in Latin America, including 159, (of 1040) on the 40 man rosters of 1992. It could be argued that the influx of Latin players has had at least as great an influence on the talent pool in the major leagues as that of black players and that at present it is much greater.
Negro league players found their time in the Latin leagues appealing because of the lack of racism. Willie Wells wrote to Wendell Smith, the leading black newspaper writer of the time. That he was staying in Mexico because “I’ve found freedom and democracy here, something I never found in the United States. Here I am a man.”
The history of Latin players in the major leagues goes back much farther than Jackie Robinson. They just had to be light enough to “pass”, (which illustrates the absurdity of prejudice: how little African “blood” can you have in you and still make the major leagues?). Estaban “Steve” Bellan has played in the National Association in the 1870’s. In 1911 two Cubans, Rafael Almeida and Armando Marsans, showed up in Cincinnati playing for the Reds. Club president Garry Herrmann “arrived to pick up the imports upon their arrival at the Cincinnati train station, he suffered near heart seizure when he saw a couple of brown Pullman porters disembark moments ahead of the expected ballplayers. Soon, however, Cincinnati newspaper were boasting that the two dark-skinned Cubans were “two of the purest bars of Castilian soap ever floated to these shores” once the ended documentation had arrived.” The documentation were “certifications” by Cuban officials that they were of Castilian, not black heritage. Ahhhh….the good old days…
The Reds later acquired the services of the greatest Cuban pitcher, In terms of career victories), Adolfo, “Dolf” Luque. Luque was 10-3 for the Reds 1919 World Series champs and won 194 games in his career, including a 27-8 mark in 1923. He later pitched for the Dodgers and Giants and went 8-2 for the Giant’s 1933 World Series champions. The “Castilian” looking-Luque:
http://sports.mearsonlineauctions.com/ItemImages/000035/e9843b9d-09bd-4028-b865-8ba5181a2ca9_lg.jpeg
As great as Luque was, he wasn’t any greater that his countryman and contemporary Martin Dihego, who had an image problem:
http://sports.mearsonlineauctions.com/ItemImages/000035/e9843b9d-09bd-4028-b865-8ba5181a2ca9_lg.jpeg
What is interesting is that two other Cubans, Jacinto Calvo and Jose Acosta, played briefly in the majors in the early twenties for the senators and the White Sox and also played in the Negro leagues. But don’t tell anybody.
Ironically, the owner most interested in singing “Castilians” was Clark Griffith of the Senators. Years later his son Calvin would say to a gathering in Minneapolis, (with Rod Carew sitting next to him” that he was glad he moved the club to a town “full of hard-working white people”. His father was interested in hard-playing ball players who wouldn’t ask for too much money and saw the Caribbean as a rich source of them. He hired a legendary scot named “Papa” Joe Cambria who came to know Caribbean baseball as well as anybody and who signed many Latin players for the lowly Senators. Cambria “who had worked his way from sandlot player in his native Massachusettsto controversial minor league club owner in Albany, New York and finally to Griffith’s back-room assistant in Washington), eventually signed over 400 Cuban prospects. He “opened the eyes of competing general managers to a rich and untapped pool of Latin American player talent seemingly ripe for the picking.”
Washington writer Morris Beale “carpingly claimed (Griffith and the Senators) would do even better if he would get over his predication for Cubanolas.” But Bjarkman points out “the thin pool of wartime talent made Cuban athletes all the more attractive. They were not subject to the military draft and they demanded small wages.” 18 Cubans played big league baseball during the war. Bjarkaman says that two of them, pitcher Tommy de la Cruz of the Reds and the oddly-named Hiram Bithorn of the Cubs, were “of dubious racial stock”. Branch Rickey snickered to Red Smith that Clark Griffith “was hardly one to object to Jackie Robinson, given his known propensity for hiring Cuban blacks”. Jackie Robinson integrated a sport that had already been integrated. The problem was, people didn’t know it. Or want to admit it.
Later the Pittsburgh Pirates, also having trouble competing, followed the Senator’s example, hiring Howie Hack to work Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic the way Cambria worked Cuba. They became one of the leading teams in importing Latin talent, including the most famous of them all, Roberto Clemente. “Haak relentlessly conducted the same old-style tryout camps with the same time-worn methods, even though by the 1980s other ball clubs were moving into his well-worked territory to compete head-on with large training complexes and newer recruitment strategies Perhaps the most remarkable fact about the venerable Howie Haak, however was the force and charm of his personality. All that he accomplished from the 1950’s through the 1990’s he had managed with only enough broken Spanish to get by. “
There were some attempts to incorporate Latin baseball into the structure of “organized baseball”. The remnants of Pasqual’s Mexican league were made part of the minor leagues, although they were not formally farm teams of any major league team. In fact, “Mexican teams retain first rights to sign any native amateur. A major League club, therefore, must buy the contract from a player’s Mexican club, usually for more than it costs to sign a prospect elsewhere in the region. For that reason, there are far more Dominicans and Venezuelans in the Major leagues than there are Mexicans.
There was a possibility that the first black major leaguer of the 20th century might have been a Latin player. Branch Rickey had his eye on Cuban star Silvio Garcia in the mid 40’s and sent Walter O’Malley down to look at him. Differing accounts say that Garcia (a) had been drafted into the Cuban army or (b) was on a drinking spree or (c) when asked by O’Malley how he would respond to racist taunts, said “I’ll kill the guy”. Whatever, nothing came of it. Rickey had the idea that because Cubans had played in the major leagues before, a Cuban black might be deemed more acceptable. Instead, he went with Jackie Robinson.
Papa Joe Cambria founded the Havana Sugar Kings, in 1946 as a Class C team in the Florida International league. In 1954, now owned by they made the International League even more international. It proved to be a wild, colorful place to play baseball, especially during the Cuban revolution. The most famous incident occurred in 1959 when celebrating rebels fired guns in the air outside the stadium. Some of the descending bullets landed on the field and Rochester third base coach Frank Verdi, (later the manager of the all-conquering 1970 Syracuse Chiefs), and Havana shortstop Leo Cardenas received minor wounds as they evacuated the field. The Sugar Canes won the 1959 Governor’s Cup. That era ended in 1960, when the Sugar Canes were moved to Jersey City after Castro nationalized all US enterprises in Cuba.
Some Cuban refugees still made their way to the major leagues, Such as Tony Oliva, Tony Perez and Luis Tiant. But from then on the balance of power shifted east to the Dominican Republic as far as producing major leaguers.
Latin players had all of the same challenges playing baseball in the United States that black players had had with the added problem of unfamiliarity with the language and culture. And they received little help from their ballclubs, coaches or teammates. Latin players developed reputations as “hot blooded…showboats…who didn’t play the game with heart, courage or even the proper dose of native intelligence”. Also, they didn’t play hurt, as white players did. Every conflict meant they were all hotheads. Every bit of showmanship by such as Vic Power or Juan Marichal made them showboats. Language problems were made fun of, proving that they were stupid. And, when asked questions about injuries through translators, they answered honestly. It’s hard not to do so through a translator.
They also faced quotas as did American blacks. The Dodgers had Roberto Clemente in their farm system but didn’t call him up because they felt they had enough blacks in their line-up. They held onto him too long and the Pirates were able to claim him. With Clemente, Duke Snider and Carl Furillo in their outfield, they would have had the three greatest outfield arms ever put together for one team and one of the best all-around outfields in history. The Yankees had a chance to acquire Vic Power but “owners Dan Topping and Del Webb were apparently not ready to have a black man don the hallowed Yankee uniform and if they did have a black in uniform, it would certainly not be one who called attention to himself and his individualistic style of play.” They eventually went for the soft-spoken Elston Howard. Their first Hispanic black was the defensively inept Hector Lopez.
Their names often got mangled or anglicized, (which was not too different for them. Victor Pollet became Vic Power. Roberto Clemente was “Bob”, just as Roberto Avila had been “Bobby”. Saturino Orestes Arrieta Armas somehow became “Minnie Minoso”. Minoso was the name of some half-brothers he played with in Cuba. Minnie was either a shortening of that name, a reference to his height or, as “Minnie” tells it, a lady in his dentist’s office who was summoned from the waiting room and he thought they were saying his name.
Orlando Cepeda described arriving in Salem, Virginia in 1955 from ethnically tolerant Puerto Rico after “a nightmare overnight bus trip through Georgia and the Carolina…Cepeda innocently enough strolled through a downtown shopping district only to be strong-armed by shotgun-toting police as soon as he stopped to stare through a shop window. Black males, it turned out, were no permitted to walk the streets of downtown Salem after dark. The terrified youngster could only repeat “Beisbol!”over and over until someone at the local lock-up finally phoned team officials to bail him out of a frightening set of circumstances. Minnie Minoso was shocked to see that he wasn’t allowed to play in a minor league game in Memphis and that when he did play in Dayton, Ohio, fans canceled their season tickets “Knowing little English and frightened by an unfamiliar and often hostile environment, (Tony) Olivia would walk the dozen miles each day from his apartment to the Bloomington ballpark.” . Antonio (Tony) Taylor was stuck in the Texas League and wanted to fly back to Havana but it cost $86 and he only had $84, so he stayed and never went back to Cuba.
The whole thing was summarized by a statement Giant manager Alvin Dark made in an interview: “We have trouble because we have so many Spanish-speaking and Negro players on the team. They are not able to perform up to the white ballplayers when it comes to mental alertness…..You can’t make most Negro and Spanish players have the pride in their team that you get from white players. “ Dark actually banned the Spanish language from use in his clubhouse and discouraged “fraternization” between Latin American teammates.
Power made light of it all. When he saw “whites only” signs he started crossing streets during red lights, insisting that the green light was for whites only. When told a restaurant didn’t serve colored people, he informed the waiter that that was OK, since he didn’t eat them. If people are determined to make you unhappy, smile at them. That’s what Vic Power did.
Meanwhile baseball has continued to thrive in the Caribbean area major leaguers and Negro league stars no longer play “Winter Ball”, although there are still winter leagues for natives and minor leaguers. There are no Negro leagues and major leaguers make too much money. But young Latin players still love baseball and dream of success in the majors. And there’s a “Caribbean World Series”, (or Serie del Caribe) that has existed, with a couple of interruptions, since 1949 where teams from each of the baseball playing countries of the region play each other for a regional championship. It was the brainchild of Venezuelan entrepreneur Pablo Morales and brought together teams from his country, Panama, Cuba and Puerto Rico. Mexico and the Dominican Republic joined later. The series was interrupted when Castro pulled out of it was not held from 1961-69. It was also not held in 1981 due to a strike by the Venezuelan players. The Dominican Republic has won 19 times, Puerto Rico 14 times, Mexico 8 times, Cuba 7 times, (which shows their dominance in that first decade), Venezuela 7 times, and Panama once, (the first tournament in 1950). In the old days, this tournament would have included major league stars, (as when Willie Mays homered with Roberto Clemente on base in 1955), but they are still fanatically popular. “Baseball remains ‘el rey de deportes’, (King of Sports) in the region.
