Minnie Minoso 1925-2015

It is one of the strange quirks of the universe that one city would lose two of its sports pioneers, two of its ambassadors and two of its most beloved figures in the span of less than six weeks.  On January 23rd of this year, the city of Chicago and baseball fans around the globe mourned the loss of Hall of Famer Ernie Banks, Mr. Cub.  Today we learned that another Chicago icon, former White Sox outfielder Minnie Minoso, passed away at the age of 89 (or at the age of 92, depending on who you ask, his age is a matter of dispute). Over two years before Banks broke the color barrier as the first African-American player with the Chicago Cubs in 1953, Minoso joined the Chicago White Sox as their first black player. Notice the difference in the adjectives.  Banks was born in Dallas, Texas, Minoso in a small town near Havana, Cuba. While Minoso didn’t have quite the same impact as a player as Banks, he did have a superlative major league career, good enough to have been on the “Golden Era” Hall of Fame ballot this past December, when he fell just four votes shy of enshrinement to Cooperstown.

“Minoso was the Jackie Robinson for all Latinos; the first star who opened doors for all Latin American players,” said Puerto Rican native and future Hall of Famer Orlando Cepeda. “He was everybody’s hero. I wanted to be Minoso. Roberto Clemente wanted to be Minoso.” (Chicago Tribune)

“Minnie may have been passed over by the Baseball Hall of Fame during his lifetime, but for me and generations of black and Latino young people, Minnie’s quintessentially American story embodies more than a plaque ever could.”

— President Barack Obama

From Tony Perez, the only Cuban-born player in the National Baseball Hall of Fame:

“Every young player in Cuba wanted to be like Minnie Minoso, and I was one of them.  The way he played the game, hard all the time, hard. He was very consistent playing the game. He tried to win every game. And if you want to be like somebody, and I picked Minnie, you have to be consistent.”  (www.espn.chicago.com)

For baseball fans of my generation (I was born in 1967), Minoso was an oddity, a Bill Veeck-inspired promotional gimmck. In 1976, twelve years after his final year with the White Sox, Minoso,  now in his 50’s, was hired as a coach and convinced by owner Veeck to make a couple of appearances as a designated hitter; he had eight plate appearances for the 1976 team and became, allegedly, the oldest player in baseball history to get a base hit.  The accomplishment was memorialized by this special Topps baseball card, which was all a lot of young fans like me knew about him.  Minoso came out of retirement again in 1980, with two at bats that made him only the second player in baseball history to appear in five different decades.

For me and probably many other fans that weren’t old enough to remember his prime, these ceremonial appearances by Minoso distracted from what was an excellent career. The Cuban Comet finished his career with a .298 batting average, 1,963 hits, 186 home runs and 1,023 RBI. Those numbers, on the surface, didn’t gain him much support by the baseball writers when it came time to consider his Hall of Fame candidacy (he topped out with 21% of the necessary 75% of the vote in 1988).  In the last decade, however, modern analytics have placed a higher premium on some of his skills that didn’t grab one’s attention in the past. For example, in addition to his .298 batting average, Minoso sported a .389 on-base percentage.   During his eleven years as a regular player (1951-1961), look at how he ranks in many statistical categories, including WAR (Wins Above Replacement), OPS+ (which combines on-base%, slugging% and adjusts for ballparks and the era in which a player played) and Runs Created (RC).

From the indispensable website www.baseball-reference.com, among players with at least 4,000 plate appearances.

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The only players above Minoso in any of those categories are all Hall of Famers and almost all legends.  In addition to his offensive game, Minoso was an excellent defensive player, earning three Gold Gloves in five years (starting with the first year the award was issued in 1957).  He also was a fearless player, very willing to take his base for his team when the ball ventured towards his body.  He led the league in being hit by a pitch ten times and is ninth on the all-time list with 192.

One of the factors that almost certainly have kept Minoso out of Cooperstown was that his major league career was too short.  He appeared in parts of 17 major league seasons but was only a full-time regular in 11 of them.  He simply didn’t compile the career numbers that are expected of a Hall of Fame player.  So this is why his actual age is really important.  If he was born on November 29, 1925, as listed on most internet sites including Baseball Reference and SABR (the Society of American Baseball Research), then he made his debut in the American League at the age of 23 and became a full-time player at 25.  However, if he was born in 1922, as the White Sox official statement stated today when announcing his passing, then he didn’t become a full-time player in the majors until he was 28, which makes it reasonable to claim that he lost three to five of his prime years due to the segregation and racism at the time. This is a very important distinction that I’ll revisit near the end of this article.

 

Minnie Minoso grew up in Cuba with the name Saturnino Orestes Arrieta, known mostly as “Orestes” with the name “Arrieta” being his mother’s maiden name.  He unofficially adopted the last name Minoso after his older half-brother and was known as Orestes while growing up in Cuba, adopting the nickname Minnie after reaching the United States.

Minoso’s first foray into American baseball came in 1946, when he was signed to play for the New York Cubans of the Negro National League. One of his teammates was Luis Tiant Sr., father of the flamboyant hurler of Red Sox fame. Two years later, towards the end of the 1948 season, Minoso was signed by the Cleveland Indians. Before Jackie Robinson made his debut for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947, major league baseball was off limits to blacks, whether they born in the U.S., Cuba or Mars.  However, a total of 39 Cuban players of lighter complexion appeared in major league games throughout the first half of the 20th century. Only one of them could be considered a star: that was pitcher Dolf Luque, who won 194 games in the National League and was a member of both the World Series champion 1919 Reds (who beat the infamous Black Sox) and the 1933 Giants.

Anyway, Minoso, now a member of the Indians organization, finished the ’48 season with the minor league “Class A” Dayton Indians. He made a great first impression, batting .525 with 21 hits in 40 at bats. Minnie broke camp with the big club in the spring of 1949 but was shipped back to the minor leagues after the first four weeks of the season. He did not return to the major league club in Cleveland despite a dominant performance in nearly two years with the San Diego Padres in the Pacific Coast League.  In 1949, Minoso hit .297 with 22 home runs, 75 RBI and 13 stolen bases in 137 games.  The following season, he hit .339 with 20 home runs and 115 RBI. Still, he did not get the call back to the majors.

It’s been written that perhaps Minoso languished with the minor league Padres for those two seasons because of the color of his skin.  When he was sent to San Diego in May of 1949, only three major league teams had integrated.  However, his team, the Indians, were one of those three teams, having added future Hall of Famers Larry Doby in 1947 and Negro League legend Satchel Paige in 1948. The Indians owner, Bill Veeck, was arguably the Branch Rickey of the American League.  He was progressive-minded, a showman, an entrepreneur, a risk-taker and a master promoter.  He was not a deep-pocketed owner like many of his peers, merely the leader of a syndicate of stock-holders in the franchise.  Besides Doby, Paige and Minoso, Veeck also signed a 20-year old African-American outfield prospect (Al Smith) in 1948 and two more Negro League players in 1949, Luke Easter and Harry Simpson.  Doby and Paige became the first black players to feel the joy of a championship ball club; the Indians won the World Series in 1948.

Let’s look at the record: certainly it is true that Minoso didn’t get much of a chance in 1949.  He appeared in 9 games total (starting 6 of them in a row) before being shipped out west.  In that brief trial, Minnie hit .188, with 3 hits in 20 at bats. Quoting from the book African American Pioneers of Baseball, player-manager Lou Boudreau felt he needed more experience after his experience with the Cubans: “he was a raw star in the beginning, but in only two years he was a seasoned ballplayer.”

The history of baseball has thousands of examples of young players who, after going 3 for 20 or similar at the begining of a major league season, get shipped back to the minor leagues.  Boudreau tried a total of 6 right fielders in his starting lineups at the start of the 1949 season before settling on veteran Bob Kennedy as his primary starter (Doby and Dale Mitchell were mainstays in the outfield).  Anyway, to say that Minoso was denied a big-league opportunity in 1949 because of racism is speculation at best: it would imply that Boudreau, Veeck or General Manager Hank Greenberg held him back because he was black. Greenberg, remember, was the first Jewish superstar baseball player and was the subject of enormous abuse and anti-semitism, a level of abuse his teammate Birdie Tebbets said was second only to Jackie Robinson himself.

Now let’s remember that the 1948 Indians had won the World Series with two black players (Doby and Paige).  Is it unreasonable that Boudreau, as the player-manager, would stick with some of the players who had been a part of that championship rather than insert an untested rookie into his everyday lineup?  The players I’m talking about are Kennedy, Allie Clark and Thurman Tucker.  History shows that Minoso was a much better player than any of those three but, again, baseball history is littered with examples of veterans who held onto roles over more talented younger players because the organizations didn’t realize yet what they were missing.

Incidentally, in 1949, another rookie player on the Indians was sent to the AAA Padres: his name was Al Rosen, a 25-year-old third baseman whose path to a starting role was blocked by Ken Keltner, a 7-time All-Star.  Keltner managed to start only 67 games in ’49 but the Indians still saw fit to leave Rosen in the minor leagues for a good chunk of the season.  Rosen, finally getting his full-time chance at 26 (in 1950), hit 37 home runs with 116 RBI and would be the American League MVP in 1953.

So what about 1950?  Kennedy was the Tribe’s full-time right fielder despite the monster season Minoso was having in San Diego.  But it’s pretty clear that Kennedy, a respected major league veteran and World War II fighter pilot, had earned the job with his performance in the 2nd half of 1949.  In the final 67 games of that season, he emerged as a solid offensive player, batting .316 with 41 runs batted in and a.842 OPS (only 13 points less than Minoso’s in the minors).  Kennedy was also a solid defensive outfielder with a good arm.

Also, the narrative that Minoso was held back in 1950 due to racism is not supported by the fact that his 1949 Padres teammate, Luke Easter, a 33-year-old power hitting Negro League veteran, had surpassed him on the Indians organizational depth chart.  Look at the 1949 numbers of Minoso and Easter in San Diego:

1950 San Diego Padres
PA
HR
RBI
SB
AVG
OPS



Luke Easter
323
25
92
1
.363
1.181


Minnie Minoso
598
22
75
13
.297
.855

Easter, a huge man who hit prodigious blasts, quickly became one of the biggest stars and gate attractions in the Pacific Coast League.  Easter was so good that year that in August, after missing six weeks due to a broken right knee, he was promoted to the big club in Cleveland, with the popular Allie Clark getting dropped to the minors to make room.  In May 1950, the Indians traded 2-time All-Star first baseman Mickey Vernon to Washington to make room for Easter at first base.

With the 1950 minor-league Padres, Minoso was joined (and surpassed) by another talented young black player, Harry “Suitcase” Simpson, also an outfielder.

1951 San Diego Padres
PA
HR
RBI
SB
AVG
OPS



Harry Simpson
751
33
156
2
.323
.945


Minnie Minoso
671
20
115
30
.339
.945

Note: the 1951 Pacific Coast League, with all teams on the climate-friendly West Coast, played a 200-game season.  Simpson played 178 games, Minoso 169.

So, with Satchel Paige having been released at the age of 43 before the previous season, the Indians began the 1951 campaign with four black players: Doby, Easter, Simpson, Minoso.  Here is where there is some documentation that race played a role in what happened next.

Despite having guided the Indians to a World Championship in 1948 and solid 89 and 92 win campaigns in the seasons that followed, Lou Boudreau was released as a player after the 1950 season and fired as manager. Financially strapped because of a divorce, Veeck had sold the team after the 1949 season; Greenberg was still the General Manager and he hired Al Lopez to be the team’s skipper for 1951, which would be the beginning of Lopez’ Hall of Fame managerial career.  According to multiple reports, including the Sporting News and the book The Integration of Major League Baseball”, it was felt by “everybody” in the organization that four black players were too many.  Hence, with Doby and Easter as established starters and Simpson having had superior statistics with San Diego in 1950, Minoso was traded to the Chicago White Sox.

Minnie was distressed by the trade; it was now up to him to break the color line in Chicago but he flourished both on and off the field.  The trade would become really distressing to the Indians, as they watched the Cuban Comet become an immediate star on Chicago’s south side. He hit a home run in his first at bat and helped the team to a 14-game winning streak; he made the 1951 All-Star team while finishing 4th in the MVP voting, beginning his spectacular 11-year peak. Off the field, while Jackie Robinson was understated, Minoso was flamboyant, embracing his new-found celebrity, driving a green Cadillac around his new hometown while wearing bright-colored shirts and wide-brimmed hats (biographical info courtesy of SABR).

So, back to the question at hand: did racism shorten Minoso’s career and perhaps deny him the extra years of statistical accomplishment that might have turned him into a Hall of Famer? This is something we can never truly know of course but the evidence suggests probably not.  Although history has proven it to be a mistake, the Indians prioritized two other black players over Minoso because they had better production as his minor league teammate. What I do believe is legitimate is that the Indians chose to keep Minoso in San Diego as a full-time player rather than keep him as a part-time player with the major league club. During the early years of integration, if you were going to put a black player on the roster, that player had to be really good, Jackie Robinson-good.  It turned out that Minoso was that good but the Indians just didn’t see it.

All of this is not to minimize in any way the struggles that Minoso and all of the other black players faced during this era. He and all of his brethren had to put up with endless racist, horrible, and vile epithets that would cause most of us to despair or lash out.  From everything I’ve read, it seems that Minnie embraced his role in a Robinson-esque manner, turning the other cheek but exacting his own retribution in the best way he knew, on the diamond.  When pitchers threw at him deliberately because they didn’t like the color of his skin, he just took his medicine, took his base, and proceeded to score runs.  When pitchers didn’t throw at him deliberately but threw just a bit inside, he was a master at taking that one for the team; by crowding the plate he mastered the art of reaching base by bruise.

Let’s finish here by tackling he issue of his age.  Was he 28 when he finally got a chance to be a full-time player?  Or was he 25?  This is a huge issue because the 25-to-28 years are often where Hall of Fame players are at their peak.  For most of the 20th century, it was believed that Minoso was born in 1922.  But the true story, missed by many, was confirmed in Minnie’s own memoir:

“I was 19 years old when I arrived in the United States in 1945, but my papers said I was 22. I told a white lie in order to obtain a visa, so I could qualify for service in the Cuban army. My true date of birth is the 29th of November, 1925.“

The three years difference is profound.  Shortly after learning of Minoso’s passing, I scoured the internet looking for the true story and I found it on the website SB Nation in a post by Rob Neyer.  Later, this quote was repeated in other on-line obits including the New York Times.  What was interesting to me is that Neyer, a well-respected writer and baseball analyst, went on to write that he used to think that Minoso belonged in the Hall of Fame “when I thought he was born in 1922.  It’s funny how three years makes such a difference.  Now I’m not sure what to think.”

Neyer is right of course.  If Minoso didn’t get a chance to play in the majors until the age of 28 because of the color of his skin, it’s easy to extrapolate a career that is Cooperstown worthy.  Personally, I think he belongs either way.  He was one of the top players in baseball in the 1950’s; that is indisputable.  And whether his career as a major leaguer was shortened by one year or five years, he was still a pioneer.  He was a pioneer as the first black player in the city of Chicago and he was a pioneer as the first true Latino superstar.  And he will be missed.