Dinner with Minnie Miñoso

La Vida Baseball launched on March 1, 2017 – the second anniversary of Minnie Miñoso’s death.

The joy of launch day was somewhat diminished for me. At the end of that day came the realization that this Latino legend whose career and life so embodied the ethos of La Vida Baseball was no longer alive.

To talk with Minnie was to hear the joy of life in the game. The timbre of his voice rose and fell with excitement in talking with fans.

And when he started speaking in Spanish, it was lyrical.

I loved hearing him talk about his career as a ballplayer, being witness to his optimism about the goodness in people and his belief that there was more good than bad in the world.

For an integration pioneer to have seen what he had seen, who successfully made a home in a land that was not his own, and who loved the game so much that he kept coming back to play again, and again, and again?

That is living La Vida Baseball.

Missing Minnie

It has been incredibly difficult for me to write about Minnie since his death.

I am haunted by the thought that we, the baseball community, failed him.

We failed to appreciate fully the grandeur of his accomplishment as the first black Latino to star in the major leagues.

Too prone to quibble about his exact age when he entered organized baseball.

Too fixated on whether the Cuban-born outfielder manipulated his age by adding or subtracting a couple of years in assessing the significance of his on-field accomplishments.

Too easily discounted the powerful sway that racial beliefs and segregated practices continued to have in Major League Baseball well after Jackie Robinson’s 1947 debut, and how that so impacted his career in the United States.

Miñoso was literally a key part of the bridge that brought baseball from segregation to integration. For Latinos, he was, as Orlando Cepeda so aptly put it, our Jackie Robinson.

Context matters

I never had the chance to personally witness Miñoso perform in the major leagues. The apex of his 17-year career — including three games in 1976 at age 50 and two in 1980 at 54 to become the first modern-day five-decade player — was well before I was born.

My appreciation for his accomplishments is purely historical. It’s shaped by my knowledge as a historian of the era in which he played in the Negro Leagues and in the major leagues — basically, the mid-1940s through the 1960s.

A color line ruled MLB and its affiliated minor leagues when Miñoso arrived in the States to play professional baseball in 1945. This meant the U.S. phase of the Cuban native’s career began in the Negro Leagues, just like another newcomer to pro baseball that year, Jackie Robinson.

Two years later on April 15, 1947, Robinson broke the majors’ color barrier, becoming the first black player in the majors since this line was instituted in the late 1880s.

Miñoso’s MLB debut occurred almost exactly two years later. His April 19, 1949, appearance with the Cleveland Indians made him the first black Latino to play in MLB.

Sure, there were other players from Cuba and from throughout Latin America who played in the majors before Miñoso, but they did not enter as unambiguously black men.

That was the burden the man who would become known as Minnie would carry.

Dinner with Minnie

Whereas I did not get to see him play, I did get to know Minnie over the last decades of his long life. We chatted at several events hosted by the Chicago White Sox, at SABR’s Jerry Malloy Negro League conferences, and at the University of Illinois when we marked the 60th anniversary of his breaking the color line with the Indians.

The first time I met Minnie was in 1999. We shared a stage at Northern Illinois University, speaking at a symposium on Latinos in baseball along with Sacramento Bee sportswriter Marcos Bretón.

My first meaningful time with Minnie came at dinner that night after the symposium. Our conversation was illuminating.

We talked baseball, Cuba and the sporting press. How the game had changed and the challenge of pioneering integration. Good teammates and those who were not as supportive.

Basically, the basis of his vida baseball.

Some topics enlivened Minnie, such as talking about those pioneering days of integration and being in a black man in a new land.

Did he understand when fans called him the “n”-word, one of us asked.

Minnie was both witty and serious in his response, which was classic Minnie.

That word doesn’t need any translation, he responded. You can tell by the hate in which they said it.

Dinner conversation overturned a few assumptions of mine. I became aware of obstacles he encountered that I did not quite expect.

Of course, the language barrier was a hurdle. But wasn’t it an advantage playing for a Spanish-speaking manager, one who understood his native language? This a reference to Al López, who was Minnie’s manager during his time with the Indians and the White Sox.

His response that it was much harder as a Cuban, a black Cuban at that, to play for López, a Hall of Famer, stunned me.

Minnie saw the dazed look in my face. He reminded me that he was traded away both times he played for López, in 1951 with Cleveland and again in 1957 after López’s first season as White Sox manager.

To this day many think López, a native of Tampa, Florida, was Cuban. But he was actually of Spanish descent; his parents were both born in Spain. And there laid an important difference. Spain ruled over Cuba as a colony for nearly 400 years. Perceptions drawn from that history surely could fester in the relationships between Spaniards and Cubans, the former seeing the latter has needing more forceful instruction, discipline and a firm hand.

That dinner revealed a thoughtful and reflective Orestes Miñoso to me. Not just Minnie, the affable ballplayer who acquired that nickname during his U.S. playing days, the Minnie who Chicago loved, who brought together fans from all backgrounds. But also, the man Orestes Miñoso, who knew his history, his Cuban roots, his own blackness, and how they influenced the path he cleared not just for himself, but for others in America’s game.

Featured Image: Hy Peskin Archive / Archive Photos

Inset Image: TOPPS