agate type

the first cuban leaguers in the minors, 1904

Everybody who cares knows about the status of Rafael Almeida and Armando Marsans as the first products of the Cuban League to play in the U.S. majors, taking the field for the Cincinnati Reds on July 4, 1911.  But virtually nobody knows about the accomplishments of Juan Violá and Estéban Prats, who were (as far as I can tell) the first Cuban Leaguers to play in the U.S. minor leagues. In 1904 they joined the Jacksonville Jays of the South Atlantic League, Violá as outfielder, Prats as first baseman, and did pretty well—Violá led the team with a .281 average (fifth in the league), while Prats’s .235 average, meager as it seems, was actually third among the Jays’ regulars.

Here they are in an (unfortunately blurry) team photo of the Jays, from the 1905 Spalding Guide:

And here’s an account of an eventful game for Prats, vs. Macon on June 7, in which he knocked a home run and got injured:

(Macon Telegraph, June 8, 1904, p. 5)

Prats (who currently appears in the SABR minor league DB as E. Pratt) didn’t return to Jacksonville in 1905, and appeared in the U.S. only once more, briefly, for the 1907 Cuban Stars.  He spent the balance of his Cuban League career mostly as a relatively light-hitting first baseman.

Violá, on the other hand, spent many years in the minors, including six seasons with Jacksonville (joined in future seasons by fellow Cuban Leaguers Luis Padrón and Valentín González) and several more with other southern teams, and ended his U.S. career with the Long Branch Cubans.  After he retired from baseball he became a policeman in Cuba, and was killed during strike-related violence in 1919.

stars of cuba, 1910

Here, courtesy of the Hakes auction site and Cesar Brioso’s tumblr, is a wonderful photograph of the Stars of Cuba, a team that toured the United States during the summer of 1910.

For whatever reason the scrap of typescript attached to the photo says (inaccurately) that the team existed in 1912. Actually it was 1910.  Here are the correct names of the players and officials in the photo (so far as I know): 

Back row: Heliodoro Hidalgo (“Jabuco”); William C. Niesen; Marcelino Guerra (“Sueya”); ?? Jones; Rogelio Valdés.

Middle row: José Muñoz; Pelayo Chacón; José Méndez; Armando Cabañas; Pastor Pareda.

Front row: Ramón Govantes; Manuel Villa; Rafael Figarola.

I’m not sure why Marcelino Guerra is called “Sueya” (a nickname, maybe?).  As you can see, this photograph includes every player who appeared for the Stars of Cuba against other top black teams that year, with the sole exception of Juliân “Fallanca” Pérez.  Incidentally, this is the only photo I’ve seen of José Muñoz actually in a baseball uniform; he’s in other team pictures, but always wearing a suit and tie.

Missing from this photo are Eustaquio Pedroso and Allyn McAllister, and present are William Niesen, Armando Cabañas, and Guerra, which may give us a clue as to when it was taken. 

Allyn McAllister was the founder of the Stars of Cuba.  A bicycle shop proprietor from Chicago, McAllister entered the ranks of baseball promoters in the fall of 1909 when he organized a major league all-star team to play the Cuban League teams in Havana.  It was a genuine all-star team, too, featuring Three Finger Brown, Addie Joss, Sherry Magee, and Fred Merkle, although they only managed two wins in five games against Habana and Almendares. 

While in Cuba, McAllister decided to move in on Abel Linares’s turf, signing up Cuban players to tour the U.S. the following summer.  He plucked Linares’s prize asset, José Méndez, the biggest star in Cuban baseball, and some other good players, including José Muñoz and Eustaquio Pedroso, giving him Cuba’s top three pitchers.

Here is a detail from a passenger list for the S.S. Mascotte, arriving in Tampa on May 4, 1910, showing eight of the Stars of Cuba players travelling together:

 

It was after the team got to Chicago that the trouble started.  At some point Pedroso had defected to Linares’s Cuban Stars.  McAllister then sued Pedroso, contending that he had signed an exclusive contract with the Stars of Cuba.  In early June, a judge threw out McAllister’s suit on the grounds that the contract lacked “mutuality”—that is, Pedroso was required to play ball only for McAllister during 1910, but McAllister was not required to retain or pay Pedroso at all.  The story was picked up by the AP and popped up in newspapers all over the country, often with headlines that implied the decision invalidated all baseball contracts.  Francis Richter of Sporting Life felt it necessary to intervene, quoting the AP story and adding their own commentary about how the case had little bearing on organized baseball:

(Sporting Life, June 11, 1910, p. 4)

With Pedroso lost, the Stars of Cuba were weakened a little; and the problems didn’t stop there.  The team started cancelling dates in early July, causing some frustration among the local clubs.  One W. C. Niesen, manager of the Gunthers club, took a vocal role against McAllister.

(Chicago Tribune, July 9, 1910, p. 10)

Starting on July 10 the Stars of Cuba  rebelled against McAllister; they were now operating “under new management,” as the Chicago Examiner (July 20) would later explain—which apparently meant W. C. Niesen and his allies.  Their new handlers lined up a three-game series in mid-July between the Stars of Cuba and Linares’s Cuban Stars, with two of the games played at Artesian Park.  The Stars of Cuba, fortified by the addition of Armando Cabañas and Marcelino Guerra from Cuba, won the first two games; the last, on July 14 at Artesian Park, saw a matchup of aces, with Pedroso of the Cuban Stars besting Méndez 3 to 2.

With Cabañas and Guerra on the roster and McAllister gone, we now have the cast of characters that appears in the team photo above; Niesen’s boycott of the team seems to have been aimed at wresting control of it from McAllister, and there he his in the team photo, along with “Jones,” presumably some partner of Niesen.

On July 19 the Chicago City League banned its clubs from playing “colored teams” (other than the Chicago Giants, who were league members, of course), a decision widely understood to be aimed at the two Cuban clubs. This was another item about local Chicago baseball that was picked up by the AP and printed in newspapers all over the country.

 

(Fort Worth Star-Telegram, July 19, 1910, p. 8)

This makes the fault lines in Chicago’s independent pro baseball scene that summer pretty clear, despite the forest of similar-sounding names (Cuban Stars, Stars of Cuba, Leland Giants, Leland’s Chicago Giants).  Keep in mind that Niesen’s Gunthers were not members of the Chicago City League, and neither were Rube Foster’s Chicago Leland Giants.  The previous winter, Foster had wrested control of the Leland Giants (and most of the team’s players) from eponymous founder Frank Leland.  Leland, enjoined from using the name “Leland Giants,” then organized his own team, referred to (confusingly) as Leland’s Chicago Giants.  Leland did convince the Chicago League to let him keep his team’s league franchise, thus the “new” Chicago Giants replaced the defending champion Leland Giants in the City League.

So on the one hand you had the Chicago City League, which included the city’s white semipro establishment, plus Frank Leland and his new Chicago Giants.  On the other hand you had Rube Foster’s Leland Giants and William C. Niesen, now controlling the Stars of Cuba as well as the Gunthers. One assumes that Allyn McAllister was originally aligned with the Chicago League, so his ouster from the Stars of Cuba may have been a large part of the reason for the League’s ban on games with the Cubans.  Abel Linares’s Cuban Stars of Havana, incidentally, played the Chicago Giants several times, but never once took the field against Foster’s Leland Giants, so they may have been more closely aligned with the City League crowd, despite their July games against Niesen’s Stars of Cuba.

On August 7 the Chicago Tribune reported that Allyn McAllister had obtained an injunction against the Stars of Cuba playing baseball under any management except his.

(Chicago Tribune, August 7, 1910, p. C2)

That day he showed up at Normal Park before a scheduled game between the Stars and Foster’s Leland Giants, flanked by three policemen and an interpreter.  It did not exactly go according to plan:

 

(Chicago Examiner, August 8, 1910, p. 8)

The Stars went ahead and played the game, losing to Frank Wickware and the Lelands 8 to 6.  A couple of days later they were hauled into court to explain themselves, but apparently the players (and, perhaps, Niesen) were able to reach some kind of settlement with McAllister:

 

(Chicago Tribune, August 11, 1910, p. 11)

(Chicago Examiner, August 12, 1910, p. 7)

A week or two after that the Stars of Cuba left for a series in Kansas City, Kansas, before returning to Chicago for some games against the Leland Giants.  Apparently the Stars of Cuba broke up soon after; by September 14 the team’s star and player-manager, José Méndez, had left to join the Linares Cuban Stars on the east coast.  As far as Allyn McAllister goes, this seems to have been the final chapter of his brief (and rather inglorious) career in baseball management.

josé del valle méndez, part ii

I’ve obtained a much better copy of the World War I draft card for José Méndez in Chicago, which confirms that he was employed by Rube Foster of 3242 Vernon Ave., and pretty much cinches the case that this is the Hall of Fame pitcher. In this copy you can make out his signature much more clearly, and it appears that he signed it “Jose del Valle y Mendez.”

This means that José Méndez himself signed a document that gives a totally different birthdate and name than what we have seen before.

Incidentally, I suspect the information here was probably itself drawn from another official document provided by Méndez. The registrar followed what I think was the standard practice of filling out the card herself, while the registrant—Méndez—simply signed it. She carefully included the accent marks in Méndez’s name, which Méndez himself did not bother with in his signature. While it’s possible she was fluent in or familiar with Spanish and knew where to put the accents, I think a more likely explanation is that she simply copied his name from some other source. This would work against any suspicion that the name or birthdate was a result of miscommunication between Méndez and the registrar.

cuban stars, 1915

Here’s another photo I don’t recall seeing before, from the Indianapolis Ledger (July 10, 1915, p. 4):

These, of course, are the Linares/Molina (western) Cuban Stars; that’s Tinti Molina in the suit and hat, between Pastor Pareda and Agustín Parpetti.

The photographer, J. C. Patton, was actually pretty well-known.  In 1915 he was the only African-American present at the National Photographers Association of America convention (held in Indianapolis), and samples of his work can be found on, for example, the Ohio Historical Society website.  He took this photograph of the 317th Engineers baseball team on July 31, 1918, at Camp Sherman, Chillicothe, Ohio:

While I’ve seen a few references to this team, I don’t think I have any box scores or names of players, so at this point I can’t identify any of these men.

the henriquez brothers

Louis Castro was not the only early twentieth-century baseball figure with Colombian origins.  The Long Branch Cubans, who played in minor leagues and independently from 1913 to 1916, were owned by a New York physician named Carlos Louis Henriquez, and managed by his brother, Richard Anthony Henriquez (pictured right), also the team’s first baseman in 1913 and 1914.  

Aside from Long Branch, the Cubans also based themselves at various times in Newark, Jersey City, Poughkeepsie, Harlem, and Newton, New Jersey.  Especially when they were in Long Branch, a seaside resort town, they played a large number of exhibitions against major league teams, according to David Skinner compiling a record of 10-24 in these games.  Most significantly, they helped funnel a number of players, including Adolfo Luque and Mike González, from the Cuban League to U.S. organized baseball.

Although the Henriquez brothers were usually assumed to be Cuban themselves, a number of records show a Colombian connection.  In June 1886, about ten months after “Master Louis Castro” and his father Néstor arrived in New York, another family arrived on board the S.S. Niagara from Colombia (via Mexico and Cuba):

The family remained in the United States, appearing in the 1900 census, where the father, Louis N. Henriquez, and children are all born in the “U.S. of Columbia”; the children’s mother, who had passed away by now (Louis is widowed) is shown as born in Cuba.

In the 1910 census the brothers, both married now, are living together on W. 88th Street, the same address later given on some passenger lists by Long Branch Cubans players.  Both give Colombia as their birthplace.

They filled out draft cards in 1918, only two years removed from the demise of the Long Branch Cubans.  Unfortunately their cards did not ask for birth place.  Both checked the space under “Citizen by Father’s Naturalization before Registrant’s Majority,” although Richard seems to have also written, below that, that he is a citizen of Colombia.

Both appeared in the 1920 census, Carlos as “Dr. Carl Henriquez,” listed for the first time as born in Cuba (his parents in South America).  Richard’s census entry, on the other hand, is consistent with earlier records, showing born in South America, his father in South America and mother in Cuba).  Both of Richard’s sons, one ten years old, the other “6 2/12” (to my eyes; Ancestry.com has recorded his age as 2 9/12), are listed as born in New Jersey.

The last sign of either brother I’ve found so far is Carlos in the 1930 census, living with in Yonkers, listing his employment as “none,” and supposedly born in New York.  The names of his wife (“Jeannette”), son (“Carlo” or “Carlos”) and his mother-in-law, Cora Long, establish this as Carlos Henriquez. His name, however, is oddly given as “Henry Carlos Henriquez,” a strong indication that the information here is probably not entirely trustworthy.

The image of Richard Henriquez above is courtesy of David Skinner, but don’t blame him for the poor quality; I lifted it from a photocopied handout for his presentation on the L.B. Cubans.

baseball ages: armando marsans

The official baseball birth date for Armando Marsans is October 3, 1887.  This would have made him 17 when he played his first Cuban League game on April 3, 1905.

The same Washington Post article (February 4, 1912) I cited in the post about Almeida says this about Marsans: “He was born in Matanzas, 55 miles from Havana, in 1885, being the same age as Almeida.”  And Peter T. Toot writes in his biography of Marsans that he “was born in Matanzas, Cuba….on October 3, 1885” (p. 8), although on the same page he says Marsans was 18 when he debuted for Almendares in 1905 (consistent with a birth date of October 3, 1886).

Here are some ages and implied birth dates from passenger lists (assuming his birthday of October 3 is correct):

--Arriving in New York on May 20, 1905: listed as 21, thus born October 3, 1883
--April 17, 1908: 23, thus October 3, 1884
--December 15, 1908: 23, thus October 3, 1885
--April 21, 1911: 25, thus October 3, 1885
--June 25, 1911: 25, thus October 3, 1885
--March 17, 1913: 26…October 3, 1885
--July 24, 1914: 27…October 3, 1886
--April 7, 1915: 28…October 3, 1886
--March 25, 1916: 29…October 3, 1886
--February 5, 1917: 30…October 3, 1886
--July 11, 1923: 36…October 3, 1886
--March 5, 1924: 35…October 3, 1888

Also: according to the Post, both Marsans and Almeida had come to U.S. as children with their privileged families, temporarily fleeing the turmoil of the Cuban Revolution in the 1890s.  As it happens, I was able to find an Armando Marsans arriving in New York from Havana on February 5, 1897, traveling with his mother and two brothers, Raúl and Mario.  Armando is listed here as 10 years old (again, consistent with a birth date of October 3, 1886).

Image of Marsans from this site, again.

herrara, herrera

By the way: this guy (“Ramon Herrara”) is Ramón Herrera.  Herrera actually started the 1922 season on the Bridgeport Americans, also of the Eastern League, alongside Cuban Hall of Famer Joseíto Rodríguez, though it evidently didn’t show up in the guides.  He must have played very little with Bridgeport (fewer than ten games) before moving to Springfield.

Herrera and Claudio Manela thus joined the Eastern League from the Negro National League at the same time, though Manela didn’t stick.  Both were nicknamed “Mike,” for whatever reason.  (At least Mike González was actually named Miguel.)

Image of Herrera comes via Ryan Christoff’s Cuban Baseball Cards site.

baseball ages: rafael almeida

Another example of an early Cuban player in the U.S. who may have adjusted his age for professional purposes is Rafael Almeida, one of the pair of Cincinnati Reds (the other being Armando Marsans) who on July 4, 1911, became the first Cuban League products to play in the major leagues.

Almeida’s official baseball birth date is July 30, 1887.  This would have made him 16 when he made his first Cuban League appearance in the 1903/04 season (actually played in early 1904), and still 16 when he first traveled to the United States with the All-Cubans in April.  When Almeida was purchased by the Reds in 1911 at the supposed age of 23 (almost 24), he had already been playing professionally in the U.S., off and on, for seven years.

These are the ages recorded for Almeida on passenger lists I’ve found, with the birth date they imply (assuming the birthday July 30 is correct):

Arriving in the United States April 26, 1904: 22, thus July 30, 1881
November 17, 1904: 22, thus July 30, 1882
May 20, 1905: 23, thus July 30, 1881
April 19, 1907: 23…July 30, 1883
June 10, 1908: 23…July 30, 1883
December 15, 1908: 25…July 30, 1883
May 1, 1909: 24…July 30, 1884
July 15, 1910: 25…July 30, 1884
June 25, 1911: 26…July 30, 1884
April 4, 1912: 27…July 30, 1884
March 17, 1913: 27….July 30, 1885
May 17, 1915: 29…July 30, 1885
May 14, 1916: 29…July 30, 1886
March 19, 1920: 35…July 30, 1884

An article about Almeida and Marsans in the Washington Post (February 4, 1912) says that Almeida “was born in Havana in 1885.”

The upshot is that, so far, every age I’ve found reported for Almeida during his playing career shows him older than his official age.

UPDATE 1:02 p.m.  Image of Almeida added from this site.

baseball ages: ramón herrera

Adjusting one’s age is nothing new in baseball.  Consider the case of Ramón Herrera (known as “Mike” or “Paito”), a Cuban infielder for both the Boston Red Sox (in 1925 and 1926) and the Cuban Stars of the Negro National League (in 1920 and 1921).  Herrera is supposed to have been born on December 19, 1897.  This would have made him 27 and 28 during his time with the Sox.

Herrera’s first professional appearance (as far as I know) was at third base for Almendares against the Brooklyn Dodgers on November 8, 1913—when Herrera would supposedly have been only 15.   He played his first Cuban League game on December 11, 1913, still eight days before his sixteenth birthday, and then went on to be Almendares’s regular second baseman as the club won the 1913/14 pennant.

Fast-forwarding to the other end of his career: Herrera’s last appearance as a professional (again, as far as I know) was in the 1929/30 Cuban League.  He would have turned 32 about two-thirds of the way through the season.

But check out the ages given on passenger manifests for Herrera’s travels to the United States.  Assuming that his birthday—December 19—is accurate, even if the year isn’t, here are the years of birth implied by each entry:

Herrera’s arrival in the U.S. on 14 September 1913:  he’s listed as 23 years old, thus born December 19, 1889

7 June 1914: 21 years old; thus born December 19, 1892
7 March 1915: 22; thus December 19, 1892
2 June 1915: 22, thus December 19, 1892
5 April 1916: 23, thus December 19, 1892

(Herrera played for the Cuban Stars in 1920 and 1921, but I haven’t yet found him on any passenger lists for those years.)

10 April 1923: 30, thus December 19, 1892
5 April 1924: 30, thus December 19, 1893
11 April 1924: 30, thus December 19, 1893
7 April 1925: 32, thus December 19, 1892
28 February 1926: 33, thus December 19, 1892
14 March 1927: 34, thus December 19, 1892
23 April 1928: 33, thus December 19, 1894
19 March 1929: 34, thus December 19, 1894

It should be emphasized that I’m not offering absolute proof that Herrera’s official age is wrong, just a strong suspicion based on both his career shape and the passenger lists.  It’s hard to know how to interpret ages on passenger lists, because we don’t always know what the source of the information is.  I tend to assume that most of the time it is the passenger himself, simply being asked how old he is.  But this information, as you can see, varies from year to year for the same person.  On any given list, the age could represent a guess, or could have been supplied by a club or customs official or somebody else who may or may not have known how old the person in question was.  Although it should be pointed out that one piece of evidence that the ages generally come from the passengers themselves is that (surprise surprise) as the years go on, ballplayers tend to shave years off.

In Herrera’s case, it seems significant that every single age given on the passenger lists is considerably older than his official baseball age.  Even the ages reported in 1928 and 1929 are still three years older than what we thought before.  It’s hard to think of any explanation other than the obvious one: his baseball age was wrong.  Herrera (or perhaps somebody else) slashed five years or so off his age.

If we take the most common implied birthdate here—December 19, 1892, which appears on 8 of 13 passenger lists—then Herrera was already 30 (rather than 25) when he joined organized baseball in the U.S. (with Springfield of the Eastern League in 1923), and 32 (rather than 27) when he finally made the Red Sox in 1925.  It isn’t exactly a mystery why it would have helped his career to lie about his age.  In fact, it probably made his career possible in the first place.  In addition, such an adjustment obviously alters any evaluation of Herrera as a player, since he was almost certainly in decline by the time he reached the majors, rather than at his peak.

Using this revised birthdate would also have made Herrera eight days shy of 19 21 when he played his first game in the Cuban League, and 36/37 during his final season there. This age progression just makes a lot more sense to me than one where he started his career at 15 and ended it at 32.  In the end, of course, it would probably take research in Cuban sources to establish whether I’m right or not.

You can make similar cases for a couple of other early Cuban players, which I’ll get to in the next few days.

josé del valle méndez

When Patrick Rock and I were searching for Negro Leaguers and Cuban ballplayers with World War I draft cards, one player we didn’t find at the time was José Méndez—even though he was in the United States in September, 1918, when a man of his age would have been required to register, citizen or not.  At the time he was playing for the Chicago American Giants, having been brought in to replace the shortstop Bobby Williams, lost to the draft.  (This was during the period when Méndez did very little pitching, and made his living as an infielder.)

I’ve continued research on the World War I cards over the past year, making occasional finds, but Méndez was always a low priority, as I assumed we pretty much knew everything there was to know about him.  Then, a few weeks ago, it dawned on me that I had seen several full names given for him:

“José Méndez Ramos,” from a roster list published in La Lucha (January 26, 1912);

“José de la Caridad Méndez Arco de Tejada,” from Roberto González Echevarría’s The Pride of Havana (p. 130);

“José Méndez Baez,” from James Riley’s Biographical Encyclopedia (p. 545).

“José de la Caridad Méndez Baez,” from his Hall of Fame plaque.

So I went looking for Méndez in the World War I draft again, to see what name he used there.  Of the 211 men named José Méndez who registered, only three lived in Chicago.  Of them, two were listed as white (one a Mexican citizen); the other, the only black man named José Méndez to register for the draft in Chicago, was this one:

                                    (click to enlarge)

So we have José del Valle Méndez, born January 2, 1885, whereas the official birthdate for the Hall of Famer José Méndez is March 19, 1887. He is listed as “negro” and a Cuban citizen.  His occupation, cigar maker, is in fact the one tradition assigns Méndez (see González Echevarría, p. 131), and one that’s given for him on some early passenger lists to the United States (in 1910 traveling with the Stars of Cuba, for example).  He is not listed as a professional ballplayer, but then neither were José Méndez’s teammates Pete Hill and Bruce Petway, who registered on the same day in the same city and who had been professionals for many years (both Hill and Petway listed themselves as civilian workers for the Army, as it happens).  General Crowder’s “work or fight” order had classified sports as a non-essential occupation and led to the suspension of organized baseball on September 2.  Independent and semipro baseball continued (Hill, Petway, and Méndez were all playing for the American Giants on days surrounding the September 12 registration day), but the players who had to register at that time often (though not always) put other occupations (as did some major league players, for example Burt Shotton, Hal Chase, and Jack Coombs).

José del Valle Méndez may have been a cigarmaker, but his employer looks very much like…Rube Foster.  The microfilm from which the Ancestry.com scan was made, however, was flawed and streaked, so it could be “Robt. Foster,” or something else.  The employer’s address is 3242 Vernon Ave., although the “Vernon” is obscured by another streak.  Rube Foster’s address on that same date (September 12, 1918), as well as in the 1920 census, was 3242 Vernon Avenue.

                                    (click to enlarge)

Returning to the Méndez card, it appears that in the box reserved for checking one’s “native born” status, he wrote “Cardenas, Cuba,” probably misunderstanding the purpose of the box.  Cárdenas, of course, is where José Méndez was born.

(I love it, btw, that Méndez’s physical condition is, like the werewolf’s hair, pronounced “perfect.”)

So, what do you think?  If my interpretation of the handwriting on the card is correct (it would be immensely useful to see the actual card), and this José Méndez worked for Rube Foster at 3242 Vernon Avenue, Chicago, then we have both a different birthdate and a different name for Méndez than any we have seen before—and in his own handwriting, which would grant it a particular authority.

UPDATE 8:06 p.m. I think I can add another strong point in favor of José del Valle Méndez being our man.  On the card his nearest relative is one “Marcelina del Valle,” living on Factoria street in Havana.  José Méndez’s mother, as evidenced by a number of passenger lists on which she was listed as his relative or contact in Cuba, was named Marcelina, and in 1917 at least she lived at No. 38 Factoria street in Havana.  Her name was evidently Marcelina Méndez Lugones; she appears under both last names and also at least once as “M. Mendez Lugones.”