Check out this issue of the newsletter for SABR’s Latino baseball committee, particularly Peter Bjarkman’s piece on the demise, after 69 years, of the Puerto Rican Winter League, and Leonte Landino’s article on Luis Castro, the (probably) Colombian-born second baseman who was given the thankless task of replacing Nap Lajoie on the 1902 Philadelphia A’s. Leonte has also reproduced an article on Castro from the Smithsonian magazine on his blog, and Peter Bjarkman’s blog has a pair of entries on Castro and Charles “Chick” Pedroes (or Pedro), a Cuban-born American who played in two games for the 1902 Cubs. There is also a website devoted to Castro. I think Bjarkman is right that these two players, both of whom emigrated to the United States as children and certainly learned their baseball there rather than in Colombia or Cuba, are far less important figures in the history of Latin American-U.S. baseball than, say, Rafael Almeida or Armando Marsans (or Luis Padrón or Esteban Béllan, for that matter); but this is interesting stuff, nevertheless.
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