Agate Type

Gacho Torres

A few weeks ago, writing about the Eastern Colored League’s failed 1926 entry, the Newark Stars, I commented that their main claim to fame was hiring Sol White for what would be his last job in organized baseball. As it turns out, the Stars, who played only 11 league games before folding, earned another footnote in baseball history. This gives them an awfully high ratio of historical significance to games played.

It was originally thought that the Harrisburg Giants would leave the league in 1926, and that the Newark Stars would either take over their franchise completely, or would at least sign several of their players. When Colonel Strothers changed his mind and decided to keep Harrisburg in the ECL, Newark was left scrambling for players. It was claimed that they sent scouts to Cuba and Puerto Rico. One player they came up with was a young Dominican pitcher named Pedro Alejandro San. However, Alejandro Pompez, owner of the eastern Cuban Stars, claimed San’s services as well. The Dominican wrote a letter to the ECL commissioners to clear up the issue, but the only person at the league meeting who could read Spanish was…Alejandro Pompez. So they tabled the matter for another month. But Pompez would not be denied, and by mid-March it was announced that San had been awarded to the Cuban Stars. He became the first Dominican player to appear in the Negro leagues.

In the meantime the Newark Stars had to find players somewhere. They had scouts active in both Puerto Rico and Cuba, it was claimed, and several Puerto Rican players were mentioned in lists of Newark players before the season started, including Ramón Guilfucci, Ramón “Monchile” Concepcion, a shortstop called only “Mellio,” Joseph Burrcino, and Jace Nestor. The first two are well-known Puerto Rican players, and “Mellio” might be Emilio “Millito” Navarro; I’ve had trouble identifying the last two. At any rate, as far as I know, none of these appeared in any Newark Stars games in 1926.

The Stars were not the only team in the United States in 1926 hot on the trail of Puerto Rican (and Dominican) players. A strong independent professional club, the Allentown Dukes, which starred several former major leaguers, had beaten Babe Ruth and the New York Yankees in an exhibition game in 1923. As a result the team scored an invitation to tour Puerto Rico. This was reported at the time as the first visit to the island by an American professional team (although the Brooklyn Royal Giants had played in Puerto Rico in 1917).  They travelled to Puerto Rico in both the 1923/24 and 1924/25 off-seasons. After the second trip, the Dukes returned to Pennsylvania having signed two players they had faced during their tour: Agustín “Tingu” Daviu, a Puerto Rican infielder, and Baldomero “Mero” Ureña, a Dominican pitcher. Ureña thus became, as far as we know, the first Dominican to play professional baseball in the United States, preceding Pedro San by one year.

And later that summer, the Dukes added another Puerto Rican player:

(Mount Carmel Item, July 1, 1925, p. 4)

(Mount Carmel Daily News, July 9, 1925, p. 8)

Gacho’s stay with the Dukes in 1925 was relatively brief, only a little more than a month:

(Mount Carmel Item, August 20, 1925, p. 5)

In 1926 the Dukes joined the Interstate League, a new circuit that featured three white teams (Allentown, Reading, and Camden) and three black teams (Harrisburg Giants, Bacharach Giants, and Hilldale). Games between the black teams counted in both Interstate League and Eastern Colored League standings. In preparation for the season, the Dukes’ owner, Ernest “Duke” Landgraf (the team was named for him—see this account of his career) brought in four Puerto Rican players:

(Mount Carmel Daily News, April 10, 1926, p. 3)

Although I haven’t so far identified “Claudio,” the other three are a catcher/outfielder named Manuel Enrique Net, the aforementioned Tingu Daviu, and “Joe Gacho”—whose name was really José Torres (“Gacho” being a nickname). Torres was, it turns out, more than a footnote in Puerto Rican baseball history. Along with the Faberllé brothers and Cosme Beitía Sálamo, Gacho Torres was one of los cuatro jinetes del beisbol (the four leaders of baseball) in the late 1910s and early 1920s. They served in the 65th Infantry, the Puerto Rican Regiment, during World War I, and after the war they were (according to the historian Solsiree del Moral) “recruited into the physical education training program at the University of Puerto Rico.” As teachers, they presumably played a role in spreading baseball through the island.

Courtesy of Jorge Colón Delgado, here’s a photo of Gacho Torres:



By 1926, El Gacho was a 29-year-old veteran. A left-handed pitcher and outfielder, he was still considered a remarkable player, both for his curveball and his speed on the base paths:

(Mount Carmel Daily News, May 3, 1926, p. 6)

 

(Mount Carmel Daily News, May 25, 1926, p. 6)

He played right field and pitched for the Allentown Dukes. Here he is getting a couple of hits for the Dukes against the Harrisburg Giants in an Interstate League game on May 1:

(Harrisburg Sunday Courier, May 2, 1926, p. 3)

On May 7 he took the mound and beat the defending ECL champs Hilldale 6 to 3 in another Interstate League game.

(Chester Times, May 8, 1926, p. 14)

On May 25 Gacho was reported to be in Brooklyn recovering from an arm injury (see above). But on May 23 he was in the Bronx, playing for the ECL’s Newark Stars in a doubleheader against the Lincoln Giants:

(Baltimore Afro-American, May 29, 1926, p. 8)

Emilio “Millito” Navarro is commonly thought to have been the first Puerto Rican player to appear in the U.S. Negro leagues, in 1928 (or 1929, depending on how you define “Negro league”). But here’s Gacho Torres, one of the most important figures in the early history of Puerto Rican baseball, in an ECL game in 1926.

He didn’t last with the Newark Stars—these are the only two Stars games I’ve found him in. But he may have caught on with another black team—Syd Pollock’s Boston Black Sox, a travelling team that was the predecessor of the Havana Red Sox, Cuban House of David, and Pollock’s Cuban Stars. The Black Sox featured Manuel Net, Ramón Guilfucci, Monchile Concepcion, and one “Torrez,” a supposedly Cuban slugger whom I suspect might have really been Gacho Torres.

(Mount Carmel Item, June 29, 1926, p. 5)

So we appear to have pinpointed the first Puerto Rican to play Negro league baseball, even before Millito Navarro. But the story doesn’t end there. For one thing, I’ve seen at least one remark in 1926 that Monchile Concepcion had already played for the Boston Black Sox in 1925, though I haven’t confirmed it.

For another, Jorge Colón Delgado tells me that one Rafael Cruz López played in the U.S. for the Cuban Stars in 1920, and before that, Jesús “El Tigre” Velazquez played for a team called the South City Giants in 1917. I know nothing about the South City Giants (anyone?), and the only López I know of with either Cuban Stars team in 1920 was the Cuban outfielder José “Lopito” López of the western Cuban Stars.

However, there was a pitcher named Cruz who appeared for Pompez’s eastern Cuban Stars in 1918:

(Brooklyn Daily Eagle, July 21, 1918, p. 31)

 

(Jersey Journal, October 4, 1918, p. 7)

I can’t link Cruz to anybody on passenger lists for sure (yet), but this seems to be a very strong candidate for the earliest Puerto Rican player in U.S. black professional baseball. Until that can be confirmed, Gacho Torres is the man.

Thanks to Jorge Colón Delgado and also Tito Rondon for help with this post.

Negro Leagues DB Update: 1931 Eastern Negro Leagues

(Crossposted at Seamheads.com)

New to the Seamheads Negro Leagues Database: the 1931 eastern black teams. Once again, there was no league on the east coast. As in the case of 1930, we are at this time including only games between these independent eastern clubs, so the Homestead Grays and the Cuban House of David, who played western NNL teams extensively, aren’t fully represented yet. The NNL’s Cleveland Cubs also toured the east coast, so most of the teams here have at least a few games against top black teams that aren’t yet counted.

The ’31 Grays are commonly cited as one of the great teams in Negro league history. To a core that included Oscar Charleston (.319/.379/.513), Joe Williams (3-1. 1.80), George Scales (.308/.368/.548), and the 19-year-old Josh Gibson (.287/.353/.548), owner/manager Cum Posey added Jud Wilson from the Baltimore Black Sox and lights-out leftander Willie Foster from the Chicago American Giants, along with catcher/pitcher Double Duty Radcliffe from the Detroit Stars. Wilson tore up eastern pitching to the tune of a .422 average in 23 games, while Foster went 4-2 with a 2.89 ERA.

In games purely between the eastern teams, however, the Grays finished behind the Hilldale Club, who went 30-11 (although the Grays did beat the Hilldales 4 games to 3 in head-to-head matchups). In 1930 Hilldale, with longtime owner Ed Bolden deposed, had hemorrhaged players and collapsed, managing only 7 wins against black professional teams. This year a new owner, Johnny Drew, lured Judy Johnson back from his job captaining the 1930 Grays to rescue the team. As his first order of business, he retained Biz Mackey and installed him at his best position, catcher. Mackey rewarded him with a .373/.448/.536 performance. Johnson also brought back old favorites Martín Dihigo (.306/.414/.519), Porter Charleston (6-1, 2.86), and Chaney White (.290), and signed Rap Dixon from the Black Sox (.234, 5 triples) and Walter Cannady (.314/.399/.446) and slick-fielding basketball star Bill Yancey (.276) from the defunct Lincoln Giants. Hilldale might have done even better if submarine ace Webster McDonald (4-0, 0.97) hadn’t spent most of the summer playing for a white independent team in Little Falls, Minnesota.

One of the most established institutions in black baseball disappeared in 1931. The New York Lincoln Giants, originally founded by the McMahon brothers back in 1911, did not field a team. Ironically they were the victims of their own success. The year before the Lincolns had played the Baltimore Black Sox in a July doubleheader in Yankee Stadium, the first games between black teams in that august venue. The games were a huge success (and were repeated in September during the championship series with the Homestead Grays), but afterwards the Lincolns fans, according to W. Rollo Wilson of the Pittsburgh Courier, “stayed away from the Protectory Oval in large numbers, refusing to go to that bandbox park after seeing their favorites work on a real diamond.” To top it off, the team’s owner, James Keenan, was bitterly disappointed by the loss of championship honors to the Grays. He publicly criticized his players and fired his manager, the venerable Pop Lloyd, further alienating the fans.

Within a few weeks of the end of the 1930 season, there was already talk of a new team arising in New York, one that was seeking Yankee Stadium as its permanent home. It was financed by the famous dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson and his agent, the theatrical promoter Marty Forkins. Their first move, after securing a venue, was to hire John Henry Lloyd as manager. Lloyd convinced a number of his Lincolns players to join him. By April Keenan, facing the prospect of playing to diminished crowds with a drastically weakened team, had thrown in the towel. The Lincoln Giants of Cyclone Joe Williams, Dick Redding, Spot Poles, Bill Pettus, and many other stars, were no more.

In their place Forkins, Robinson, and Lloyd originally intended to present a club called the Black or Colored Yankees. This name was reportedly scotched by New York Giants’ owner Horace Stoneham, who objected because some of their home games were to be played in the Polo Grounds. It was also claimed that the Yankees themselves opposed the name, for whatever reason. The next idea, to call the team the “Brown Buddies,” mercifully died long before any games were played. Lloyd settled on “New York All Stars,” noting that “New York has been fed up on ‘Giants’ for the past quarter of a century, and as we are all going on the diamond to play baseball, a name devoid of any suggestion of clowning will be something that will mean much to the team” (Philadelphia Tribune, April 16, 1931, p. 10). The team’s warmup jackets were emblazoned “N. Y.,” but they still ended up most often referred to as the Harlem Stars.

They also went into business with Nat Strong, whose booking empire controlled independent baseball on the east coast. He had been for many years a very controversial figure among African American baseball men. Now, with Strong in charge of booking the Harlem Stars, other managers became reluctant to schedule games with them, despite their access to the big ballparks. Cum Posey categorically refused to bring his powerhouse Grays to New York City. In the absence of a league and a steady flow of quality opponents, the Stars  drew poorly, and by the end of the season the team was tottering financially.

The slugger John Beckwith had been slated to take over for Lloyd as Lincoln Giants manager, but when Keenan withdrew from the field, Beckwith was snapped up by the Baltimore Black Sox. Beck continued to hit in Baltimore, but he was the only real bright spot for the Dark Hose, who continued their gradual downward slide from the heights of 1929.

The promoter Syd Pollock, based in Tarrytown (on the Hudson River in Westchester County, just north of New York City), had for some years been operating a traveling team called the Havana Red Sox. Pollock  worked the same upstate New York barnstorming circuit as Pop Watkins’s old Havana Red Sox, and probably took the name from them. Watkins’s team, however, featured no actual Cubans, whereas Pollock used both Cuban and U.S. players on his rosters. Some of the Americans played under silly fake “Spanish” names, southpaw Barney Brown turning out as “Brownez,” and Johnnie Bob Dixon as “Dixonez.”

In 1930 Abel Linares, owner of the western Cuban Stars for many years, passed away, and his manager, Tinti Molina, found himself unable to field a team in the U.S. for the 1931 season. Pollock saw an opening, and decided to combine the Cuban marketing hook with another well-known baseball brand, the House of David, the religious sect from Benton Harbor, Michigan, that famously fielded teams of bearded players. The “Cuban House of David” had no connection with the actual House of David, but Pollock apparently did get his players to grow “a great assortment of side-burns, mutton-chops, flowing-beards and what not in hirsute adornment” (Altoona Tribune, May 25, 1931, p. 10). And although John Henry Lloyd might have wished otherwise, the Cuban House of David was dedicated to keeping alive the old tradition of clowning; during the off-season the players were said to be hard at work back in Cuba practicing shadowball and other comedy routines.

In Pittsburgh the Homestead Grays were served notice by an upstart sandlot team calling themselves the Crawford Giants. Their owner, the gambling king Gus Greenlee, had ambitions that extended way beyond the Pittsburgh area. His money brought in some established figures, including southpaw Sam Streeter and Rube Foster’s old shortstop Bobby Williams as manager. The Crawford Giants were still using a city playground, Ammon Field, as their home park, where they had to collect “donations” rather than charge for tickets. In 1932 Greenlee’s team would lose the “Giants” and gain a new, purpose-built park.

Satchel Paige spent much of the season with the NNL’s Cleveland Cubs, but halfway through the year he began exhibiting signs of entering the “hired gun” phase of his career. In August he took the mound for the Crawford Giants, and in September appeared briefly for the Homestead Grays.

Among the refugees from the demise of the Lincoln Giants was Charlie “Chino” Smith, who joined Nat Strong’s Brooklyn Royal Giants, a team that was gradually withdrawing from big-time blackball into the barnstorming life. He spent the whole season with them, and was still batting third and playing right field in September. Before the winter was out he would be dead of stomach cancer.

Along with the Lincolns, black baseball lost its most peculiar setting, the Catholic Protectory Oval, a tiny field wedged between Gothic buildings at an orphanage in the Bronx. This had an effect on statistics. Nearly a third of the games between eastern teams we included in the database for 1930 were played at the Protectory. Negro league teams batted .347/.419/.531 in these games, as opposed to .297/.356/.417 at all other parks combined. The Lincoln Giants hit .381 at home. In 1931, the overall averages are .264/.323/.363.  The loss of the Protectory doesn’t account for all of the big drop in offense we see from 1930 to 1931, but it is obviously a huge factor.

One more note on 1931: we haven’t chosen to include games involving the Bacharach Giants, Newark Browns, or Providence Colored Giants. These teams are all right on the knife’s edge between inclusion and exclusion. Other sources do include at least Newark and the Bacharachs, and it’s possible that after further review we will count them in the future.

On deck for the DB: the 1932 East-West League, 1901/02 and 1924/25 Cuban League, and much more.

 

From the Pittsburgh Courier, January 10, 1931, p. 14.

Cristóbal Torriente: A New Mystery

From the Outsider Baseball Bulletin, Vol. 1, No. 9 (August 4, 2010):

This is the death certificate for Cristóbal Torriente, showing that he passed away of pulmonary tuberculosis at Riverside Hospital in the Bronx on April 11, 1938, having been hospitalized since July of the previous year. It probably tells you something about his last years that he was still listed as a “Baseball player,” despite not having worked at that profession since August, 1933. According to the reverse side, Ramiro Ramírez, another Cuban ballplayer, took charge of his body, claiming to be Torriente’s cousin. It was Ramírez who employed one A. R. Hernández as undertaker.

According to John Holway’s Blackball Stars, Rogelio Crespo said that “they draped a Cuban flag over his coffin, and a politician arranged to return the body to Havana” (p. 132). Torriente is reported to be buried in the Cementerio de Cristóbal Colón, where two monuments memorialize members of the Cuban Baseball Hall of Fame. His death certificate, however, shows that he was supposed to have been buried at Calvary Cemetery (in Queens; “City Cemetery” is crossed out) on April 15. Presumably Torriente’s body was returned to Cuba instead, or else his remains were moved back to Cuba at some later time. But it might be worth checking out the Calvary Cemetery records to see if in fact Torriente never left the United States.

[Scott Simkus added this editor’s note in the original:] Ramiro Ramírez and Rogelio Crespo were both members of Syd Pollock’s 1933 Cuban Stars, featured in this week’s cover story. During the 1933 season, Torriente was in Chicago, managing a team called Falcon’s Giants, who played around the Chicago metropolitan area during the spring.

****************

I originally published the above piece in the Outsider Baseball Bulletin on August 4, 2010. Today Ralph Carhart at the Hall Ball blog offers a much more complete look at Torriente’s final days. He points out that Riverside Hospital, located on the now-deserted and off-limits North Brother Island in the East River,  also housed Typhoid Mary during the same time Torriente was there (she died in November 1938, seven months after Torriente).

Ralph did what I only suggested in my OBB article, actually contacting the two cemeteries in question, and finding out that neither burial ground has any record of Torriente’s interment. Given that Calvery Cemetery has interred some 3 million people since its founding in 1848, and the Colón Cemetery about 1 million since 1876, it’s certainly possible that over the years a few records have been misplaced. Nevertheless, there’s a mystery here that I barely suspected back in 2010.