You may have heard about this on Facebook or other social media, but I wanted to announce it here, too. The collector Jay Caldwell (of Negroleagueshistory.com) has shared with me and Mike Lynch of Seamheads.com 131 Cuban sports newspapers from 1899-1901, including El Score, El Base Ball, and El Petit Habana. Supplemented by more newspapers from the same era contributed by the collector and dealer Ryan Christoff, this forms a unique collection spanning a crucial era in the history of Cuban baseball.
In May 1900 the Cuban League became racially integrated, opening its doors to an all-black team, the San Francisco Base Ball Club, as well as allowing other teams in the league to sign black or mixed-race players (Luis Padrón for Habana, José Muñoz for Almendares). That momentous event was bookended by visits to Havana by the Cuban X Giants (spring 1900) and both the Brooklyn Superbas and New York Giants of the National League (fall 1900), which inaugurated the American Series of the early 20th century.
Almost nothing has been written about the end of the color line in Cuban ball, at least in English. The most extensive discussion, by far, is a couple of pages in Roberto González Echevarría’s The Pride of Havana (1999). Our hope is that these sports papers, which were published weekly and which focused heavily on baseball (with some nods toward cycling and chess, among other things), will enable us to tell a nuanced and detailed story about how the integration of Cuban professional baseball came to be.
Oh, and these papers printed box scores for nearly every Cuban League game, as well as the American Series games and other exhibition contests and games involving independent teams. Plus there are many fantastic and (in many cases) unique photographs, many of which I have never seen before.
Over the coming months look for a series of posts here and at Seamheads.com. We’ll be adding early Cuban League statistics to the Negro Leagues DB and writing up some of the more interesting research finds, as well as posting some of the more interesting images from these newspapers.
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