The Early History of Cuban Baseball, As Told in Cuban Sports Papers, 1899-1901

(The following piece was originally published last month at Negroleaguehistory.com, as part of our joint project on turn-of-the-century Cuban sports newspapers.)

Our collection of Cuban sports newspapers covers the years 1899 to 1901, an era that encompasses multiple turning points in the history of Cuban baseball. As we go through them, catalogue their contents, and translate them, we’ll be posting a series of articles covering some of the most interesting material we come up with. Normally articles will appear every two or three weeks. Here’s a summary of some of the major subjects we’ll be writing about.

1) The Racial Integration of Cuban Baseball

As I’ve mentioned before, the Cuban League did away with its color line in 1900. Not only were individual teams allowed to sign black players—so Luis Padrón joined Habana and José Muñoz started pitching for Almendares—but the league admitted an entire black team, the San Francisco Base Ball Club. (San Francisco, for its part, hired a white pitcher, Salvador Rosado, who was already a Cuban League veteran.)

There’s a lot of material in these papers about the debates and machinations surrounding this momentous change. We’re going to trace the impact of the Spanish-American War of 1898 and the subsequent U.S. military occupation, which was still going on throughout the period covered by our papers. The occupation authorities in many ways favored the imposition of U.S.-style segregation—but Cuban revolutionary ideals upheld racial equality. What did it mean that professional baseball erased its color line at exactly this point in history?

Along with telling a more detailed story about desegregation, we’ll also be able to illuminate some of the important characters involved in the struggle, for example Manuel Calcines, baseball writer and official for the Fe club, who was one of the biggest proponents of integrated baseball; Cruz Junqué, president of the San Francisco B.B.C.; Severino Solloso, sporting goods entrepreneur and manager of the Cuba Base Ball Club, who fought to keep black players out of the league, and in the end gave up his team rather than sign or play against black players; and San Francisco player-manager Patrocinio Silverio, who led his team to an upset pennant win under tremendous pressure.

Cruz Junqué, Severino Solloso, Patrocinio Silverio, Manuel Calcines

 

2) U.S.-Cuban Baseball Relations

U.S. teams and players had come to Cuba sporadically since the 1870s, and of course the Cuban Esteban Bellán was a professional player in the very first American major league in 1871 (he returned to Cuba to help found the Cuban League). But in 1899 and 1900, the baseball exchange between the two countries entered a whole new phase.

•In 1899 the first team of Cuban professionals, the All-Cubans, toured the United States, marking the beginning of a long line of Cuban Stars and other Cuban teams stretching into the 1940s.

•In the spring of 1900 the Cuban X-Giants became the first African American club to play in Havana against Cuban League teams. (The original Cuban Giants are said to have visited Cuba in the 1880s, but so far no actual evidence has emerged of these travels.) This series took place in the three months prior to the opening of the Cuban League season, and might well have had an impact on the erasure of the Cuban League color line.

•And in the fall of 1900, a mixed team of Brooklyn Superbas and New York Giants played four games against Cuban Leaguers, the first of an equally long series of major league teams coming to Havana.

New York Giants and Brooklyn Superbas players in Cuba (from El Score, January 6, 1901)

 

3) Profiles of Players and Officials

Many of the sports papers, especially El Score and El Petit Habana, made of point of printing pictures of players and other important figures in Cuban baseball on their covers. Many of them I’ve never seen before. We’ll pick out the best of these, and whenever possible provide sketches of the subjects.

4) Statistics

These newspapers regularly published box scores for all the important professional games played in Havana. We’ll be adding these to the Seamheads Negro Leagues Database, and will write up some of the highlights of the series and seasons as we do so.

This is what we’ll have:

•Cuban X Giants series vs. Cuban League teams (played February-April 1900): we have box scores for 14 out of the 16 games played.

•1900 Cuban League (May-December 1900): we have box scores for 54 out of a total of 55 games.

•Brooklyn/New York (NL) vs. Cuban League series (November 1900): we have box scores for all four games.

•1901 Cuban League (February-July 1901): we have box scores for 48 out of 50 games.

Full playing statistics for these seasons and series have never been published before, so this will be an important addition to the historical record.

(El Score, November 4, 1900, p. 4)

I hope this gives you an idea of what we’ve got up our sleeve for this project. Next I’ll take a closer look at the newspapers themselves so you can get a good sense of what they look like and what’s in them.

Comments

[Thomas Reill]

I am working on a book about Jack Doyle who was a member of the New York - Brooklyn team that visited Cuba in the fall of 1900. Would you be willing to share the four box scores you mentioned.