Claudio Manela

Here’s an artistic rendering of the Filipino lefty Claudio Manela, who played in the Negro National League, Cuban League, and Eastern League in the early 1920s—to my knowledge the only Negro leaguer born in the Philippines. It’s by LeRoid David, a Sacramento artist and baseball fan with a strong interest in Filipino ballplayers in America.

It’s based on the one quite blurry photograph of Manela that has circulated on the web—LeRoid has imagined the details of what Manela might have really looked like. Here’s the original:

Thanks to LeRoid for sharing!

Looking at the Seamheads DB master file, here are the birthplaces of Negro league players (that is, players for Black professional teams in the U.S.) known to have been born outside the continental United States:

Bahamas: 1 (Ormond Sampson)
Canada: 3 (Jimmy Claxton, Bill Galloway, Red Eagle Smith)
Cuba: 270
Dominican Republic: 8
Jamaica: 1 (Oscar Levis)
Liberia: 1 (James Wilson)
Panama: 12
Philippines: 1 (Claudio Manela)
Puerto Rico: 25
Spain: 1 (Alfredo Cabrera)
U.S. Virgin Islands: 1 (Alphonso Gerard)
Venezuela: 1 (Carlos Ascanio)

Among team officials and others, Alexander McDonald Williams of the Pittsburgh Keystones and Central Baseball Park was born in Barbados, and Stanislaus Kostka Govern of the Cuban Giants and New York Gorhams was born in the then-Danish West Indies (later the U.S. Virgin Islands).

Comments

[Mischa Gelman]

Thanks! I made the updates accordingly.

[Gary Ashwill]

Hi Mischa, thank you! And yes, I think you are right--Victor Greenidge in 1941 with the NY Cubans would be the first Panamanian major leaguer. Oscar Levis grew up in Panama, but he was born in Jamaica.

[Mischa Gelman]

First off, congratulations on your winning the Chadwick Award. As a long-time reader of your blog and utilizer of your research, I feel it is well-deserved.

Secondly, I used some of the information from this page to update Baseball-Reference's list of first major leaguers from various countries -
https://www.baseball-reference.com/bullpen/List_of_First_Major_League_Baseball_Players_by_Country
but was unsure who the first Panamanian major leaguer would be now. Is it Victor Greenidge or is someone before him (or several someones)?