Agate Type

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).

Sol White's Official Base Ball Guide: New Cover

This year has seen the re-release of my edition of Sol White’s Official Base Ball Guide by Summer Games Books. It’s worth getting an actual paper copy of the book, as it sports a new cover by the great baseball artist Gary Cieradkowski.

Be sure to check out Gary’s account of how he created the cover, as a nod to other vintage baseball guide covers.