Agate Type

which bell in cuba?

In the 1920s the Kansas City Monarchs had two right-handed pitchers from Texas named Bell, Cliff and William. They were unrelated, though the press liked to call them the “Bell Brothers.” William, nicknamed “W.” supposedly because he won so often, was easily the better of the two. Cliff did have one advantage over him: according to everybody from James Riley to Jorge Figueredo, Cliff starred in Cuba for several seasons. Riley says that “in four winters in Cuba [Cliff Bell] recorded a 15-17 ledger.” He also says that William Bell “spent the 1928-29 winter with Havana in the Cuban League and tied with Dolph Luque for the lead in wins with nine.”

Jorge Figueredo’s more authoritative Cuban League encyclopedias have only Cliff Bell in Cuba for four seasons—1927-28, 1928-29, 1929-30, and 1930-31—for a total won-loss record of 25-17. In 1928-29, according to Figueredo’s accounting, Bell led the league with 9 wins to Luque’s 8.

I hate to have to do this to poor Cliff, but…as it turns out, the Bell who pitched in the Cuban league in at least the first three of those winter seasons (1927-28, 1928-29, and 1929-30) was in fact William Bell. Here, for example, is a photo of three Habana players from Diario de la Marina, November 25, 1927: William Bell, Miguel Angel González, and Sam Streeter.

 

Passenger lists show William Bell returning to the United States immediately after the Cuban winter season closed in 1928, 1929, and 1930. Here he is, accompanied by Sam Streeter and Jud Wilson, sailing from Havana to Key West on January 24, 1928 two days after the Cuban League’s last game (on January 22):

Here are William Bell and Jud Wilson, travelling from Havana to Key West on January 8, 1929—again, two days after the Cuban League ended, on January 6, 1929.

And here is William Bell, this time by himself, sailing for Key West on February 10, 1930, a little more than two weeks after the closing of the Cuban season on January 23, 1930.

I haven’t been able to find anybody returning from Cuba following the 1930/31 winter season, so I couldn’t say (right now) which Bell played that year.

A couple of notes:

• In the Negro leagues, William Bell played for six pennant-winning teams (1923-25 and 1929 Monarchs, and the 1933 and 1935 Crawfords). His Habana teams added two Cuban League pennants (1927-28 and 1928-29) to his haul.

• Figueredo gives Cliff Bell the nickname of “Campanita” (which just means “little bell”)—I haven’t confirmed it, but I wonder if this wasn’t really bestowed on William while he played in Cuba.

antonio susini

During the 1921/22 Cuban winter season, the Cuban League could only field two teams, and when Almendares totally dominated, winning 4 out of the first 5 games played, fan interest plummeted. The league called it quits even before the New Year. Deprived of their expected income, most of the players were hired by the Central and Cuba clubs of Santiago de Cuba, on the eastern end of the island. The two teams promptly arranged their own lengthy series, the Campeonato de Oriente, or Championship of Oriente province.

On January 30, 1922, in the eighth inning of one of the games, a controversy erupted over a close play at home. Players from both teams argued with the umpires and with each other.  It went on and on. The crowd grew restless, and the argument more heated. José Leblanc, a pitcher for Cuba playing right field in this game, squared off against Antonio Susini, Central’s shortstop. They exchanged harsh words. Suddenly Susini lost it. With the bat he held in his hands, he struck a brutal blow to Leblanc’s head and knocked him senseless to the ground.

The crowd poured onto the field, and only the intervention of the police already on hand kept more violence from breaking out. Leblanc was taken to a nearby hospital where doctors drilled holes in his skull to relieve the pressure from swelling. In the meantime, the police handcuffed Susini and took him away.

Leblanc had suffered a serious fracture in his left frontal parietal region. That night doctors operated on him, extracting several pieces of bone from his brain with tweezers. He never regained consciousness, and died the following afternoon.*

News of the event spread through Cuba and beyond. A brief Associated Press item was reprinted in many U.S. newspapers, such as the Richmond Times-Dispatch:

(Richmond Times-Dispatch, January 31, 1922)

Susini was charged with murder. According to secondary sources, he was convicted, and sentenced to a term that I’ve seen described as either 13 years in prison, or 10 to 15 years. And, until now, that’s pretty much where he exited baseball history. He killed another player on a baseball field. Surely nobody would want him back in the game.

As it turns out, despite much deserved condemnation for his horrific act, there was a lot of sympathy for Susini. By 1924 a group of fans had banded together to ask for a presidential pardon for Susini. I haven’t been able to find much more on that effort, or whether it was successful or not. I tend to think, though, that Susini served out his full sentence—because he next enters the historical record 14 years after he murdered Leblanc. Amazingly, it appears that he did indeed return to play professional baseball again.

Prior to the Leblanc incident, Antonio Susini had played in the United States once, in 1921 with Abel Linares’s All Cubans. Along with the other All Cubans players, Susini appears on a passenger list aboard the steam packet Governor Cobb, which departed Havana for New York on April 21, 1921:

Susini is listed here as 19, which is crossed out and replaced with 20.

Fast-forward 15 years. Here’s a passenger list showing players for the eastern Cuban Stars (a different team from Pompez’s New York Cubans, by the way), traveling from Havana to New York aboard the SS Florida on May 14, 1936. On line 11 is one Antonio Susini, now aged 35:

 

Here’s the continuation of Susini’s entry from the second page of the passenger list, which shows his sister “H. Susini” as his contact, and says he was last in the United States in New York in 1921.

Here’s a box score showing “Suseni” appearing as a pinch-hitter for the Cuban Stars against the Black Yankees at Dexter Park on May 30, 1936:

(Long Island Daily Press, May 31, 1936, p. 17)

Moreover: in 1937 and 1938 a first baseman named Antonio Susini hit .297 and slugged .411 in 50 games for the Santa Rosa club of the Mexican League.

It would appear that, after serving a prison sentence for murdering a fellow player on the field, Antonio Susini was able to come back and play professional baseball for a few years in his mid- to late thirties.

From this distance, it’s impossible to say why. That the crime was certainly not premeditated, and was probably the result of a moment of madness, likely played a role. Susini, though not yet an established star, might have been popular with fans and/or players.

For what it’s worth, José María Fernández, the veteran catcher and player-manager, the man who (as I pointed out in my last post) said in 1927 that witnessing Susini’s murder of Leblanc was the “greatest displeasure” in his baseball career, was Susini’s teammate on the 1936 Cuban Stars (as he had been on the 1922 Central club, as well as the 1921 All Cubans). He witnessed Susini’s crime, and yet he was able to play on the same team with him again, albeit 15 years later.

There’s a single photo out there that purports to show Antonio Susini (I don’t know the original source.)

Though some doubt has been cast on this player’s identity as Susini, that doubt is rooted in the fact that this photo shows a Cuban Stars uniform from the late 1920s or 1930s, whereas Susini was only known to have appeared in the U.S. in 1921, and then for the All Cubans.

In fact, Susini played for the 1936 Cuban Stars. And the uniform shown above is identical to the one shown in this photograph of none other than José María Fernández.

* - My account of Leblanc’s murder is drawn from two January 31, 1922, articles from the Santiago newspapers El Cubano Libre and La Independencia, reprinted in El Mundo, February 3, 1922, and from a January 31 article in Diario de la Marina.

UPDATE 7:08 pm I should add that according to newspaper accounts of his death, Leblanc’s full name was José Leblanc Vargas, he was born in Cienfuegos, and he was 28 years old. These details do not match anybody I have found in passenger lists yet.

UPDATE 9/9/2014 According to this article, the longtime Cuban player Cheo Ramos, a teammate of Susini on the 1921 All Cubans, claimed that Susini was a rumba dancer (of the fast-paced “Columbia” style) and an “Ekobio Abakuá” or “Ñañigo,” a member of the Abakuá secret society, an Afro-Cuban fraternal organization.

Also, Mark Aubrey tracked down an exchange between a couple of old Cuban baseball fans in the Spanish edition of the Miami Herald in 1982, in which one of them remembers that Susini served his sentence on the Isla de Pinos (the Isle of Pines; now called the Isla de Juventud). There he played prison baseball, and occasionally took the field against teams that visited from Havana—which might account for how Antonio Susini remained in the consciousness of the Cuban baseball community.

méndez vs. williams, havana, 1912

José Méndez (1920), Cyclone Joe Williams (1912)

(This piece was originally published in the Outsider Baseball Bulletin, Volume 1, No. 4, June 30, 2010.)

On a balmy late afternoon in February (February 22, 1912, to be exact), the Almendares and Habana clubs of La Liga Nacional de Base Ball de la República de Cuba faced each other in a regularly scheduled game.  A contest between “los eternos rivales,” the Yankees and Red Sox of the Cuban League, was always a big draw.  Several thousand fans packed the palm tree-lined Almendares Park, cheering, booing, gambling openly and constantly.  But it was not a playoff game or a key contest at the end of a tight pennant race.  It was not a no-hitter.  It didn’t even end with a decision, as it was called for darkness at the beginning of the tenth inning with the score knotted at 1 to 1.

It was, simply, a tense, exciting, and extremely well-played game that showcased the best baseball talent from outside organized baseball, along with some talent from within it.  Taking the mound for Almendares was the biggest star in Cuban baseball at the time, José Méndez, “El Diamante Negro.”  Working for Habana was Cyclone Joe Williams.  They formed quite a contrast.  Méndez, then 27, was not a large man, a wiry 5’10” with a powerful right arm, a brilliant fielder who could also play shortstop or third base when not pitching. His opponent, Williams, was 26, and would at 6’3” or 6’4” have towered over Méndez.  He had emerged from the Texas Colored League only two years previously. 

They were the two best pitchers in the Cuban League that winter:

          W-L   ERA    G    ST    CG  ShO    IP     H    HRA   BB    K
Méndez    9-5   1.91   19   13    13    2   136.7  114    5    43    92
Williams 10-7   1.68   21   16    12    0   155    117    3    66    80

Both were in their primes; both would, of course, end up in Cooperstown, as would two of Williams’s teammates, shortstop John Henry Lloyd and left fielder Pete Hill.  Matty McIntyre, the longtime Detroit Tigers outfielder (though currently with the White Sox), was in left field for Almendares.

What follows is simply a play-by-play description of the game, translated (freely, with a few embellishments and some additional information) from a Spanish account printed in the Havana newspaper Diario de la Marina (February 23, 1912).

FIRST INNING
    •Almendares
Armando Marsans of the Cincinnati Reds leads off with a base on balls.  Minor leaguer John Burke follows with a sacrifice, advancing Marsans to second.  Matty McIntyre of the Detroit Tigers triples, scoring Marsans. Longtime minor leaguer Juan Violá strikes out.  Four-time Cuban batting champ Regino García grounds to John Henry Lloyd, who throws to first baseman Bill Pettus for the out. 

     •Habana
Carlos Morán belts a line drive over the shortstop for what looks like a sure triple, but the Almendares left fielder, Rogelio Valdés, races over to cut it off and hold Morán to a single.  Morán immediately steals second.  Pete Hill strikes out.  Home Run Johnson walks, and on ball four Morán takes off for third, sliding in safely when García throws high.  Lloyd lofts a foul fly which Valdés drifts over to take, but Morán tags up and scores, tying the game.  Luis Padrón grounds out to short.

SECOND INNING
     •Almendares
Manuel Cueto (future Cincinnati Red) grounds to Williams, who tosses him out at first.  Valdés strikes out looking, never lifting his bat from his shoulder.  Méndez grounds out to the pitcher.

     •Habana
Ricardo Hernández pops up to Marsans at first.  Bruce Petway strikes out.  Williams grounds toward third base; the Almendares shortstop, Tomás Romañach, makes a beautiful play to his right and fires to first for the out.

THIRD INNING
     •Almendares
Romañach works Williams for a walk, but he’s stranded on first as “Cíclon” fans Marsans and Burke, and McIntyre flies to Hill in left field.

     •Habana
Méndez fans Pettus.  Morán strikes out with a vicious swing.  Hill does no better, and Méndez has struck out the side.

FOURTH INNING
     •Almendares
Violá knocks a roller to “Quijada” (Lloyd; the nickname comes from a musical instrument made from a donkey or horse’s jawbone, and refers to Lloyd’s very prominent chin), who throws him out at first.  García hits a comebacker to the mound, and Williams throws him out.  Cueto grounds out to Lloyd.

     •Habana
Grant Johnson dribbles a grounder to Romañach, who muffs it, Johnson getting to first safely.  Lloyd singles over second, Johnson stopping there.  Padrón, a power hitter, drops a sac bunt, advancing the two runners to second and third.  Ricardo Hernández slaps the ball to Méndez, who looks Johnson back before throwing to first for the out.  Petway grounds to Romañach, who tosses him out at first.

FIFTH INNING
     •Almendares
Rogelio Valdés grounds out to Johnson.  Méndez singles to right field.  Romañach pops up, García gathering it in behind the plate.  Marsans pops up to Morán at third.

     •Habana
Williams flies out to left.  Pettus grounds out to Méndez.  Morán singles to right for his second hit, but Méndez catches him napping off first to end the inning.

SIXTH INNING
     •Almendares
Burke swings and misses three straight times.  McIntyre grounds back to the pitcher for the second out.  Violá hits the ball on the nose, but lines straight into the glove of the center fielder Hernández.

     •Habana
Hill grounds to the third baseman Violá, who throws him out.  Johnson works Méndez for a pass.  Lloyd lines to center, but Burke makes the catch and holds Johnson at first.  Padrón flies to center for the third out.

SEVENTH INNING
     •Almendares
Regino García grounds out to Williams.  Cueto walks on four straight pitches.  Williams punches out Valdés.  On the third strike Cueto takes off for second, and Petway guns him down.

     •Habana
Ricardo Hernández leads off with a walk.  Petway lays down a bunt.  Méndez grabs it, whirls, and gets Hernández at second.  Williams swings and misses three times.  With Petway on first, Pettus smashes a line drive, but third baseman Violá spears it.

EIGHTH INNING
     •Almendares
Méndez tries to get on base with a bunt.  Williams dives for it and throws him out while still sprawled on the ground, prompting an ovation from the fans.  Then he strikes out Romañach and Marsans.

     •Habana
Morán beat out a grounder to short, his third hit of the day.  Hill bunts down the third base line.  Méndez pounces on it and throws him out at first, Morán getting to second.  Johnson grounds out to Romañach, advancing Morán to third with two out and the lefty-hitting John Henry Lloyd coming up.  Méndez walks him intentionally to get to the right-handed-hitting Luis Padrón, whom Méndez promptly fans to snuff out the threat and earn his own ovation.

NINTH INNING
     •Almendares
Burke walks.  Williams strikes out Matty McIntyre.  Violá hits a roller back to Williams, who fumbles it, but recovers in time to get the runner at first.  In the meantime Burke has motored all the way to third base, putting the winning run ninety feet away with two out and Regino García strolling to the plate.  He’s 37 and a somewhat pudgy 5’6”, but still dangerous with the stick, and Williams decides to walk him.  Minor leaguer Marty Krug, who will debut for the Red Sox in the spring, bats for Cueto.  Williams strikes him out, his tenth K of the game.

     •Habana
Méndez sets down Ricardo Hernández on strikes.  Petway knocks what should be a hit into center field, but Burke makes a great catch to deny him.  Williams follows with another solid blow to center, and once again Burke snares it, saving another hit and sending the game into extra innings.

TENTH INNING
     •Almendares
Rogelio Valdés comes to bat.  Williams throws one pitch for a ball and another for a strike before the umpire Eustaquio Gutiérrez calls the game due to darkness.

cuban old timers’ game, 1922

On September 22, 1922, Almendares Park hosted an old-timers’ game, featuring a bunch of familiar names. El Mundo published a full play-by-play account of the game and included photos of the participants:

(El Mundo, September 23, 1922, p. 8)

Here are some close-ups:

Julián Castillo, Carlos Morán

Francisco “Pancho” Morán, Luis Padrón

 

The teams were the “Umpires” (so named after their captain, José “Kiko” or “Quico”  Magriñat, a former player who had become the top umpire in Cuba), and the “Reliquias de Yoyo,” or Yoyo’s Relics, Yo Yo being that team’s captain, the turn-of-the-century pitcher Salvador Rosado . The game ended after four innings in an amicable 3 to 3 tie.

pete hill’s historical marker, annotated

As you may have heard, the state of Virginia is placing a marker commemorating Pete Hill on the grounds of the Cedar Grove Baptist Church in Buena, Culpeper County, Virginia.  It joins a batch of new markers at various sites related to African American history, women’s suffrage, and the War of 1812—the most notable, perhaps, being a marker for Henrietta Lacks.

I worked with some folks at the Virginia Department of Historic Resources to develop the text of the marker.  Here’s the final version:

PETE HILL (1882-1951)

John Preston “Pete” Hill, Negro League baseball player and manager, was born nearby, on 12 Oct., probably 1882, and likely to formerly enslaved parents. Banned from whites-only major leagues, Hill became a star outfielder for African American teams, notably the Philadelphia Giants and Chicago American Giants.  A Cuban League 1910/11 winter-season batting champion (with a .365 average), Hill hit 28 home runs for the Detroit Stars in 1919 (when Babe Ruth hit 29 in more games), marking Hill as among black baseball’s earliest power hitters. Hill died on 19 Dec. 1951 and was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 2006.

I wrote a first draft, then we edited and compressed it down to 101 words so it would fit on the sign.  It’s not perfect, but it does the job, I think.

I thought I would go ahead and provide an annotated version of the marker text, so you can see the sources and the reasoning behind some of the choices we made.

John Preston “Pete” Hill, Negro League baseball player and manager, was born nearby, on 12 Oct., probably 1882, and likely to formerly enslaved parents.

A vast constellation of documents confirms John Preston Hill’s identity as the ballplayer Pete Hill, and Hill’s place and date of birth.  Most important are his World War I draft card (which gives October 12, 1882, but no place of birth), his death certificate (October 12, 1882, Virginia), the 1900 U.S. census (October 1882, Virginia), the 1920 U.S. census (ca. 1884, Virginia), and his Form SS-5, Hill’s application for a Social Security number (October 12, 1884, Rapidan, Virginia).  (Another Social Security document lists his birth date as October 12, 1883.)  A 1916 passenger list gives his birthplace as “Buena Vista, Va.,” which might be a mistaken reference to Buena, a small community just north of Rapidan in Culpeper County.  Hill’s family in Pittsburgh was pretty well-known, and coverage in the Pittsburgh Courier, along with census records, confirmed their origins in Culpeper County and neighboring Orange County.

We don’t have specific documentation of his parents’ slave status before the end of the Civil War, but they were both apparently born in Virginia in the 1850s, so it seems highly likely that they were enslaved.

Banned from whites-only major leagues, Hill became a star outfielder for African American teams, notably the Philadelphia Giants and Chicago American Giants.  A Cuban League 1910/11 winter-season batting champion (with a .365 average), Hill hit 28 home runs for the Detroit Stars in 1919 (when Babe Ruth hit 29 in more games), marking him as among black baseball’s earliest power hitters.

My own compilation of Cuban League box scores from the 1910/11 season (unpublished as of yet, but hopefully soon to be posted at Baseball-Reference.com) indicates a .391 average for Hill (36 for 92), but .365 (35 for 96) is the official figure cited in Jorge S. Figueredo, Cuban Baseball: A Statistical History, 1878-1961).   The Cuban League at that time was notorious for “adjusting” statistics after the season, particularly those pertaining to the prestigious batting title, so I tend to think that the statistics I compile straight from the box scores are more reliable than official numbers.  Nevertheless I decided that an historical marker required official sourcing whenever possible. 

Early drafts included the oft-cited factoid that in 1911 Hill hit safely in 115 of 116 games, but I could find only secondary sources for that, and decided to go with his remarkable home run total in 1919 instead. It’s a new piece of information, one that doesn’t appear in any of the standard reference books, statistical compilations, or Negro league histories.  As such it stands in for the new wave of Negro league research, one that obviously works a lot better for a general audience than trying to explain in a pithy phrase or two that he walked a lot or had a high on-base percentage or played a bunch of his career in an offense-killing home park, which are the other major results of recent research.  For whatever reason, until very recently nobody had done extensive research on the Detroit Stars’ 1919 season (or at least nobody had published it), so Hill’s home run production that year had been entirely forgotten.

It was, however, known at the time. Hill’s home run count was continually publicized by the Detroit Stars as the 1919 season progressed.  Hill himself touted it in a press release printed in the Chicago Defender (January 10, 1920):

(For the whole story of Hill’s 1919 season, see my article, “1919: A Tale of Two Sluggers,” in the Outsider Baseball Bulletin, June  8, 2010, as well as the two-part series, “The Year Before the Negro National League,” also in the OBB, September 1 & September 8, 2010.)

By the way, this is the original sentence I wrote: “His total of 28 home runs for the Detroit Stars in 1919 marked the end of the deadball era in black baseball.”  But the people at the Department of Historic Resources thought that the reference to the “deadball era” would confuse those who weren’t baseball history buffs.  In explaining what I meant, I mentioned Babe Ruth’s 29 home runs the same year, and we ended up deciding that Ruth’s was a name everyone recognized, and that comparing Hill’s season to his would help the uninitiated grasp the significance of Hill’s accomplishments.

I did have some reservations about the comparison: Pete Hill was really nothing like Babe Ruth, in kind or degree, and of course I dislike the old habit of talking about Negro leaguers as the black version of some white star or other.  But, just as Spottswood Poles was called the “black Ty Cobb” by his manager Ed Bolden, it was Pete Hill who compared himself to Ruth.  As the comparison was made in contemporary sources and by the subject himself, it seemed legitimate.

Hill died on 19 Dec. 1951 and was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 2006.

His death date has been confirmed by his death certificate and by a Fay Young column in the Chicago Defender (December 29, 1951), in which Young notes the death of “Pete Hill, the grand old man of baseball,” on “Wednesday of last week [December 19] in Buffalo, N. Y., where in recent years he had made his home.”  So far this is the only contemporary newspaper mention of  Hill’s death I’ve been able to find.

bjarkman on cuban baseball

I’ve recently been reading Peter Bjarkman’s History of Cuban Baseball, 1984-2006.  My favorite chapters are the ones on Castro-era baseball and what Bjarkman calls “the world’s best unknown ballplayers,” including: the all-time home run king, Orestes Kindelán, and the all-time hits leader, Antonio Pacheco; the all-time leader in wins, southpaw Jorge Luis Valdés, and the man he surpassed, Braudilio Vinent; 1970s slugger Antonio Muñoz, reputedly a left-handed version of Tony Pérez; legendary shortstop Germán Mesa, often compared to Ozzie Smith; and the greatest of them all, third baseman Omar Linares.

Great stuff, all of it.  I wonder if there’s any possibility in the near future of a full statistical encyclopedia of Cuban baseball since 1962?

the first spaniards to play professional baseball

I got this email from Tito Rondon the other day:

Thanks to you, I have found the first Spaniards who played baseball at the professional level.  Following one of your links, I read the book El Base Ball en Cuba y América, by Ramón de Mendoza, Manuel Calcines and José María Herrero.  On pages 21 and 28 the players who founded Almendares are mentioned. Then on p. 42, bingo: Antonio Alzola and Leonardo Ovies “were two Peninsulars [my note: Spaniards] who were the catcher and the firstbaseman of Club Almendares.”  Elsewhere it states that they were pretty good.  It shows also the universal appeal of baseball.

Historians and sociologists insist that baseball replaced bullfighting as the national sport in Cuba as a symbol of independence and getting closer to the new ideals in the United States. Which is all very nice, except that nobody in Cuba thought of bullfighting as a sport (you will never find it in the Sports section in Spanish newspapers, plus it is usually described as a “fiesta brava,” somewhat like a celebration or dance showing bravery). So it could not be replaced by one, except as an avocation or hobby.

[…]

And, by the way, it has never been established that supposed Spanish big leaguer Alfredo “Pájaro” Cabrera was born in the Canary Islands; it is theorized that 1) he was trying to avoid being thought of as a mulato (half Black) from Cuba, or 2) that he was really born in Spain and he was brought to Cuba as a baby.  I suppose all this means I have to investigate Gregorio Solis (first Spanish minor leaguer circa 1957?), Alberto Pardo, and recent minor leaguers Gaby Valarezo and Xavier Civit.  And hurry; like the other European countries they are “nationalizing” Argentinians, Cubans, and Americans in order to compete against pros...

Tito

claudio manela & the true meaning of the “8” and the “36”

Thanks to Tito Rondon, who has provided an explanation for an obscure remark (found in the Diario de la Marina article excerpted in this post) concerning the Filipino pitcher Claudio Manela: “Todavía no sabe el verdadero significado del 8 y del 36” (“He still doesn’t know the true meaning of the ‘8’ and the ‘36’”).

ABOUT 8 AND 36 (MANELA)
No doubt you have played charades, complete with three fingers up meaning “three words” or “syllables.”  A Cuban version of the game (I have learned) used hints based on numbers; each number meant something.  For instance, “one” was a “horse.”  The Cubans also had a public lottery game called “bolita” (numbers racket in the U.S.). And so, dreams became associated with numbers.  If you dreamed of a cat, for instance, you had to bet combinations that had a four in it (I think bolita had three or four numbers, it was run daily).  Everybody played it, so if you arrived in Cuba and stayed a few months, in time you learned the significance of the numbers. Manela did not stay long enough to learn that 8 is “muerto” (dead man) or that 36 is “cachimba” (pipe used to smoke).

cuban national series on the web

Just got this email from David Skinner:

I had one good game to watch today, thanks to Pete Bjarkman’s tip. The mind boggles. With all the Cuban games I've seen, I hadn't ever watched the Serie Nacional final series until now. The live Cubavision telecasts are free on Windows Media, if you have broadband, I guess it’s what they call streaming video. It’s perfect audio, Spanish of course, good video quality with occasional freezes. Industriales, the Yankees of Cuba, won tonight to cut Santiago de Cuba’s lead to 2 games to 1. Estadio Latinamericano looked so good, with 50,000+ screaming crazies, and the play, especially flamboyant fielding, reminded me of my first trip to Cuba and the feeling that this league is the true heir of the  Negro Leagues. If you’re interested, the website is baseballdecuba.com, just click on window in middle marked PLAY. Game 4 is Sunday at 2PM Eastern.
Best,
David

campos

In both the Negro Leagues Book and Riley’s Biographical Encyclopedia, we find “Tatica Campos,” a multi-position player for various Cuban Stars teams of the 1910s and 1920s, up to his final U.S. season in 1930.

Checking up on Tatica from the Cuban side of things, however, we find three players named Campos during this time.  Jorge Figueredo’s Cuban Baseball lists: 1) José “Tatica” Campos, a pitcher/infielder/outfielder who played in the Cuban League from 1913/14 through 1920/21; 2) B. Campos, who appeared briefly (only four at bats in seven games) for Almendares in 1914/15, the same team as Tatica; and 3) Roberto Campos, whose hometown is identified in the index as Manzanillo, an infielder/outfielder (but not pitcher) in the 1923/24 and 1926/27 Cuban League seasons, plus the rival “Triangular” league of 1926/27.

Patrick Rock, using passenger lists for ships from Cuba to the United States (just a fantastic resource), has found records of the Cuban Stars teams of the 1900s through 1920s.  Patrick discovered that the Campos who traveled with the Cuban Stars in 1915-1917, and again in 1930, was named Francisco Campos.  He was born in 1892 in Havana.  On the 1923 Cuban Stars, however, it’s Roberto Campos, born about 1902 in Manzanillo.

So it seems clear that Roberto’s tenure with the ’23 Cuban Stars was mistakenly conflated with the career of the 1910s Campos.  But what about Francisco Campos, as opposed to José?  Was the Cuban Stars’ Campos in 1915-17 the same as the well-known Cuban Leaguer, Tatica Campos?  It seems highly likely, considering that the Cuban Stars at the time were mostly drawn from Almendares, Tatica’s club.  But could the Cuban Stars’ player have been the other Campos with Almendares at this time, the little-used outfielder B. Campos?  Either way, the name Francisco, which appears repeatedly in the records, causes problems.

I checked the Cuban League box scores for the 1910s, focusing on 1914/15, the year that two players named Campos appeared with Almendares.  It turns out that there were definitely two men with the name.  One always appeared as “T. Campos” when first initials were given in box scores, and was often called “Tatica” in the game stories and play-by-plays.  The other appeared both as “F. Campos” and as “S. Campos,” and is referred to three or four times (with both initials) as “el mejicano.”  They appeared together in the lineup twice—both times as “T. Campos” and “S. Campos.”  Here’s one of them, played on February 22 (La Lucha, February 23, 1915):

And here are the seventh and eighth innings of the play-by-play account.  S. Campos, “el mejicano,” ends the seventh with a fly to center (he’s batting in the number three position, having taken Hidalgo’s place in center field).  T. Campos, “Tatica,” pops to the pitcher for the second out of the eighth:

“B. Campos,” by the way, never crops up in 1914/15, at least in La Lucha—it could be that a blurry “S.” on microfilm was mistaken by someone for a “B.”

During both 1913/14 and 1915/16, there is clearly only one Campos on the Almendares roster, and he’s always called “T. Campos” and “Tatica Campos.”  In 1917, however (the strange year when the games were played at Oriental Park, the racetrack, and the teams all took new names), Tatica Campos appeared in box scores as both “T. Campos” and “F. Campos.”

The second Campos of 1914/15 still muddies the waters a bit, but two things lead me to think that Tatica Campos of the Cuban League was the same as Francisco Campos of the Cuban Stars: 1) the second Campos of ‘14/15 was called “el mejicano,” which doesn’t have to refer to his national origin, but probably does—while the passenger records establish Francisco as a Cuban native; and 2) the 1917 instances of Tatica being called “F. Campos.”

We do still have the problem of the name “José” from Figueredo, though.  I can say that I have never seen a “J. Campos” in a Cuban box score from this era.  Perhaps his name was “José Francisco,” but he preferred to go by “Francisco.”  Whatever the case, it seems clear that here we’ve managed to shed light in both directions, on Cuban and American baseball history.