Agate Type

This Cuban Stars Broadside Does Not Date from 1920

The above broadside advertising a June 11 game between the Cuban Stars and Marshall University dates, according to Getty Images, to 1920. Okay, to be clear they say “ca. 1920.” But it should be immediately obvious to anyone reading the text that it couldn’t be from anywhere near 1920. And it’s fairly easy to establish exactly what year it’s from.

The text, which might be a little small to read, goes like this:

“This team, composed of native Cubans, defeated the World’s Champion Athletics nine out of twelve games. Mendez, considered by many experts as the best pitcher in the world, will probably pitch. Pedrosa, the hitless wonder, is also with them.”

First of all,  the reference to Eustaquio “Bombín” Pedroso as the “hitless wonder” refers to his 11-inning no-hit win over the Detroit Tigers in Havana in the fall of 1909, so we know it happened after 1909. The broadside also refers to the Philadelphia Athletics’ fall 1910 visit to Havana after beating the Giants in the World Series. They didn’t actually play the “Cuban Stars” then, but rather the Almendares and Habana teams, and they didn’t lose 9 out of 12 games either (dropping 6 out of 10 instead). So the earliest it could be dated would be June 1911.

Now let’s come at it from the other direction. In 1920 José Méndez was pitching for, and managing, the Kansas City Monarchs, and in June of that year he can firmly be placed with the Monarchs and not either of the Cuban Stars teams.

In fact, at that point Méndez hadn’t played for the Cuban Stars in the United States for eight years. He played for them in 1908, 1909, 1911, and 1912, along with a brief appearance late in the season in 1910, after the Stars of Cuba had folded. Pedroso was his teammate only in 1912, again excepting only brief, late-season appearances side by side in 1910 and 1911.

In other words, Pedroso and Méndez played together on the Cuban Stars in the United States in the month of June only in the year 1912.

And as it happens, the Cuban Stars were in West Virginia and vicinity at that time. I couldn’t find a box score or reference to the June 11 game, but on June 8 Méndez himself took the mound to defeat Daddy Clay’s Giants in Pittsburgh, two home runs by Rafael Figarola featuring the game:

(Pittsburgh Press, June 9, 1912, p. 22)

And on June 14 the Cuban Stars beat the University of West Virginia 12 to 1 in Morgantown. Méndez didn’t appear, but Pedroso did, playing right field, getting a couple of singles, and later coming in to pitch.

 

(Pittsburgh Daily Post, June 15, 1912, p. 14)

Another way to look at it is that the broadside says the game was to take place on Tuesday, June 11. In 1920 June 11 fell on a Friday.  During José Méndez’s whole career in the U.S., which stretched from 1908 to 1926, June 11 fell on a Tuesday exactly twice—in 1918, at which time he was playing for the Los Angeles White Sox, and in…1912.

So I think we can say with some certainty that the broadside was advertising a game that was scheduled to be played on June 11, 1912.

...oh, and here is a picture of me working on this post last night:

 

UPDATE 1/30/2017: Courtesy of Bill Mullins, here is a report of a June 11, 1912, game played in Huntington, West Virginia, though this report has the Cuban Stars facing the Huntington team rather than Marshall University:

Hopefully for Méndez’s sake, he didn’t pitch the entire 19 innings...

UPDATE 7/21/2021 In response to Claudio Naranjo and Scott Simkus in the comments to this post, here are two box scores for a Cuban Stars game against West Virginia University, played on May 11, 1909:

(Pittsburgh Daily Post, May 12, 1909, p. 11)

 

(Pittsburgh Gazette Times, May 12, 1909, p. 10)

 

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.

the first negro league no-hitter

Here’s what appears to be, for now, the earliest known Negro league no-hitter (that is, a no-hitter in a game between top-flight black professional teams in the U.S.), preceding Frank Wickware’s 1914 gem by two years.

(New York Press, August 29, 1912, p. 7)

This was one classic game—Dick Redding in a no-hit, 1-0 victory over José Méndez, at that point the most accomplished and most famous pitcher outside the major leagues.  I’d love to find an actual box score.

Apparently Bill Holland claimed that Redding threw some 30 no-hitters in his career, but I can’t recall anyone, player or historian, mentioning this one—versus the Cuban Stars in 1912—in particular.  There is this article, which says he went 43-12 in 1912 with seven no-hitters, including a perfect game.  I couldn’t find seven, but I did come up with one more no-hitter, the one mentioned briefly in the story above—and it was in fact a perfect game:

(New York Press, August 5, 1912, p. 7)

stars of cuba, 1910

Here, courtesy of the Hakes auction site and Cesar Brioso’s tumblr, is a wonderful photograph of the Stars of Cuba, a team that toured the United States during the summer of 1910.

For whatever reason the scrap of typescript attached to the photo says (inaccurately) that the team existed in 1912. Actually it was 1910.  Here are the correct names of the players and officials in the photo (so far as I know): 

Back row: Heliodoro Hidalgo (“Jabuco”); William C. Niesen; Marcelino Guerra (“Sueya”); ?? Jones; Rogelio Valdés.

Middle row: José Muñoz; Pelayo Chacón; José Méndez; Armando Cabañas; Pastor Pareda.

Front row: Ramón Govantes; Manuel Villa; Rafael Figarola.

I’m not sure why Marcelino Guerra is called “Sueya” (a nickname, maybe?).  As you can see, this photograph includes every player who appeared for the Stars of Cuba against other top black teams that year, with the sole exception of Juliân “Fallanca” Pérez.  Incidentally, this is the only photo I’ve seen of José Muñoz actually in a baseball uniform; he’s in other team pictures, but always wearing a suit and tie.

Missing from this photo are Eustaquio Pedroso and Allyn McAllister, and present are William Niesen, Armando Cabañas, and Guerra, which may give us a clue as to when it was taken. 

Allyn McAllister was the founder of the Stars of Cuba.  A bicycle shop proprietor from Chicago, McAllister entered the ranks of baseball promoters in the fall of 1909 when he organized a major league all-star team to play the Cuban League teams in Havana.  It was a genuine all-star team, too, featuring Three Finger Brown, Addie Joss, Sherry Magee, and Fred Merkle, although they only managed two wins in five games against Habana and Almendares. 

While in Cuba, McAllister decided to move in on Abel Linares’s turf, signing up Cuban players to tour the U.S. the following summer.  He plucked Linares’s prize asset, José Méndez, the biggest star in Cuban baseball, and some other good players, including José Muñoz and Eustaquio Pedroso, giving him Cuba’s top three pitchers.

Here is a detail from a passenger list for the S.S. Mascotte, arriving in Tampa on May 4, 1910, showing eight of the Stars of Cuba players travelling together:

 

It was after the team got to Chicago that the trouble started.  At some point Pedroso had defected to Linares’s Cuban Stars.  McAllister then sued Pedroso, contending that he had signed an exclusive contract with the Stars of Cuba.  In early June, a judge threw out McAllister’s suit on the grounds that the contract lacked “mutuality”—that is, Pedroso was required to play ball only for McAllister during 1910, but McAllister was not required to retain or pay Pedroso at all.  The story was picked up by the AP and popped up in newspapers all over the country, often with headlines that implied the decision invalidated all baseball contracts.  Francis Richter of Sporting Life felt it necessary to intervene, quoting the AP story and adding their own commentary about how the case had little bearing on organized baseball:

(Sporting Life, June 11, 1910, p. 4)

With Pedroso lost, the Stars of Cuba were weakened a little; and the problems didn’t stop there.  The team started cancelling dates in early July, causing some frustration among the local clubs.  One W. C. Niesen, manager of the Gunthers club, took a vocal role against McAllister.

(Chicago Tribune, July 9, 1910, p. 10)

Starting on July 10 the Stars of Cuba  rebelled against McAllister; they were now operating “under new management,” as the Chicago Examiner (July 20) would later explain—which apparently meant W. C. Niesen and his allies.  Their new handlers lined up a three-game series in mid-July between the Stars of Cuba and Linares’s Cuban Stars, with two of the games played at Artesian Park.  The Stars of Cuba, fortified by the addition of Armando Cabañas and Marcelino Guerra from Cuba, won the first two games; the last, on July 14 at Artesian Park, saw a matchup of aces, with Pedroso of the Cuban Stars besting Méndez 3 to 2.

With Cabañas and Guerra on the roster and McAllister gone, we now have the cast of characters that appears in the team photo above; Niesen’s boycott of the team seems to have been aimed at wresting control of it from McAllister, and there he his in the team photo, along with “Jones,” presumably some partner of Niesen.

On July 19 the Chicago City League banned its clubs from playing “colored teams” (other than the Chicago Giants, who were league members, of course), a decision widely understood to be aimed at the two Cuban clubs. This was another item about local Chicago baseball that was picked up by the AP and printed in newspapers all over the country.

 

(Fort Worth Star-Telegram, July 19, 1910, p. 8)

This makes the fault lines in Chicago’s independent pro baseball scene that summer pretty clear, despite the forest of similar-sounding names (Cuban Stars, Stars of Cuba, Leland Giants, Leland’s Chicago Giants).  Keep in mind that Niesen’s Gunthers were not members of the Chicago City League, and neither were Rube Foster’s Chicago Leland Giants.  The previous winter, Foster had wrested control of the Leland Giants (and most of the team’s players) from eponymous founder Frank Leland.  Leland, enjoined from using the name “Leland Giants,” then organized his own team, referred to (confusingly) as Leland’s Chicago Giants.  Leland did convince the Chicago League to let him keep his team’s league franchise, thus the “new” Chicago Giants replaced the defending champion Leland Giants in the City League.

So on the one hand you had the Chicago City League, which included the city’s white semipro establishment, plus Frank Leland and his new Chicago Giants.  On the other hand you had Rube Foster’s Leland Giants and William C. Niesen, now controlling the Stars of Cuba as well as the Gunthers. One assumes that Allyn McAllister was originally aligned with the Chicago League, so his ouster from the Stars of Cuba may have been a large part of the reason for the League’s ban on games with the Cubans.  Abel Linares’s Cuban Stars of Havana, incidentally, played the Chicago Giants several times, but never once took the field against Foster’s Leland Giants, so they may have been more closely aligned with the City League crowd, despite their July games against Niesen’s Stars of Cuba.

On August 7 the Chicago Tribune reported that Allyn McAllister had obtained an injunction against the Stars of Cuba playing baseball under any management except his.

(Chicago Tribune, August 7, 1910, p. C2)

That day he showed up at Normal Park before a scheduled game between the Stars and Foster’s Leland Giants, flanked by three policemen and an interpreter.  It did not exactly go according to plan:

 

(Chicago Examiner, August 8, 1910, p. 8)

The Stars went ahead and played the game, losing to Frank Wickware and the Lelands 8 to 6.  A couple of days later they were hauled into court to explain themselves, but apparently the players (and, perhaps, Niesen) were able to reach some kind of settlement with McAllister:

 

(Chicago Tribune, August 11, 1910, p. 11)

(Chicago Examiner, August 12, 1910, p. 7)

A week or two after that the Stars of Cuba left for a series in Kansas City, Kansas, before returning to Chicago for some games against the Leland Giants.  Apparently the Stars of Cuba broke up soon after; by September 14 the team’s star and player-manager, José Méndez, had left to join the Linares Cuban Stars on the east coast.  As far as Allyn McAllister goes, this seems to have been the final chapter of his brief (and rather inglorious) career in baseball management.

josé méndez in cleveland 1912

Here’s a cool photo of José Méndez I hadn’t seen before, from the August 20, 1912, Cleveland Plain Dealer.  Just another example of how famous Méndez was in the U.S. around that time, surely the best-known ballplayer from outside organized baseball.  Not sure what that round thing growing out of his back is supposed to be.

Incidentally, as the article tells us, the Tellings semipro team was trying to get University of Michigan star George Sisler to pitch against Méndez in the next game.  But the marquee matchup did not come off.  Sisler didn’t show up, and Méndez was “attacked with acute indigestion” just before game time and couldn’t play.  So instead it was Luis “Chicho” González who took the mound and disposed of the Tellings 3 to 1.

black diamond 1912

On January 14, 1912, the Philadelphia Inquirer published a long, detailed feature on José Méndez, “El Diamante Negro” (“Black Diamond”), by the obviously pseudonymous “Jim Nasium” (real name: Edgar Forrest Wolfe) who had evidently done his research.  It’s a very important source and, being published in 1912, is out of copyright, so I thought I’d make it generally available.  This is how it concludes:

“It is one of the pathetic instances of life to see this Cuban negro, possessing all the characteristics of a gentleman, and an ability that would make him one of the great figures in a great pastime—qualities that would bring him world-wide fame and popularity and wealth—barred from reaping the full benefits of these qualifications through the misfortune of birth.  Jose Mendez will always have to be content just to be Cuba’s ‘black Mathewson’.”

The version I’m posting is the Washington Post’s reprint of the story from a week later, as the layout makes it a little easier to handle.  As you can see, the Post had an artist do his own version of Jim Nasium’s portrait of Méndez.

You should be able to click on  it for the full-size, readable story.

And here is the original art that accompanied the Inquirer story:

josé del valle méndez, part iii

Here is Tito Rondon on the question of José Méndez’s real name:

“‘José del Valle y Méndez’ means his first last name is Valle (or del Valle, makes no difference; del is just a conjuction, which is why it is not capitalized, same as van or vander in dutch). And his second last name, or mother's maiden name, is Méndez.

“In conservative Latin societies, if at the time of your birth your mom was not married to your dad, you got her last name as your own. Then, maybe you would use your dad’s last name as your second last name, or maybe your adoptive father’s (maybe mom’s new hubby). And if she divorced the new guy, you could change yours too if you liked the new guy better.

“So the 1912 Ramos could be the appropriate second last name at the time, and Baez the appropiate one thereafter, and maybe he found out by 1918 that his father’s last name had been Valle, and used that on official documents trying to accommodate U. S. usage.

[…]

“Of course, de la Caridad is his middle name; in the draft card someone put his last name in the middle name spot by mistake, something that would be repeated for decades by ballplayers, like Latigo Gutiérrez being known as René Valdez in the U. S.

[…]

“Your research on his mom, Marcelina [see below], looks pretty definite to me, so it is clear he used her last name as his. And I guess he pretty much preferred to use Baez as his second last name during the latter part of his career. Which he has a right to. So it is José de la Caridad Méndez Báez.

“However, you have just revealed the true mystery. Who was José’s father? I'll ask some Cuban historians (as I am not one) and let you know.....”

A few additional notes from Tito and from my own research:

• Tito also disposes of the version of Méndez’s full name given by Roberto González Echevarría in The Pride of Havana, “José de la Caridad Méndez Arco de Tejada.”  There was, Tito says, a Cuban sportswriter “with a peculiar sense of humor, who gave ballplayers and famous people fanciful second last names based on Spanish noble names, usually compound last names. ‘Arco de Tejada’ is one such feeble attempt at humor; please disregard it.”

Incidentally, the longtime Pittsburgh Courier sportswriter and columnist, Wesley Rollo Wilson, had a very similar habit, often for example calling Judy Johnson (whose middle name was Julius) “Julius Caesar Johnson.”

• In a 1920 interview with the newspaper Diario de la Marina, the legendary slugger Julián Castillo refers to Méndez as “the celebrated Méndez-Colmenar del Valle.”  Tito’s comment: “It could very well be. Some people with compound names preferred to simplify, and dropped half of it. So Jose could very well be named Colmenar del Valle and refer to himself as ‘del Valle’ or even simply Valle.”

• On Méndez’s mother: the World War I draft card for José del Valle Méndez lists his nearest relative as “Marcelina del Valle,” of 38 Factoria, Habana, Cuba.  Marcelina was Méndez’s mother’s first name, and her address in 1917 was 38 Factoria in Havana.  Here is what’s entered as Méndez’s relative or friend in Cuba on passenger lists in the 1910s:

June 10, 1912: “Mrs. M. Mendez, mother”

May 7, 1914: “mother Marcelina Lugones”

April 22, 1916: “mother Marcelina Méndez” (Méndez crossed out,
actually traveled the next day)

April 23, 1916: “mother Marcelina Menendez [sic]”

May 9, 1917: “mother M. Mendez Lugore [sic], Factoria 38” (same
address she is given on Méndez’s draft card)

May 13, 1917: “mother M. Lugones, Factoria 38”

The image of Méndez above was snagged from somewhere on the internet (I’m forgetting where at the moment), but it is originally a detail from a team photo of the 1920 Kansas City Monarchs.

josé del valle méndez, part ii

I’ve obtained a much better copy of the World War I draft card for José Méndez in Chicago, which confirms that he was employed by Rube Foster of 3242 Vernon Ave., and pretty much cinches the case that this is the Hall of Fame pitcher. In this copy you can make out his signature much more clearly, and it appears that he signed it “Jose del Valle y Mendez.”

This means that José Méndez himself signed a document that gives a totally different birthdate and name than what we have seen before.

Incidentally, I suspect the information here was probably itself drawn from another official document provided by Méndez. The registrar followed what I think was the standard practice of filling out the card herself, while the registrant—Méndez—simply signed it. She carefully included the accent marks in Méndez’s name, which Méndez himself did not bother with in his signature. While it’s possible she was fluent in or familiar with Spanish and knew where to put the accents, I think a more likely explanation is that she simply copied his name from some other source. This would work against any suspicion that the name or birthdate was a result of miscommunication between Méndez and the registrar.

josé del valle méndez

When Patrick Rock and I were searching for Negro Leaguers and Cuban ballplayers with World War I draft cards, one player we didn’t find at the time was José Méndez—even though he was in the United States in September, 1918, when a man of his age would have been required to register, citizen or not.  At the time he was playing for the Chicago American Giants, having been brought in to replace the shortstop Bobby Williams, lost to the draft.  (This was during the period when Méndez did very little pitching, and made his living as an infielder.)

I’ve continued research on the World War I cards over the past year, making occasional finds, but Méndez was always a low priority, as I assumed we pretty much knew everything there was to know about him.  Then, a few weeks ago, it dawned on me that I had seen several full names given for him:

“José Méndez Ramos,” from a roster list published in La Lucha (January 26, 1912);

“José de la Caridad Méndez Arco de Tejada,” from Roberto González Echevarría’s The Pride of Havana (p. 130);

“José Méndez Baez,” from James Riley’s Biographical Encyclopedia (p. 545).

“José de la Caridad Méndez Baez,” from his Hall of Fame plaque.

So I went looking for Méndez in the World War I draft again, to see what name he used there.  Of the 211 men named José Méndez who registered, only three lived in Chicago.  Of them, two were listed as white (one a Mexican citizen); the other, the only black man named José Méndez to register for the draft in Chicago, was this one:

                                    (click to enlarge)

So we have José del Valle Méndez, born January 2, 1885, whereas the official birthdate for the Hall of Famer José Méndez is March 19, 1887. He is listed as “negro” and a Cuban citizen.  His occupation, cigar maker, is in fact the one tradition assigns Méndez (see González Echevarría, p. 131), and one that’s given for him on some early passenger lists to the United States (in 1910 traveling with the Stars of Cuba, for example).  He is not listed as a professional ballplayer, but then neither were José Méndez’s teammates Pete Hill and Bruce Petway, who registered on the same day in the same city and who had been professionals for many years (both Hill and Petway listed themselves as civilian workers for the Army, as it happens).  General Crowder’s “work or fight” order had classified sports as a non-essential occupation and led to the suspension of organized baseball on September 2.  Independent and semipro baseball continued (Hill, Petway, and Méndez were all playing for the American Giants on days surrounding the September 12 registration day), but the players who had to register at that time often (though not always) put other occupations (as did some major league players, for example Burt Shotton, Hal Chase, and Jack Coombs).

José del Valle Méndez may have been a cigarmaker, but his employer looks very much like…Rube Foster.  The microfilm from which the Ancestry.com scan was made, however, was flawed and streaked, so it could be “Robt. Foster,” or something else.  The employer’s address is 3242 Vernon Ave., although the “Vernon” is obscured by another streak.  Rube Foster’s address on that same date (September 12, 1918), as well as in the 1920 census, was 3242 Vernon Avenue.

                                    (click to enlarge)

Returning to the Méndez card, it appears that in the box reserved for checking one’s “native born” status, he wrote “Cardenas, Cuba,” probably misunderstanding the purpose of the box.  Cárdenas, of course, is where José Méndez was born.

(I love it, btw, that Méndez’s physical condition is, like the werewolf’s hair, pronounced “perfect.”)

So, what do you think?  If my interpretation of the handwriting on the card is correct (it would be immensely useful to see the actual card), and this José Méndez worked for Rube Foster at 3242 Vernon Avenue, Chicago, then we have both a different birthdate and a different name for Méndez than any we have seen before—and in his own handwriting, which would grant it a particular authority.

UPDATE 8:06 p.m. I think I can add another strong point in favor of José del Valle Méndez being our man.  On the card his nearest relative is one “Marcelina del Valle,” living on Factoria street in Havana.  José Méndez’s mother, as evidenced by a number of passenger lists on which she was listed as his relative or contact in Cuba, was named Marcelina, and in 1917 at least she lived at No. 38 Factoria street in Havana.  Her name was evidently Marcelina Méndez Lugones; she appears under both last names and also at least once as “M. Mendez Lugones.”

what was josé méndez’s full name?

I recently realized that I have seen at least three versions of José Méndez’s full name:

“José Méndez Ramos,” from a roster list published in La Lucha (January 26, 1912);

“José de la Caridad Méndez Arco de Tejada,” from Roberto González Echevarría’s Pride of Havana (p. 130);

“José Méndez Baez,” from James Riley’s Biographical Encyclopedia (p. 545).

Does anybody have any idea what the story is here?

UPDATE  3:50 p.m. His Hall of Fame plaque reads “José de la Caridad Mendéz Baez.”  Yes, the accent mark on “Méndez” was wrongly placed.