Here are statistics for the 1909/10 Cuban League season (which was actually played from February 6 through April 3, 1910):
[NOTE: Stats for the 1909/10 Cuban League have been deleted, but will reappear in a different venue in the near future. Stay tuned!]
These are complete, and based as always on box scores from La Lucha and Diario de la Marina. You’ll notice a few minor differences between the box scores and the official statistics as recorded in Jorge Figueredo’s Cuban Baseball; for instance, the box scores show Julián Castillo with a batting record of 20 for 53 (.377) in 13 games , but Figueredo has him at 20 for 49 (.408) in 12. It’s unclear exactly why this is; at first it seems that Figueredo’s statistics don’t count one game, but in fact there wasn’t a game in which Castillo went 0 for 4 (he hit in 12 of his 13 games, the one hitless game being an 0 for 2 performance). He wins the batting title either way.
The season’s start was delayed because Almendares, which had narrowly lost the 1908/09 pennant to an Habana club featuring several African-Americans, demanded that the league ban foreign players. Habana objected, and the start of the season was delayed indefinitely.
John Henry Lloyd, Pete Hill, and Bruce Petway, who toiled for Habana in the American Series that fall against the Detroit Tigers and a major league all-star team, stayed in Cuba while the dispute dragged on. Finally by early January the Americans gave up and left. Here is some commentary from La Lucha (January 3, 1910):
(The next-to-last paragraph is rather interesting—I have no idea which Cuban player they’re talking about.)
Almendares finally lifted its demands and the league got underway in early February. By then it was too late to recall Lloyd and company, but Habana made an effort to secure American players, getting Jesse Bragg and William Mathew Land, longtime journeymen on various East Coast black teams in the late 1900s and 1910s. Land, as it happens, appears in the 1910 census (enumerated in April) rooming in Newark, New Jersey, with Clarence Williams, the old Cuban Giants’ catcher who had traveled to Cuba with a number of black teams in the 1900s.
Unfortunately it didn’t go well for Land and Bragg. They first appeared in a February 21 game against Almendares. La Lucha commented that
That would be Bragg’s first and last game in the Cuban League. Land played once more, on February 24 against Fe. Together they went 0 for 12. By March 1, they were bound for the U.S. again aboard the S.S. Mexico. Almendares went on to win the truncated season with a 13-3-1 record.
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