El Profe: A Giant Legacy in Baseball’s Integration
By Adrian Burgos
Giants vs. Dodgers.
One of baseball’s great rivalries.
It dates back to the days when both teams were based in New York City. And it continues to this day with these two organizations, representing San Francisco and Los Angeles, respectively.
The Dodgers hold a special place in the annals of baseball history, stretching back to their Brooklyn days.
The Dodgers opened the doors to baseball’s integration. Thanks to Branch Rickey’s courageous leadership and Jackie Robinson’s perseverance, the “Great Experiment” succeeded.
Looking at baseball’s racial saga from a Latino perspective, however, I say that the New York Giants, more so than the Dodgers, played a bigger and more important role in the first decades of the integration era.
The Giants turned racial integration into an international crusade that touched all parts of Latin America and the Caribbean, where pelota was played.
Sure, the Cincinnati Reds, Boston Braves and Washington Senators actively signed Cuban players before Jackie Robinson knocked down the color line. And once integration started, the Cleveland Indians, Chicago White Sox, Pittsburgh Pirates and the relocated (Milwaukee) Braves sought talent throughout Latin America.
But the Giants did it better, for longer, and, I would contend, the right way.
Changing the Scouting Game
Contemporary sportswriters as well as baseball historians have often described Giants owner Horace Stoneham as a drunk and a follower, a team executive who played a distant second fiddle to Rickey and the Dodgers.
Yet Stoneham made one of the smartest decisions in Major League Baseball as integration began: In 1950, he hired Alejandro “Álex” Pompez as the Giants’ scout in Latin America and to cover the Negro Leagues and the rest of the black circuit in the United States.
That was a game-changer.
Stoneham took integration beyond the playing field and into the front office through that hire.
Pompez, born in Key West to Cuban immigrants in 1890, had a résumé unlike any other in MLB.
He had decades of experience as a Negro Leagues team owner, starting in 1916. Initially calling his first team the Cuban Stars and later the New York Cubans, he was the first team owner to scout and acquire Latino players in places besides Cuba. The first Dominican, Puerto Rican, Venezuelan and Panamanian players to perform in the elite Negro Leagues appeared on his teams.
And Pompez had connections that worked for the Giants. That was evident in the Giants signing Hank Thompson (1947), Monte Irvin (1949) and a teenage Willie Mays 1950), even before Pompez was the Giants’ full-time employee.
Pompez would pay off huge dividends for decades, endearing the Giants to Latino fans throughout the Americas.
Los Gigantes
Much as he had done in the Negro Leagues, Pompez scouted the Americas for talent. Pompez signed players from Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, Panama, Mexico and even the Bahamas for the Giants.
The names read like a who’s who of Latino baseball.
Orlando “Cha Cha” Cepeda. Juan Marichal.
The Aloú brothers: Felipe, Jesús and Mateo.
Manny Mota. José Cardenal. Tito Fuentes. José Pagán.
Dámaso Blanco. Andre Rodgers.
The list goes on.
These were the pioneros, the pioneers who played during the first generation of baseball integration. They fulfilled the major league dreams previously denied to many of their countrymen.
In the case of Cepeda, he pursued a baseball life in the United States that his own father, Pedro “Perucho” Cepeda, decided not to pursue.
The times were different. But the pursuer was the same: Álex Pompez.
Perucho Cepeda opted against signing with Pompez’s New York Cubans in the early 1940s, refusing to accept the Jim Crow segregation that ruled life in much of the United States and baseball.
The younger Cepeda, however, took on that challenge and became a Hall of Famer.
Different Approach
My interviews with Cepeda, Marichal and Willie McCovey over the years revealed that Pompez created a network of bird-dog scouts to locate talent worthy of getting a closer look. That network was staffed primarily by Pompez’s former players. Makes sense. Those guys had a personal understanding of what Pompez sought in terms of physical tools as well as the mental fortitude needed to succeed in professional baseball.
In the Dominican Republic, Pompez’s main guy was Horacio Martínez, his former standout shortstop. Discovered during the Cubans’ 1933 tour of the Dominican Republic, the slick-fielding Martínez quickly became a fan favorite in the Negro Leagues, regularly voted to participate in its all-star game, the East-West Classic.
A star from 1933 through 1947, Martínez knew what it took to make it in the United States. Thus, when he spotted a young Marichal, he sent word to Pompez. The Giants signed the future Hall of Famer.
Listening to Hall of Famers Cepeda and Marichal tell stories about their early days in the Giants’ organization shed further light on Pompez’s efforts to create something rather unique — an organizational culture that helped Latino players as well as African Americans adjust and thrive in the first decades of integration.
They told stories about how Pompez sat with them, how he shared the wisdom he gained over his decades in baseball as a black Latino. It provided a Latino perspective to baseball’s integration saga, of the particular challenges those players faced as part of that pioneering generation, and of how the Giants also made their mark in changing America’s Game.
Featured Image: Bettmann