Ethnic Pioneers who Weren't Named Jackie Robinson - in Baseball, and in Other Sports

[DonRocks]

35 minutes ago, DonRocks said:

Jun 6, 1999 - "Sports of the Times; A Play Maybe Nobody Had Ever Seen Before" by Dave Anderson on nytimes.com

As an unrelated side note, you may notice that all three players have Latino names, and in fact, all three are Cuban in ethnicity, with only Martinez having been born in America to a Cuban-American father and a Spanish-American mother. I have a personal interest in Latino baseball players, especially the pioneers, and I notice these things - I suspect very few people can name the first Latino major-leaguer (it was Lou Castro, who, despite his last name, ironically *wasn't* Cuban; he was born in Medellín, Colombia, and made his debut with the American League-champion 1902 Philadelphia Athletics). I suspect if you asked the average person to guess which year the first Latino man played in the Major Leagues, they'd guess something much more recent than 1902.

Incidentally, I wrote my freshman English term paper arguing that Japanese home-run king, Sadaharu Oh of the Yomiuri Giants, could have been a star in the major leagues - this is well before any Japanese player had ever excelled in the majors, although Masanori Murakami from Yamanashi, Japan, played for the 1964 San Francisco Giants - the title of the paper, which was admittedly a piece of shit, was "Oh, Yes!" ... there was almost no data then, and only a couple of articles had been written about the subject (there were card catalogs and microfiche; not computers), and I could only find *one article* that supported my hypothesis that a great Japanese player such as Oh could succeed in the major leagues - not bad insight for an 18-year-old kid, huh?

Frank Deford is a very well-known sports writer now, but give him credit: He was the *only person* to have the guts to write an article such as this at such an early date:

Aug 15, 1977 - "Move Over for Oh-San" by Frank Deford on si.com