Minnie Minoso-One More Time

Judie Kleinmaier at The Capital Times was nice enough to forward this Sports Illustrated article,  Nothing Minor About Minnie article:

Miñoso deserves more recognition as player, pioneer...Yet there is another goodwill ambassador who should be enshrined, a man who shared O'Neil's boundless sense of enjoyment and hope for the game. The difference is that this man, Saturnino Orestes Armas Arrieta Miñoso -- more commonly known as "Minnie" -- is remembered primarily for his clownish pinch-hitting stunts in 1976 and 1981, which he did as much to qualify for a pension as for the giggles.

I am well aware of the pinch hinting. As someone who saw him play, it never even merited a footnote.  As Alex Belth so poignantly notes:

...On April 30, 1951, Miñoso was shipped to the White Sox as part of a seven-player deal. His debut with the new club was a doozy. On May 1, against the defending champion New York Yankees, Miñoso became the first black man to play major league baseball for either Chicago club -- two years before Ernie Banks' debut with the Cubs. Miñoso blasted a long home run off Vic Raschi in his first at-bat. But Miñoso's historic day would be overshadowed. In the sixth inning another rookie, Mickey Mantle, also hit his first big league homer, and the Yankees went on to win the game.

"This knack for inadvertently playing second fiddle on the baseball diamond," notes Latin baseball scholar Peter Bjarkman, "would somehow become something of a hallmark of Miñoso's otherwise brilliant big league career."

This held true after Miñoso's brilliant rookie season, when sportswriters awarded the Rookie of the Year to New York's Gil McDougald. McDougald benefited from being white and playing for the Yankees (who would win another World Series that fall), but a look at the numbers shows that Miñoso was the superior player. The Sporting News picked Miñoso as its top rookie, and oddly enough, the baseball writers themselves had him fourth in their MVP voting -- while McDougald was a distant ninth...

...Miñoso was as much an all-out hustler as Pete Rose, and had to put up with considerably more crap. Just how many major league years did Miñoso lose to racism? Some records suggest he was 25 in 1951, others say he was 28. If Miñoso was 28, then what he was able to accomplish in his 30s was truly great. Some observers think Miñoso lost as many as five years to racism, but even if it was only two or three seasons, it was enough to skew his overall achievement in the majors.

When taken as a whole, Miñoso's playing career in the Negro Leagues, minors and big leagues (not to mention the winter leagues -- Miñoso continued to play in Mexico for another nine years after he left the majors) merits recognition. How he should be evaluated is a question of historical context. While Jackie Robinson can be regarded with awe on numbers alone, there is a less-heralded second tier of pioneers, Doby and Miñoso included, whose career numbers are better understood when held alongside the cultural world they played in. If Doby is in the Hall of Fame, why isn't Miñoso?

As I finished Belth's article, I wondered: Are the accomplishments of a great athlete, a man who loved the game, one of the most enthusiastic players of all time to be dwarfed by a minor moment of levity that he and one the most gifted owners, Bill Veeck, brought to baseball?  No one diminished Veeck's career by his playing Eddie Gadel in St. Louis or Minoso when he was pushing 60 years of age.

Then again Veeck is white.  Veeck is in the Hall of Fame. One thing of which I am certain.  If Bill Veeck was alive today he would insist that Hall of Fame take both of them, or neither of them.