The Outsiders: No. 1, Minnie Miñoso

This offseason, leading right up to the 2021 Baseball Hall of Fame announcement, we’re counting down the 100 greatest eligible players not in the Hall of Fame and ranking them in the order in which I would vote them in. Each player will receive a Hall of Fame plaque based on the pithy ones that the Hall used to use back at the start. Topping our list is Minnie Miñoso.

Saturnino Orestes Armas (Minnie) Miñoso Arrieta
New York Cubans—Cleveland—Chicago White Sox—St. Louis—Washington, 1946-1980

One of the great outfielders of the 1950s, the Cuban Comet combined power, speed and great defense. First Black player to play in Chicago. Roberto Clemente’s hero. “He was the Jackie Robinson for all Latinos,” Orlando Cepeda said. Played in the Major Leagues in five different decades.

Minnie Miñoso?

Yes, that’s right. Minnie Miñoso.

He is, in my mind, the biggest void in the Baseball Hall of Fame. It is, quite frankly, shocking and appalling that he was not elected while he was alive. And while you can make powerful arguments why Barry Bonds or Roger Clemens or Pete Rose or Shoeless Joe Jackson do not have a place in the Hall of Fame, no such arguments exist for Miñoso. He was a great player, a pioneer and a powerful force for good within the game.

Every day that he is not in the Hall is a day that the Hall of Fame itself is diminished.

Miñoso did not become a regular in the Major Leagues until he was 25 years old (or 28 — his birth date has been much debated). That was the year he joined the Chicago White Sox and became the first Black player to play in Chicago. At that point, only Cleveland in the American League had integrated. (The St. Louis Browns briefly integrated in ’47 but quickly got rid of their two Black players and returned to being all-White.)

The integration of baseball in Chicago is an under-told and enormously important story. Chicago was the second-biggest city in America and one of the centers of African American life. More than a half-million African Americans moved to Chicago during the Great Migration, and Chicago was in many ways the very heart of the Negro Leagues — it was, for example, where the East-West All-Star Game was played every year. Miñoso was the starting third baseman in the East-West game in 1947 and 1948 before he was signed by Cleveland.*

*It was actually Abe Saperstein, founder of the Harlem Globetrotters, who recommended Miñoso to Cleveland. He came to scout a pitcher named José Santiago, who would briefly pitch for Cleveland in the mid-50s. But Santiago, who was from Puerto Rico, kept talking about his Cuban teammate Miñoso. He said that Miñoso had tried out for the Cardinals, but it would be another six years before the team would sign a Black player. Saperstein watched Miñoso play and immediately included him in his report to Cleveland’s Bill Veeck, who signed both players.

Miñoso was almost certainly Major-League ready when Cleveland signed him, but Cleveland had a powerhouse team — they were defending World Series champions in ’49 — and there wasn’t anywhere to play him. They sent Miñoso to Triple-A San Diego, where he hit .297 with power and speed. Nothing changed by 1950, so they sent Miñoso back to San Diego, where this time he hit .339 with more power and more speed.

Then in ’51, Cleveland still didn’t have anyplace to play Miñoso — but the trade market was, shall we say, limited because no other team in the American League had a Black player. The White Sox were the team closest to integrating — former Negro Leagues stars Bob Boyd and Sam Hairston had impressed the team during spring training and were assumed to be called up at some point — and so Cleveland traded Miñoso to Chicago in a three-way deal that brought them back a left-handed pitcher and war hero, Lou Brissie.

Miñoso, finally freed to play ball every day, celebrated by homering in his first at-bat for the White Sox.

It remains unclear how Miñoso lost the Rookie of the Year award to Gil McDougald in 1951. Miñoso hit .326/.422/.500, all three slash lines significantly better than McDougald. He scored 40 more runs, had more doubles, triples (led the league with 14), drove in more runs, stole 17 more bases (led the league with 31), walked more, struck out less and played five different positions, going wherever the White Sox needed him.

When the award went to McDougald, who had a fine season for the World Series-winning Yankees, White Sox general manager Frank Lane about lost his mind. He thought that Miñoso not only should have won the Rookie of the Year, but should also have beaten out Yogi Berra for MVP, too.

“Certainly Berra shouldn’t have gotten it,” Lane said. “He had one of his worst years. He didn’t hit, and he got so he couldn’t even throw.”

This was a bit of an exaggeration — Berra hit .294 with 27 homers and led the Yankees in RBIs and runs — but he was not wrong that Miñoso was a more valuable hitter. Lane’s point was that the awards always seemed to go only to players on pennant-winning teams, and he thought that was unfair. As it turns out, that would be a theme in Miñoso’s career. He was never on a pennant-winning team, joining his fellow Chicago pioneer Ernie Banks as one of the best players to never play in a World Series.

But unlike Banks, Miñoso’s achievements just seemed to get overlooked.

He had a terrific year in ’53, hitting .313, scoring and driving in 100 runs, and leading the league in stolen bases for the third time.

In ’54, he was the best player in the American League — he hit .320/.411/.535 with 119 runs scored, 119 RBIs and he led the league with 19 triples.

He hit .316 in ’56, again led the league in triples, and cracked 21 homers.

He hit .310 and led the league with 36 doubles in ’57 and also won a Gold Glove in the inaugural year of the award.

He went back to Cleveland the next year and hit .302 with 24 homers. Hit .302 the next year with 21 homers and 92 RBIs.

Then he went back to Chicago in 1960 and put up another MVP-type season, hitting .311 with a league-leading 184 hits, 20 homers and 105 RBIs.

He never won an MVP award, never really came all that close. The awards almost exclusively went to pennant winners in those days, and pennant winners were almost exclusively Yankees — Berra won it again in ’54, the year that Miñoso absolutely should have been the MVP. Plus, this was the heyday of Mickey Mantle, who overshadowed everybody.

From 1951-60, 10 seasons, Miñoso hit .307 with a .397 on-base percentage. Over that stretch, only Mantle scored more runs, only Mantle and Berra drove in more RBIs, only Luis Aparicio stole more bases (one more base, actually), only Nellie Foxx cracked more hits. All of them are Hall of Famers. He hit more doubles than any of them.

Also, there’s this: A SABR researcher named Scott Simkus added things up, and he found that when you add together Miñoso’s Major League hits, minor league hits, Cuban League hits, Mexican League hits and Negro Leagues hits, you come the staggering number of 4,073, seventh all-time. Here’s that list of players with more than 4,000 total professional hits:

1. Pete Rose, 4,769
2. Ty Cobb, 4,379
3. Ichiro Suzuki, 4,367
4. Henry Aaron, 4,245
5. Jigger Statz, 4,093
6. Julio Franco, 4,074
7. Minnie Miñoso, 4,073
8. Derek Jeter, 4,059
9. Stan Musial, 4,023

How about that? We’ll save our essays on Franco and Statz for another time.

And Miñoso did all this even as he proudly carried the extraordinary burden of being the first Black player in Chicago and the first Black Latino star in the Major Leagues. As David Maraniss points out in his wonderful book, “Clemente,” the legendary African American writer Wendell Smith wrote about what Miñoso had to deal with when he went to spring training in Florida:

You cannot live with your teammates.
You cannot eat the type of food that your athletic body requires.
You cannot get a cab in the mornings to take you to the ballpark, unless it happens to be Negro driven.
You cannot enter the hotel in which your manager lives without first receiving special permission.
You cannot go to a movie or nightclub in the heart of town, nor enjoy any of the other normal recreational facilities your white teammates enjoy so matter of factly.
You cannot bring your wife and children to the town where you are training because accommodations are not available where you are imprisoned.
You cannot, even if there are facilities, take them to the town’s sprawling beaches or parks, unless, of course, they are designated as “Negro.”
You cannot do anything you would normally do in any of the major-league cities where you make your living during the summer.
You are quartered in a neighborhood that ordinarily you would be ashamed to be seen in.

And so on and so on … Miñoso and other Black players lived in residences without phones, they could not be treated by trainers immediately because they lived in the White hotels, you could not hang out with White teammates because they generally would not come to the part of town where the players were staying.

Miñoso so cheerfully endured. He overcame the indignities of life as Black man in baseball and history has often overlooked just how hard it was.

Speaking of Roberto Clemente, there has been some talk — rightfully so — about retiring his number for every team because of the extraordinary impact he had on the game. Well, Miñoso was Clemente’s hero. Miñoso was Hall of Famer Tony Pérez’s hero. Hall of Famer Orlando Cepeda called Miñoso the Jackie Robinson for Latinos.

(Hy Peskin / Getty Images)

It is utterly inconceivable that Minnie Miñoso is not in the Hall of Fame.

And yet, he really hasn’t ever come close to getting elected. He never received even 25 percent of the BBWAA vote. In trying to put that puzzle together, I’ve looked closely at his Hall of Fame record — he first came on the ballot in 1969 after he retired the first time.

At that point, the Hall of Fame was utterly myopic about the impact of those pioneers who integrated the sport; heck, they still hadn’t elected Satchel Paige to the Hall. Miñoso, who wasn’t given a chance until years after he was ready and faded rapidly after he turned 35, lacked the numbers that Hall of Fame voters cared about then. He didn’t have 2,000 hits. He fell short of being a lifetime .300 hitter. He got just six votes and disappeared from consideration.

Then, as you might know, Miñoso had a strange second life as a ballplayer — Bill Veeck had him return to the White Sox for three games in 1976, when Miñoso was (at least) 50. It was a stunt, the sort of thing Veeck loved. Then in 1980, Miñoso came back again for another Veeck stunt, this time so it could be said he played in five decades.

Then he returned to the Hall of Fame ballot in 1986, but now it had been almost 30 years since he was in his heyday. Miñoso did get some support — receiving as many as 90 votes — but there was no real groundswell for him. Few of the voters had seen him at his best. And even then, there wasn’t a full appreciation for what Miñoso had meant. Heck, it wasn’t until 1998 that the Hall of Fame Veterans’ Committee finally elected Larry Doby, the first African American to play in the American League.

The closest Miñoso came to getting into the Hall of Fame, I think, was in 2006, when a special committee was put together to elect all the remaining Negro Leaguers who were worthy of election. They elected 17 people but Miñoso was not one of them, even though he was on the ballot. It has been reported that the committee did not vote for Miñoso because he only played three years in the Negro Leagues. I wish they could have been more open in their thinking. He played long enough in the Negro Leagues to be on the ballot, and he was a superb Negro Leagues player in his short span. I think they should have looked at his full life and impact.

In 2007, Miñoso was back on the ballot, this time voted for by Hall of Famers. Nobody was elected and Miñoso got just 15 percent of the vote. He should have been on the Historical Era ballot in 2009 but was left off for some reason. He did get on the 2012 Golden Era Committee ballot, and he received nine of the 16 votes, which was pretty good but not good enough for election.

He was back on the ballot for the 2015 Golden Era ballot, and this time he got eight of 16 votes. Minnie Miñoso died a few months later.

I honestly cannot understand why this has even been a question in anyone’s mind. It has been 23 years since everybody finally woke up and elected Larry Doby to the Hall of Fame and it was disgraceful that it took so long.

Well, how much more disgraceful is this? Miñoso was every bit the player Doby was, probably better, and he overcame the same prejudice and had a similarly enormous impact. He made baseball a better game and was beloved like few players in the game’s history. We can argue about all those greats like Rose and Bonds and Clemens and the rest, but let’s be clear: They all stand in line behind Minnie Miñoso.

If you’d like to discuss or ask questions about The Outsiders project, please join Joe in a Live Hall of Fame Q&A on Tuesday, Jan. 26 at 7 p.m. ET.

(Top photo: Getty Images)