"Playing America's Game" talk on Book TV

Book TV (C-SPAN2) will re-air on Saturday, July 12, 8 am (est) the book lecture I delivered at the National Archives as part of their Hispanic Heritage Month event last September. Tune in and let me know what you think.

http://www.booktv.org/program.aspx?ProgramId=8681&SectionName=History&PlayMedia=No

Tribute to Jules Tygiel

For many of us who study race and baseball, Jules Tygiel’s Baseball’s Great Experiment remains one of the most sophisticated treatments of baseball’s integration and its impact on U.S. society. It is one of the most widely read books on Jackie Robinson and baseball integration, and justly so.

Tygiel approached the integration of baseball as more than just a story of the Major Leagues. He interviewed dozens of Negro League players and researched white mainstream and black newspapers to craft a narrative that allowed readers to understand the profound impact that segregation had on the US national pastime and the complicated terrain that integration pioneers traversed as they participated in the process of desegregating organized baseball.

I first read Baseball’s Great Experiment as an undergraduate at Vassar College working on a senior’s thesis on baseball’s introduction to the Caribbean. Reading the stories he wrote on how racial perceptions in communities throughout the United States affected Latinos such as Vic Power, Orlando Cepeda, Juan Marichal, and Minnie Miñoso as organized baseball underwent its transformation inspired me to chart a new path of research: To study Latinos, baseball, and race as a way to better comprehend the impact of baseball’s color line and gain a fuller appreciation of the story of race in American life.

I first met Jules Tygiel at an annual meeting of the North American Society of Sport Historians where he was to deliver a keynote address. I was a young graduate student at the University of Michigan and extremely excited to meet the man who had crafted such a compelling narrative about baseball integration.

I approached his table with trepidation, hoping to just say hello and thank him for the inspiration. He insisted I sit and that we talk. There began a collegial relationship that evolved into an intellectual collaboration. Indeed, not all senior scholars are eager to entertain young scholars seeking to address what some may perceive as a ‘gap’ in their scholarship.

Jules Tygiel was more than a historian, to me and many other young historians working inside and outside of academe, whether writing on baseball, urban history, or politics. Yes, he was an exemplar as a baseball historian who set a standard for writing baseball history in a scholarly manner yet also accessible to a popular audience. But, he was also very giving of his time, willing to share his wealth of knowledge and information, and offer advice and encouragement.

A number of years ago, when the University of California Press asked me for names of potential reviewers of my book manuscript, his name came immediately to mind—who better to entrust the years of work I invested in this project than the individual who helped inspired it. In the end, Jules read my book manuscript several times and gave thorough and thoughtful criticism. Whatever success my book Playing America’s Game: Baseball, Latinos, and the Color Line has enjoyed since its release is a credit to his wonderful, giving spirit and his gracefulness as a senior scholar committed to mentoring the next generation.

Last year’s All-Star Game Week festivities in San Francisco gave me the opportunity to meet Jules again in person. I was in town to do a book signing at the Mission Bay Borders Bookstore across from the Giants ballpark, conduct some interviews, and catch up with a few friends. It was also the first chance I had to personally thank him for his inspiration, guidance, and encouragement through the years after the publication of my book the previous month.

The highlight of my time in San Francisco was talking baseball, history, and about life in academe with Jules, and being given a tour of his beloved San Francisco—a Brooklyn transplant, Jules had long come to grips with rooting for the Giants.

I was hoping to catch up again next month in San Francisco when I attend a friend’s wedding and a Dodgers-Giants game. But the cancer that had been in remission had made an unwelcome comeback.

He will be missed, but his impact will continue through the scholars and historians he mentored and the scholarship they produce.

posted on Counterpunch.com on July 11, 2008, http://www.counterpunch.org/burgos07112008.html

Minoso and Historical Record: A Response to an Email

This past weekend I had the pleasure of speaking on a panel at the inaugural Double Duty Classic hosted by the Chicago White Sox. This event was created to honor Ted "Double Duty" Radcliffe and is fashioned after the Negro League's East-West Classic. Held annually in Chicago from 1933 to 1959, the East-West Classic was Black baseball's all-star game and was, as fellow Negro League historian Larry Lester observed during the panel, the equivalent of football's "Super Bowl" in terms of its significance as a celebratory event for the African American community.

Prior to the game, the White Sox organized a forum which consisted of three panels and was moderated by ESPN's Michael Smith. The panel on which I participated, the first of the three, focused on the legacy of the Negro Leagues and included Sharon Robinson (daughter of Jackie Robinson) along with fellow Negro League historians Eddie Bedford and Larry Lester. My participation on the panel was to account for the history of Latinos in the Negro Leagues, and to offer the perspective of significance of the Negro League for Latinos.

When I got home, I had an email (below) in my in-b0x that was sent immediately following the event. I have not joined the Blackberry generation (although my Dad has one--how weird is that?), so I did not see the email until arriving home late that evening. However, I wanted to share my response to the e-mailed query since it speaks to what precisely I hope my work as a scholar speaks.

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7/7/08

Dear Prof. Burgos Jr.:

Shouldn't the record be corrected to reclassify Minoso as NOT being the first black player on the Chicago Whites Sox?

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Dear Sir:

I entirely disagree that the record is inaccurate in naming (and honoring) Minnie Minoso as the first black player on the White Sox as a historian who studies the period of integration in baseball and as a scholar who studies race in the Americas (the U.S. and Latin America). He was indeed the first black player on the Sox, and that is exactly how the Chicago Defender, Chicago Tribune, and all the other papers in Chicago wrote about this story as it unfolded. They viewed him as a black man, and he was treated as such by opposing players and segregation sympathizers.

Minoso underwent two levels of acculturation in coming to the US to play professional baseball, dealing with both racial and cultural bias from every sector of US society. Simply put, Minoso is a black Latino who endured and overcame a different set of challenges than any other ballplayer in the Major Leagues in being the first black Latino to perform in the Majors (1949 with Cleveland) and the first black Latino to pioneer the racial integration of a Major League team (White Sox, 1951).

To state otherwise is to deny the history of Minoso being the subject of racial animus on and off the field--the insults hurled at him from opponents of integration, the pitches thrown at him from opposing teams, the separate accommodations he had to endure when traveling through the American League circuit. Opposing teams and segregation sympathizers did not give him a pass because he was Cuban, they saw a black (Cuban) man before them and made their feelings known.

Indeed, it would be historically disingenuous to strip Minoso of this recognition. This is a man whose major league aspirations were placed on hold due to Jim Crow policies and racial thinking of individuals inside US baseball circles, specifically organized baseball. Thus, like the majority of Latinos prior to 1947, Minoso started the US portion of his baseball career in the Negro Leagues, where he played for three seasons (1946-1948). To strip him of this place in the annals of history would be to deny what Puerto Rican Hall of Famer Orlando Cepeda has stated of the early Latino pioneers allowed to enter MLB once the project of racial integration of baseball began: "We had two strikes on us, one because we were Latino and another because we were black."

In fact, I have argued that too many deny what black Latinos went through in recalling and/or writing about this era in baseball and American history. For in addition to racial slights, they also endured the cultural chauvinism of white and black Americans for their being Latino. This made their successes on the field all the more greater.

Minoso is a standard bearer for this history, his personal grace and dignity in the midst of this adversity makes his baseball excellence ("stats") all the more compelling. In this regard, he is quite like Jackie Robinson and Larry Doby, their statistics do not convey their historical importance nor their achievements. All three ought to be honored with plaques in Cooperstown. Yet, it is Minoso who has been denied that rightful place in history precisely because so many deny the significance of his blackness and how race so affected the journey and triumph of black Latinos who part of the generation of integration pioneers.

In the end, ironically enough, Minoso was not the first Latino to play for the White Sox, but he WAS most definitely the first black man who took on the awesome challenge of integrating the Sox and enduring the racial animosities of the era. The path that Minoso and other black Latinos (or Afro-Latinos) was indeed different than that which Rafael Almeida, Armando Marsans, Adolfo Luque, Miguel Angel Gonzalez, and other Latinos permitted to perform in the Major Leagues before Jackie Robinson and the official start of baseball's racial integration. To alter the record of how racial understandings affected Latinos as they were assigned to different locations along the color line is to deny how much race matters then as now.