Discussion: Baseball Legend Minnie Minoso Dies

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Discussion for article #233816

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What a beautiful face.

All he ever wanted to do was play baseball, and he did it well.

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Great player & person whose career began at an especially ugly time in race relations, a time when black players could not stay in the same hotel as their white teammates.

From the NYTimes:
"When Minoso made his major league debut with Veeck’s Cleveland Indians in 1949, two years after Jackie Robinson broke the majors’ modern color barrier, he struggled with English and had to endure the segregation of the times.

‘I was prepared for the racial insults from opposing players and fans in towns we visited,’ he told Danny Peary in the oral history ‘We Played the Game’ (1994). 'They’d say, ‘You black …’ and I’d flash an insincere grin. Sometimes I’d insult them back in Spanish, warning them, ‘I can tell you worse things than you said to me without you knowing what I said.’

Chico Carrasquel, a Venezuelan White Sox shortstop who was white, became good friends with Minoso after Minoso joined the team in 1951.

'Sometimes he couldn’t get into a restaurant because he was black, so I’d go in and get the food,”'Carrasquel said.

Minoso finished second to the Yankees’ Gil McDougald in the baseball writers’ balloting for the American League rookie of the year in 1951, his first full season in the majors, but was acclaimed the leading rookie by The Sporting News in balloting by players.

On May 1, 1951, having just been traded by the Indians, he became the White Sox’ first black player and hit a home run at Comiskey Park off the Yankees’ Vic Raschi in his first at-bat with Chicago."

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