Ernie Banks (L) and Minnie Minoso (R) (Photo Credits baseballhall.org and Public Domain).
Baseball loves to utilize nostalgia any chance it can.
I’m old enough to remember “Turn Back the Clock” games where players would suit up in throwback uniforms and fans would dress up in era-appropriate attire from a time many baseball historians look back fondly upon.
Meanwhile, a segment of the population mostly remembers the agony, pain, and sorrow that visceral racism created when legitimate baseball players never received their due.
Many Chicago baseball fans are familiar with Ernie Banks, affectionately called “Mr. Cub,” who joined the team in 1953, making him the first Black man to make an impact for the North Siders (the team signed quite a few Black players before Banks.)
Meanwhile, four years earlier, Minnie “The Cuban Comet” Miñoso, who later became a White Sox legend, made his Major League debut with the Cleveland baseball franchise in 1949 (he joined the White Sox via trade in 1951 becoming their first Black player).
At the same time, Banks and Miñoso, along with their families, couldn’t live anywhere near the ballparks filled with fans who routinely reveled in their exploits.
Baseball historian Don Zminda’s book, “Justice Batted Last,” details not only the struggles of Banks and Miñoso but also the Black players signed by the Chicago baseball teams who never stuck around long enough to make an impact.
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You probably have never heard of the following players the Cubs and White Sox signed over time. Admittedly, I was a bit ashamed at not knowing some of these men existed:
Billy Hart.
Sam Hairston.
Gene Baker.
Connie Johnson.
Bob Boyd.
Sam Jones.
In some cases, these players’ appearance—not merit—was the main reason franchises passed on their generational talents.
Imagine passing on Jackie Robinson and Willie Mays.
It happened.
The White Sox made those instances a reality.
Imagine trading a player who was later elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame because the franchise was fearful of having too many Black players.
The Cleveland baseball team made that choice by trading Miñoso to the White Sox.
Imagine signing a three-sport athlete and releasing them after an 11-game trial run.
The Cubs did that.
Zminda, who grew up on the Northwest Side, remembers a time when the White Sox, led by Miñoso, outplayed and outdrew their North Side counterparts in attendance.
Zminda says his interest in writing a book was piqued when the White Sox reached out to him to assist them in his capacity as a baseball historian in bolstering their case for Miñoso’s Hall of Fame induction.
The book will be released on Tuesday, March 11.
“… The more I looked into his story, it triggered me into looking more into baseball integration, and that led me to Ernie Banks and the idea of writing about both the Cubs and the White Sox in Chicago during that period,” Zminda said. “… My dad, even though he was on the North Side, he was always a White Sox fan so I picked that up from him. And in the 50s—people don’t believe this—but the White Sox were a really good team. During the 1950s, the Cubs were mostly terrible, so I had to root for the White Sox; was a fairly easy thing to do.”
Reading “Justice Batted Last,” amid the Trump Administration’s ongoing efforts to stamp out Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, better known as DEI, shows why these folks continue to make the same bad faith arguments regarding merit as when baseball franchises who initially passed on adding Black players not to upset their primarily white fanbases.
Some folks in the social media cheap seats love to ask why race is brought mentioned in our supposedly “colorless” society while ignoring the reasons why the Negro Leagues existed in the first place.
Speaking from a sports lens—one can make the case on a macro level—the integration of Major League Baseball provided a blueprint showing how anyone, regardless of race, can succeed in the sport if given a proper chance.
Former Negro Leaguers led the charge changing baseball going forward. During the time period of 1949 to 1959, the National League’s MVP award winner previously played in the Negro Leagues—seven straight years and nine times overall.
Amid baseball’s self-imposed struggles with integrating the game despite Black players providing net positive results, many other African Americans who became gainfully employed during the Great Migration found significant obstacles in acquiring the American Dream.
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While Zminda’s book documents the racism Banks and Miñoso received over time and the stories of Cubs and White Sox players who never received a fair shot to make the Major Leagues, he connected that history with an event that sparked the Cicero Race Riots of 1951.
When a law enforcement officer turned him away, CTA bus driver Harvey Clark attempted to rent an apartment in Cicero, a Chicago suburb. Clark, a World War II veteran and an HBCU graduate (Fisk University) was embroiled in a legal dispute over the matter. Once Clark and his family were allowed to move into the apartment, a mob formed around them soon after. The mob, among other things, set a fire and threw their belongings into it. One hundred and eighteen men were arrested in connection with the riot (none were indicted).
“The first chapter of the book is about 1951 when the White Sox actually traded for Miñoso, and he became their first Black player, and the team had been terrible for a long time,”said Zminda. “All of a sudden they’re winning. They’re in first place. They’re setting an attendance record. He’s this local hero. He’s a big figure in Chicago. And then I get to July, and I’m just going through some microfilm, and all of a sudden I see the story about the riots in Cicero when a Black family just tried to rent an apartment there. And I thought, you know, this is Chicago, and that’s kind of the story…I wanted to add that stuff to the book.”
One of Clark’s daughters, Michele, went on to become the first Black woman to helm a CBS News correspondent position. At 29, she died in a 1972 plane crash while investigating the Watergate scandal that led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon.
A magnet high school in Austin is named in her memory.
“[Banks and Miñoso] were both outgoing. Always had a smiling face. Related really well to people. Never complained about race matters, and so it was easy for white people to accept them,” said Zminda. “… Jackie [Robinson] really pushed not only about how he was treated as a baseball player, but how he was treated as a citizen. Ernie and Minnie didn’t do that so it’s easy for us to accept them because they made it easy for us. But the reality was a lot more complex than that.
“And you hear about the story of the Clark family, you can see what those times were like, and it took a long, long time for that stuff to change. And, you know, Ernie and Minnie, they both had to live on the South Side. Ernie played on the North Side team, but he didn’t move to the North Side until he was in probably his 10th year or so. Chicago kind of wasn’t ready for that.”
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A lot of Zminda’s research for the book was found in the Black Press. The Chicago Defender, Ebony, The Pittsburgh Courier, and the New York Amsterdam News, among others, heroically countered the narrative of the baseball purists and mainstream media of the day.
One can read “Justice Batted Last” and say not much has changed—or things did actually change, and were taken right back to the way they used to be. Nevertheless, Zminda says the reader will make those astute connections tying the past to the present.
“I think the title says a lot of what I was trying to say in the book, ‘Justice Batted Last,’” said Zminda. “Eventually, we came to the point where Black players and Black citizens got much more of an opportunity to play baseball, work in occupations that were all-white in earlier years, and then eventually to live where they wanted to live. But it took decades and decades.
“There’s a sense of after Jackie Robinson that the story is over. The issue has been settled, but it really wasn’t settled. I mean, these guys were signed by Major League teams. You can’t really say they were overly welcomed. They couldn’t stay with their teammates in Spring Training if they trained in Arizona and Florida..”