#9

Baseball, unlike football, has a past that matters.  Take Red Grange or Y.A. Tittle out of the NFL, and who cares?  Do the same to MLB with Babe Ruth or Bob Feller, and you have a problem.  Who broke the color line in football or the NBA?  Who broke the color line for the Brooklyn Dodgers April 15, 1947?  And why did Minnie Minoso have to die yesterday?

I was too young to ever see Minoso play, but the film clips they showed on the news were enough to get a sense of the man and his times.  Baseball on the South Side of Chicago in the 1950s produced a body electric, fueled by Minoso, Aparicio, Fox and Pierce doing battle with the Yankees, White Sox pinstripes superior in look if not result to those other, more famous ones.  Minnie Minoso didn’t so much run the bases as he flew around them.

All those 1963 hits and 1136 runs scored and 1023 runs batted in didn’t start until Minoso reached the age of 25, or 28, or later; the exact age remains a mystery.  The stats did not depend on Minoso’s ability to speak English, which came slowly, or to deal with the prejudice of fans who disliked a player both black and Cuban, which came right away.  Minoso simply produced in such a way as to win the undying affection of those born south of State and Madison.  I saw that at SoxFest four years ago.

Minoso was walking by and stopped to autograph a ball for me; he was like royalty in a three-piece suit.  A line of people formed instantly.  No one joked or slapped the old player on the back.  Rather, they stood quietly in line waiting their turn to greet the man who by his play so long ago would now be our king.