Cuban Star
How One Negro-League Owner Changed the Face of Baseball
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- USD 11.99
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- USD 11.99
Descripción editorial
In Cuban Star, an interpretive account of Alejandro "Alex" Pompez's life in context, Adrian Burgos, Jr. follows Pompez's--and baseball's--path through the twentieth century's changing social and racial landscape.
When the selection committee voted Alex Pompez into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2006, some cried foul. A Negro-league owner during baseball's glory days, Pompez was known as an early and steadfast advocate for Latino players, helping bring baseball into the modern age. So why was his induction so controversial?
Like many in the era of segregated baseball, Pompez found that the game alone could never make all ends meet. To finance his beloved team, the New York Cubans, he delved headlong into a sin many baseball fans find unforgivable—gambling. He built one of the most infamous numbers rackets in Harlem, eventually arousing the ire of the famed prosecutor Thomas Dewey. But he also led his Cubans, with their star lineup of Latino players, to a Negro-league World Series championship in 1947.
In this effervescent biography, the historian and sportswriter Adrian Burgos, Jr., brings to life the world of professional baseball during a time of enormous change. Following Pompez from his early days to the twilight of his career, Burgos offers a glimpse inside the clubhouse as both owners and players struggled with the new realities of the game. That today's rosters are filled with names like Rodriguez, Pujols, Rivera, and Ortiz is a testament to Pompez and his lasting influence.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In his first book, Playing America's Game: Baseball, Latinos, and the Color Line, Burgos celebrated the role Latinos played in the development of professional baseball. Here he continues that theme in this highly readable in-depth account of one of the key Latino figures in baseball's early years: Alex Pompez (1890 1974), who overcame an early role in the Harlem numbers racket to become "the most successful force in the incorporation of Latino talent" in U.S. baseball history. Burgos expertly details Pompez's career over seven decades, including his troubled youth in Cuba during the 1900s; his move to the U.S. and his creation in 1923 of the wildly popular Cuban Stars team of the Eastern Colored League; and his role beginning in 1950 as a scout with the New York Giants in the "dismantling of baseball's color line" which not only helped the early careers of future legends Willie Mays and Willie McCovey but also aided such "talented Afro-Latino players" as Orlando Cepeda and Felipe Alou. Burgos definitively shows how Pompez helped create a "Dominican pipeline" of players that "laid the groundwork for what would become the major leagues' most significant source of foreign-born talent by the end of the twentieth century."
