In his first at-bat in a White Sox uniform, on May 1, 1951, at old Comiskey Park, Orestes “Minnie” Miñoso homered off Yankees pitcher Vic Raschi.
It was the start of a beautiful relationship between Miñoso and Sox fans, one that continued for 64 years until his death in 2015 at age 90.
As the first Black major league player in Chicago, Miñoso was the Sox’s Jackie Robinson. He was hired by the team a good two years before the Cubs signed Gene Baker and played Ernie Banks in 1953 to break the Cubs’ color line.
There was a certain air of confidence about Miñoso as he took warmups before facing the mighty Yankees on that day in May. With one out in the bottom of the first, Paul Lehner singled off Raschi, a three-time 21-game winner for New York. Up stepped Miñoso.
Raschi threw, Miñoso swung and the ball took off to straightaway center, disappearing over the old bullpen fence, 415 feet away. Some debut.
The team went on to win 20 of its next 23 games to take the American League lead. Miñoso, who was named the Sporting News’ Rookie of the Year, said he never worried about being Chicago’s first Black major leaguer.
“No, I was not scared,” the Cuban player told author Bob Vanderberg in his book “Sox: From Lane and Fain to Zisk and Fisk.”
“Because in baseball, I never was scared of nothing. I thought I was like in my own home.”
Nicknamed “The Cuban Comet,” Miñoso spent 12 seasons with the Sox and emerged as one of the game’s first Afro-Latino stars, starting a thriving tradition of Cuban players on the South Side.
He was a nine-time All-Star and won three Gold Glove Awards as an outfielder with Cleveland, the White Sox, the St. Louis Cardinals and the Washington Senators. Before that, he made the All-Star roster in two of his three Negro Leagues seasons with the New York Cubans and was part of a championship team in 1947. He also mentored many Latino players and finally made it into the Baseball Hall of Fame posthumously, voted in on the Golden Era Committee’s ballot for the 2022 class.
“He wrote a huge legacy for all of us,” former Sox shortstop Alexei Ramírez, who was born in Cuba, said in 2022.
“Minnie helped the White Sox reach out to Chicago’s Hispanic and African American communities. He built bridges to the South Side of Chicago in a time when there was a racial transformation of the city,” said author and unofficial White Sox historian Richard Lindberg.
Sox Chairman Jerry Reinsdorf said in 2015 that when he thinks about Miñoso he doesn’t think about breaking barriers, he thinks about the impact Miñoso made by being a great player and a great human being.
“The White Sox, really outside of his family, were the most important thing in his life,” Reinsdorf said. “He was incredibly nice to everybody. He’d come around the ballpark, sometimes bringing his dog, and he had something nice to say to everybody. It didn’t matter whether you were important or just a minor employee. Minnie treated everybody exactly the same.”
