Baseball without boundaries

Black players had greater freedom in Mexican League

Satchel Paige, shown above in 1956, pitched in Mexico in the late 1930s. (AP Photo)

South of the Color Barrier: How Jorge Pasquel and the Mexican League Pushed Baseball Toward Racial Integration
By John Virtue
McFarland, 231 pp., illustrated, paperback, $29.95

Of the summer of 1942, during which he played professional baseball in Mexico, Monte Irvin said, "It was the first time in my life I felt that I was free."

Such freedom was not possible for black ballplayers in the United States, where Major League Baseball was still segregated, and where traveling Negro League players were often refused service in restaurants, hotels, and even gas stations.

But a black professional ballplayer's life was full of opportunities in Mexico because Jorge Pasquel, a wealthy and ambitious Mexican businessman, had seen the signs in the United States that read "No dogs, Negroes, Mexicans," and he understood the advantage that vicious prejudice gave him in creating baseball teams in his native land that would be as good as the major-league clubs for which stars such as Irvin, Satchel Paige, and Cuban phenom Martin Dihigo could not play.

To the distress of Branch Rickey and the rest of the men who ran American baseball, Pasquel was an equal-opportunity employer. He signed white ballplayers, too. His strategy was to show up in the lobby of a hotel where major leaguers were staying, with a suitcase full of cash. When he'd cornered a prospect, he'd open up the suitcase and offer it to the ballplayer in return for a commitment to jump to Mexico. Pitcher Sal Maglie was among the players who accepted Pasquel's offer. He said he made as much in one season in Mexico as he would have made in five playing for the New York Giants in the majors, where the reserve clause artificially depressed salaries. Stan Musial, to whom Pasquel offered a $125,000 signing bonus and a quarter of a million dollars over five years in 1946, knew he wouldn't make as much in a lifetime of playing for the St. Louis Cardinals and acknowledged that "all that money makes a fellow do a lot of thinking before he says no."

Black players didn't need to think much before saying yes to Pasquel in the late 1930s and '40s. Arthur Pennington played three seasons for the Veracruz Blues in the '40s and reported that he "never had so much freedom in all my life, because you could eat anywhere and they got the finest restaurants, the beautifulest women - all colors, don't make no difference. It's beautiful. Everybody swimmin' together."

Pasquel's endeavor, which began more than a decade before the "great experiment" by which Jackie Robinson and Rickey began the integration of American baseball, proved that black, white, and Hispanic ballplayers could share the infield, the outfield, and the clubhouse as well as eat in the same restaurants and sleep in the same hotels. Pasquel also gave black men the opportunity to manage integrated teams, a challenge Major League Baseball didn't accept until 1975.

For his success, Pasquel was characterized as an outlaw by the men running Major League Baseball, and at one point he was forbidden by the US government from entering the country.

The drama inherent in these circumstances and the shame they cast on the United States in general and the major leagues in particular provide plenty of material for a book. But to his credit author John Virtue has more in mind than baseball. He sets the story of Pasquel's work as a promoter, businessman, hustler, and champion of equal rights against the background of the historical relationship between Pasquel's native land and the colossus to the north, a relationship that Porfirio Diaz, for 35 years the president of Mexico, once summarized by opining "Poor Mexico. We are so far away from God and so close to the United States."

It was that geographical circumstance that had led the United States to absorb half of Mexico as a result of the 1846-48 war that a congressman named Abraham Lincoln regarded as unconstitutional, and that U.S. Grant, who served in the conflict, characterized in his memoirs as "the most unjust war ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation." In World War II, when Americans who would otherwise have been harvesting crops in what had been Mexico were instead fighting in Europe and the South Pacific, the United States asked Mexico for help. Would it send north some laborers? According to Virtue, "The Mexican government initially had some reservations because of the treatment given Mexican farm workers in the United States in the past," since "during the Great Depression, nearly half a million Mexicans were rounded up and deported at Congress's behest."

The result was the Emergency Labor Program, which to some extent temporarily recognized the humanity and rights of the Mexican workers. It might be a stretch to conclude that in the cases of both the guest workers of the '40's and the black ballplayers of the same era, Mexico led the United States toward equal rights, and Virtue is too careful to make that leap. But the suggestion is there.

Bill Littlefield hosts National Public Radio's "Only a Game." His most recent book is also titled "Only a Game."