Eleventh in a season-long series
A while back in this year’s Pioneers series, I identified Luis Castro, born in Colombia in 1876, as Major League Baseball’s first player of Hispanic origin. Some readers pointed out that Castro’s debut in 1902, with the Philadelphia Athletics, was rather late, as Steve Bellán, born in Cuba, had preceded him by three decades. The difficulty with that observation was that Bellán played three seasons in the National Association, a professional league that preceded the creation of the National League, and thus MLB, in 1876.
Other readers noted that the parents of Sandy Nava of the Providence Grays of 1882 were Mexican, so he might be regarded as the first MLB player of Hispanic descent. A catcher for Hoss Radbourn, he also played ball in California under his English stepfather’s last name of Irwin. The record books indicate that Nava was born in San Francisco (a Mexican city until 1846) in 1850. In truth, he was born ten years later, to a Mexican mother, Josefa Simental, and an unknown father (presumably named Nava).
The question of descent vs. heritage vs. origin is an interesting one — how many fans today would regard Ted Williams as Mexican? — but let’s get back to Cuba. Until the Revolution of 1959, Cuba sent the most players to the major leagues and the Negro Leagues (today it is the Dominican Republic; we’ll focus on Ozzie Virgil in this space soon).
As of this moment, 384 men born in Cuba have played in MLB, not including Bellán but counting many Negro Leaguers of the period 1920–1948 who, because of the color of their skin, were not eligible to play in the white leagues. Since the Commissioner’s ruling of December 16, 2020, however, they are today recognized as major leaguers. (Among these are Pedro Dibut, a light-skinned Cuban who played with the Cincinnati Reds in 1924–1925 after debuting in the Negro Leagues, a sequence followed a generation later by dark-skinned Cubans Lino Dinoso, Hector Rodriguez, and Minnie Miñoso.)
Before anyone dreamed of playing baseball for a living, counting-house friends in New York, with their offices also in Havana and Matanzas, could be expected to extend credit to their patrons, buy their sugar, make their investments, disburse allowances, and educate their young men at a boarding school and, later, college. Estevan Enrique Bellán was one such Cuban boy sent from Havana to New York at age 13 to be educated at the preparatory school of St. John’s College (today’s Fordham University). There he played ball for the Rose Hill club, and upon his graduation in 1868 went on to play for the powerful Unions of Morrisania.
Bellán (1849–1932) went on to play the infield in baseball’s first professional league, with the Troy Haymakers and the New York Mutuals. In the winter of 1873 he returned to Cuba and started up the Club Habana baseball team. He played in the first organized baseball game ever played on the island, on December 27, 1874, at Palmar del Junco Field. Club Habana beat Club Matanzas by 51–9. For this reason, he is regarded in the U.S. as the “Father of Cuban Baseball.”
Cubans, however, might put forward another candidate. Also playing for Club Habana in the aforementioned game are two other early giants of Cuban baseball: Emilio Sabourín and the little-known (in the U.S.) Ernesto Guilló. Sabourin was elected to the Cuban Baseball Hall of Fame in 1941; Guilló’s brother Nemesio in 1948; and Bellán not until 1984, in a ceremony held in Miami.
Like Bellán, Nemesio Guilló Romaguera (1847–1931) was sent to the U.S. by a father who was in the sugar trade. Along with his brother, in 1858 he was sent to Spring Hill College in Mobile, Alabama — a private, Roman Catholic school founded in 1830. Many other Cuban boys joined them there over the next two years.
In recent years I discovered, with help from Peter Morris and César González, another candidate for a “father of baseball” that might be celebrated in both nations: the previously unnoted Rafael Julian de la Rúa of Matanzas. In 1860, at the age of 12, he is listed in the U.S. census, living in Newton, Massachusetts, a student at R.B. Blaisdell’s school. A classmate of Bellán at Fordham from 1864–1867, he transferred to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) of Troy for 1868, and in that year joined the Haymakers, pitching in 12 games. A lefthander with a peculiar screwball pitch, Rúa was so effective against the New York Mutuals on August 4 that the Troy Times observed, “Rúa’s pitching was the acme of perfection — not too swift to be unreliable, and with just enough of the ‘twist’ to prevent the Mutuals from making their heaviest batting.”
Because Rúa played against professional clubs before Bellán left Fordham to join the Unions of Morrisania, it may be said that he and not Bellán was the first Cuban national to play high-level ball in the States. Rúa did not graduate from RPI, nor did he continue to play ball after 1868. He was naturalized as an American citizen in 1874, while living in New York City. He traveled to Cuba on separate trips in 1874 and 1875, but there his trail goes cold.
Looking back at the stories of Bellán, Guilló, and Rúa, it becomes evident that American colleges were the most important agents in the proliferation of the game in Latin America, even more than the U.S. military and its multiple occupations, as we had long supposed. By 1879 American players from the National League were playing winter ball in Cuba. In 1886, El Sport, a Havana weekly, declared: “Baseball is today, without distinction of classes, age and sex, the preferred diversion of all [Cubans].”
PIONEERS: Steve Bellán was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.