With the historic and groundbreaking appearance of a Cuban Little League team in this year’s Little League World Series it brings back memories of a time when the Williamsport professional baseball team, the Grays, could have rightfully had Williamsport proclaimed, “Havana on the Susquehanna.’ During 1944 and 1945, those Grays’ teams were made up mostly of white Cuban ballplayers.
This article’s information comes primarily from Dr. Jim Quigel’s article in the Summer 2004 issue of Pennsylvania Heritage, which contains research and interviews that Quigel and I did in preparation for our history of professional baseball in Williamsport, titled Gateway to the Majors, published by Penn State Press in 2001.
The period discussed occurred during World War II when many consumer goods were rationed to help support the war effort. Good professional baseball players were also rationed because many were serving in the war. New imaginative ways had to be developed to fill out the minor and major league team rosters. Many minor leagues suspended play during the duration of the war.
The Washington Senators, a notoriously cheap franchise owned by Clark Griffith, found a unique way to find baseball talent. They combed Cuba for baseball players that would not be subject to the draft and could command meager salaries. However, they had to be white because even the war emergency helped maintain a solid color line in baseball.
The man Griffith selected to help find this talent was Joe Cambria. Cambria ingratiated himself to Clark Griffith and moonlighted as a roving scout for the Senators. Cuba became Cambria’s primary beat, and he established a “bird dog” scouting network to tap into the rich baseball talent from the Cuban Amateur and Professional Leagues. Over twenty-five years, beginning in the 1930s, Cambria would single-handedly establish the “Cuban Pipeline,” which eventually led to the signing of seventy-eight players to the Washington farm system.
Cuban baseball historian Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria noted that Cambria’s “profit Jay in quantity, not quality.” Columnist Robert Considine, writing for Collier’s, accused Cambria of “going ivory hunting in Cuba” — a not-so-veiled reference to his search for white Cuban baseball talent. “Papa Joe Cambria hadn’t done so bad, and would do even better if he would get over his predilections for signing Cubanolas,” observed baseball historian Morris A. Beale.
The Cambria brothers owned a controlling interest in the Springfield, Massachusetts, team of the Class A Eastern League (EL). A dismal financial season in 1943 led them to the decision to relocate the troubled franchise to another city. That new city turned out to be Williamsport. With less than three weeks to prepare for opening day, the Grays’ new manager, Ray Kolp, undertook a “crash course” in Spanish and went about the task of meshing the Cuban and American players. His patience would be acutely tested during his two-year tenure as manager of Williamsport’s Cuban teams from 1944 to 1945.
These Cuban players had a great deal to adjust to, a new language, a new culture, cooler, wetter weather, and perhaps most challenging of all, being in an environment in which they were a cultural curiosity, in a time of less cultural diversity.
They had the advantage of comprising a majority of the team’s members but were billeted as a group five miles north of the city at Haleeka campgrounds, in Cogan Station. It remains unclear, however, if management’s decision to house the team at Haleeka was to prevent the isolation of individual Cuban players or to sequester the team as a whole from contact with the public. An interpreter-trainer was assigned to help the players with their English and ease their transition to life in Williamsport.
For the most part, the Cubans were well-received by local fans. And, in turn, conducted themselves appropriately in public. During the two seasons in Williamsport, the Cubans often gathered at the Lycoming Hotel or one of its many Italian restaurants to celebrate victory with drinks and dinner.
As ballplayers, the Cubans were a novelty to fans across the Eastern League. Sportswriters in the various cities penned various nicknames for the team, including “The Rumba Rascals,” “The Laughing Latins,” and simply “the Williamsport Canebrakes,” indicative of the stereotyping of Latin Americans prevalent among sportswriters of the era and by the public at large. Al Decker, the former sports editor of the Grit, remembered their “constant chatter, blazing speed, and defensive athleticism set them apart from the other Eastern League teams.” He recalled that the teams of 1944-1945 lacked a legitimate power hitter. The Cubans played what baseball purists labeled the “inside game,” winning by bunting, advancing runners one out at a time, stealing bases, and using their hustle and speed on base paths to force defensive errors by the opposition. Decker recalled that the Cubans’ erratic play and daring on the base paths often exasperated Kolp to the point of “hitting the bottle.”
In 1944, they started out quickly, led by outstanding outfielder Jose Zardon, nicknamed the “The Cuban Canebreak,” snappy infielder Frankie Gallardo, and standout pitcher Danny Parra, who was the best pitcher during the Cuban years.
The novelty of the Cubans’ presence eventually wore out in opposing Eastern League cities and teams, and it was replaced by ethnic taunts, brawls, and a steady barrage of “brush-back pitches.” This was not a myth concocted by the hometown press. Samuel “Chic” Feldman, dean of the EL sportswriters and sports editor of the Scranton Tribune, summarized the contention. “It grieves me to report that some Eastern League players and even some managers went out of their way to abuse the Cuban kids,” Feldman opined. “This blind hate may have been responsible for Williamsport’s failure to crash the first division in 1944. It would be a hard allegation to prove, yet there was talk in reliable circles that the other clubs ‘ganged up’ on Williamsport. Yes, even saving their best pitchers to toss at the once-laughing Latins.”
Unfortunately, this carried over into the 1945 season. The Grays with the Cubans started out slowly and were in an early hole that they never got out of. This was punctuated during the summer by some ugly incidents with opposing teams. The worst offenders were the Utica Blue Sox, a Phillies farm club that included future Hall of Famer Richie Ashburn and future Whiz Kid player Granny Hamner. The chief troublemaker on the Blue Sox was virulent racist Cecil “Turkey” Tyson.
Things came to a head on Sunday, July 8, at Williamsport’s Bowman Field. Grays’ pitcher Leonardo Goicochea sent Tyson sprawling to the ground with a brush-back pitch. He took threatening steps toward Goicochea before the umpire stopped him. After another pitch, Tyson, however, went directly for the Cuban pitcher, setting off a bench-clearing donnybrook that spurred Williamsport fans to pour out of the stands before city police quelled the “riot.”
A week later, there was another incident with the Blue Sox, this time in Utica. “Turkey” Tyson went after another Grays’ pitcher, Daniel Parra. By all accounts, Parra held his own, verbally and physically, before Utica police restored order. However, the constant abuse on the road by fans and internal fighting had worn down the Cubans. There was even tension among Grays’ teammates; infielder Hector Arrago had fisticuffs with his teammate, Bill Schaedler, on two instances in a one-week period. To lessen tensions, Schaedler was given his release from the team.
The Grays finished out the season with a dismal record of 52-85, a record fifty-two games behind the Utica Blue Sox.
1945 marked the end of the stormy “Cuban Years” when Clark Griffith and Joe Cambria discontinued their working agreement with Williamsport. But even though the Cuban Seasons were tumultuous, they left a lasting mark and a fond spot on the fans that saw them play at Bowman Field those seasons. They helped to pave the way for the many multicultural teams that have called Bowman Field their home since those wartime years.
