The Eastern Stars - Mark Kurlansky [34]
Dominicans were not being recruited in those days, and Ozzie probably would never have been found by Major League Baseball had his father not so vociferously opposed the Trujillo regime that the family had to flee to Puerto Rico. From there, like many Puerto Ricans of the time, the Virgils moved to the Bronx, where Ozzie played sandlot ball in his neighborhood—which happened to be near the Polo Grounds, home of the New York Giants. Later he played for the Marines. Virgil could do almost everything in baseball: he was a utility player—someone who filled in where needed—and in his nine years in the major leagues, he played every position except pitcher and center field.
The Giants at the time had hired Alejandro Pompez as a scout. Alex Pompez, born in Key West, Florida, of Cuban parents, had owned two Negro League franchises: the New York Cubans and the Cuban Stars. He was known for bringing Latinos into the Negro League, including Minnie Miñoso and pitcher Martín Dihigo, regarded in Cuba as one of their all-time greatest players.
Pompez was out scouting in the Bronx. He was always looking for Latino players and had even expressed a desire to find some Dominicans when he stumbled on a very talented one right in the neighborhood. Virgil played his rookie year for the Giants in 1956 and later said that he was so nervous during his first major-league at-bat that he could not stop his legs from shaking. He batted four times and failed to get a single hit; he even made an error at third base. This was the official debut of Dominican Major League Baseball.
There was not a great public reaction to the first Dominican—at least not to his nationality. Everyone was too preoccupied with his skin color—especially in 1958, when Virgil was traded to the Detroit Tigers. The Detroit Free Press reported the trade with the headline “Tigers Call Up First Negro,” and on the day of his first game another page-one headline announced, “Tigers’ First Negro to Play 3rd Tonight.” The Detroit News front-page story ran with the headline “Tigers’ Decision to Play Negro Hailed by Race.” Suddenly a man too light to be considered black in his native land was a symbol of racial integration in America. His historic significance as the first Dominican player was almost completely forgotten, despite the fact that at the time the major leagues had forty-six black players and no Dominicans but him. At that point the Tigers were the only major-league club other than the Red Sox that had not integrated, and so his race was the single most important fact about him. A June 9, 1958, editorial in the Free Press began “The Tigers now includes a Negro” and misspelled his name. The same paper thirty-nine years later ran a profile that revealed, “Ozzie Virgil doesn’t think of himself in terms of black and white.”
But even though Virgil was willing to accept his role in Detroit as a black icon, American blacks did not see him as one of their own. “They thought of me more as a Dominican Republic player instead of a Negro,” he once complained to the Detroit Free Press.
The same year that Virgil started, the next Dominican, Felipe Alou, came to the U.S. to play minor-league baseball. His name was actually Felipe Rojas Alou. He went by the surname of Rojas Alou, with the traditional use of the father’s name first, but the scout who recruited him did not understand the Spanish custom with names and assumed that Alou, his mother’s name, was his last name and Rojas was simply a middle name. All the Rojas boys—Felipe, his brothers Matty and Jesús, and Felipe’s son, Moisés, all major leaguers—changed their name rather than contradict the Americans. In 1992, Felipe Alou became manager of the Montreal Expos, the first Latino manager in Major League Baseball.
But it was Ozzie Virgil who had led the way. Juan Marichal, one of the first five Dominican major leaguers and the only Dominican in the Hall of Fame as of 2009, has said that in the