By Robert Heuer
Former Minnesota Twins owner Calvin Griffith, whose uncle Clark Griffith had owned the Washington club, denied that Estalella was black. “It was said that some of our Cubans had black blood, which made them black according to the standards of the world,” Griffith told me a decade ago, shortly before selling the franchise that he’d brought to the midwest in 1961. “They may have been black in the minds of blacks. But Bobby Estalella was not negroid. He had very thin lips and was more yellow than anything else.”
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“I’ve told lots of reporters Jackie Robinson wasn’t the first black player,” said Howie Haak, the veteran scout who loaded Pittsburgh Pirates lineups with Latinos for several decades–starting with Roberto Clemente, a Puerto Rican whose skin color would once have prevented his Hall of Fame career. “There was Bobby Estalella, and Tommy de la Cruz pitched for the Reds. He was darker than my shoes. But nobody ever picked up on the story.”
Estalella passed because the island’s genetic melting pot confounded baseball’s racial purists. Reflecting Mediterranean mores in which slave and master were equal in God’s eyes, Cuban society wedded Spanish Catholic and African cultures. The intermingling of the masses inspired a pecking order that featured terms like prieto (dark), trigue–o (less dark), and jabao (least dark of the darks). In the coffee-and-milk equation of Cuban life, Estalella was heavy on the lighteners. Un jabao.
In 1983 I dialed Estalella’s phone number in Miami. “I didn’t know how to speak English but went on learning little by little,” he said softly in Spanish. The highlight of his nine-year American League career was a pinch-hit grand slam off Detroit’s Bobo Newsom. “I never had a problem in the minor leagues or the major leagues,” he explained. “You have to be careful and do what managers tell you. I can say with some certainty that we always understood each other.”
“Your grandfather broke into the majors when he was 24,” I said, and told him a story I’d heard from Calvin Griffith. In 1935 Griffith, also 24, was in his first year as president of a minor-league team affiliated with the Senators. He thought he’d discovered the next Babe Ruth. He convinced his uncle Clark to make an addition to the Washington roster.
“He said it was a lot more difficult, especially for him coming out of Cuba,” Bobby replied. “He had to work harder at it just because he was Latin and wasn’t American speaking. He didn’t speak the language very well or maybe that he didn’t understand it as well. In that sense, he had a tough barrier to deal with.”
