Book review: “Justice Batted Last: Ernie Banks, Minnie Minoso and the Unheralded Players Who Integrated Chicago’s Major League Teams” by Don Zminda

Ernie Banks and Minnie Minoso are the headliners in Don Zminda’s book Justice Batted Last: Ernie Banks, Minnie Minoso and the Unheralded Players Who Integrated Chicago’s Major League Teams. But Zminda’s main focus is on the scores of talented Black ballplayers who never made it to the white major leagues or arrived only for a cup of coffee.

Although Jackie Robinson’s success in what Jules Tygiel called “baseball’s great experiment” opened the door for African Americans and Afro-Latinos, the new opportunities to play in white baseball were few and far between.

What gets lost in the rightful celebrations of Robinson’s courage and skill in breaking white major league baseball’s color barrier in 1947 is that integration of the rest of the majors was ever so slow to happen.

Within months of the Brooklyn Dodgers putting Robinson on the field, the Cleveland Indians and the St. Louis Browns followed suit with their own Black players. However, it was another two years before the New York Giants integrated and yet another year before the Boston Braves did.

The Chicago White Sox became the sixth team to integrate on May 1, 1951, when manager Paul Richards started Orestes “Minnie” Minoso, a future Hall-of-Famer at third base and batted him third in the lineup against Vic Raschi for the defending world champion New York Yankees. A quarter of a century later, Richards told an interviewer that Minoso was one of four players whom he had managed who had the same inner drive as Ty Cobb, the others being Nellie Fox, George Kell and Brooks Robinson.

After Minoso’s debut, it was two more years before another team integrated, the Philadelphia Athletics on September 13, 1953. Then, four days later, the Chicago Cubs sent Ernie Banks out to shortstop as their first Black player.  The future two-time National League Most Valuable Player only played the final two weeks of that season, Zminda writes, but “there were few doubts about Banks, who had batted .314 with two homers in his ten September games. The Cubs looked like they had found a star.”

At this point, six years after Jackie Robinson had taken the field, only half of the major league teams had integrated. Nonetheless, Zminda writes, “The success of Black players on both of Chicago’s MLB teams made it fairly obvious that it was no longer possible for an MLB team to remain segregated and hope to win.”

Even so, it wasn’t until July 21, 1959, twelve years after Robinson, that the last of the holdouts, the Boston Red Sox, fielded Pumpsie Green, a Black infielder.

 

Slow to sign, slow to develop Black players

The White Sox and the Cubs may have been quicker than at least half of the teams to integrate, but they weren’t quick.  Both teams were slow to sign Black players, slow to promote Black players, slow to develop Black players — and this at a time when the rosters of previously untapped Negro League teams were rich with great and near-great players.

Black stars, such as Banks and Minoso, were able to prosper, even as they put up with racism inside and outside of baseball. But teams had little patience with Blacks who weren’t above average.

Consider catcher Sam Hairston, the second Black to play for the White Sox. A former Negro League all-star, he was called up and got into a game against the Washington Senators as a pinch hitter on July 21, 1951. He appeared in only four games, the last on August 26, garnering two hits in five official at bats, one of them a double.

Hairston played eleven minor league seasons for White Sox teams, batting .304, became a scout for the team and a coach for the major league team, and spent more than four decades as a White Sox employee.

But he never again played in the majors. His sons, Jerry Sr. and Johnny, did, and so did his grandsons, Jerry Jr. and Scott.  In addition, another son and three other grandsons had minor league careers.

 

Good enough for four Halls of Fame

Hairston was one of three Black players at the White Sox spring training camp in 1951. Another was Luis Garcia, a 21-year-old Venezuelan-born infielder.

Garcia was sent to the minors and ended up spending his career wandering through the white minor leagues and independent leagues. He played so well that, after he retired, he was elected to the Caribbean Baseball Hall of Fame, the Venezuelan Baseball Hall of Fame, the Navegantes del Magallanes (Magellan Navigators) Hall of Fame and the Latino Baseball Hall of Fame. In addition, the Mexican Baseball Hall of Fame, which has never inducted a Venezuelan player, came close four times to electing Garcia.

Nonetheless, he never got the chance to play in the white major leagues.

In 1949, Charles Pope, a semipro catcher in California, was the first Black to be signed by the Cubs and, according to a newspaper reporter, was “considered by Wrigley scouts a future star.”

Assigned by the Cubs to their Class C team in Visalia, CA, Pope made the starting lineup on opening day and picked a runner off second base. Used sporadically after that, Pope was batting .286 with a .375 on-base percentage on June 11 when he was given his release.  He never again played in white baseball.

 

“Being in this skin”

“One would think,” Zminda writes, “that the team would have had more patience with Charles Pope, the first Black player signed by the Chicago Cubs and a local star.” This is a question he raises throughout Justice Batted Last, reporting the often thin and even nonsensical reasons given by White Sox and Cubs officials for sending Black players on their way.

Zminda also reports what the former players and their relatives said to him in interviews for his book, such as Pope’s granddaughter Traci Carr who said: “I would expect [Pope’s release by Visalia] to be difficult for some to understand…but then, being in this skin, I can tell you people come up with a whole lot of things when they don’t want to do something.”

Even as Willie Mays, Hank Aaron and Don Newcombe were transforming major league baseball over the next two decades, integration was spotty.  American League teams were much slower to sign and cultivate Black talent, and that was true in Chicago.

From the mid-1950s to 1965, the White Sox were more successful than the Cubs, even winning the American League pennant in 1959. The Cubs, however, were much better at bringing Black ballplayers to the majors.

 

A Josh Gibson statue?

During this period, three Black players who were future Hall of Famers debuted as Cubs rookies: Billy Williams, Lou Brock and Banks. A fourth member of the Hall, Ferguson Jenkins, came to the Cubs after appearing in only eight major league games for the Philadelphia Phillies. By contrast, the White Sox didn’t develop a future Hall of Famer until Harold Baines debuted in 1980.

At the end of Justice Batted Last, Zminda writes that, in putting Minoso and Banks on the field, the White Sox and Cubs “would up with players so talented and beloved that each team erected statues of them at their ballpark.” And he goes on:

“In a more enlightened world both teams would have integrated decades earlier, and the first statues at their ballparks would have honored Josh Gibson or Satchel Paige or Double Duty Radcliffe or Oscar Charleston. In the same enlightened world, there would also have been more opportunities in baseball, and in life, for the forgotten heroes who never reached the ‘white’ major leagues, such as Charles Pope…

“We did have Minnie and Ernie. Chicago, and the world, are much the better for that.”

 

Patrick T. Reardon

7.18.25

 

This review originally appeared at Third Coast Review on 7.29.25