Minnie Minoso Makes it to Cooperstown

In December 2021, a bit more than 96 years after he was born and over six years after his death, Cuban-born outfielder Minnie Minoso was elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, New York. He was inducted posthumously today, with his widow Sharon speaking on behalf of her late husband. Minoso’s Major League Baseball career spanned five decades. He was best known as the dynamic on-field leader of the Go-Go Chicago White Sox of the 1950s.

Minoso was one of ten candidates on the Golden Days Eras Committee ballot. On a committee of 16 voters, Minoso got 14 votes (87.5%), two more than the minimum required to earn a plaque in the museum in Cooperstown, New York. Minoso is a part of a class of seven Hall of Famers. Gil Hodges and Negro Leaguers Buck O’Neil and Bud Fowler will also be inducted posthumously, while Jim Kaat, Tony Oliva, and David Ortiz were on stage today to see the unveiling of their plaques.

Minoso had previous two close calls with the Eras Committees before getting his name called last fall. In December 2011, he got 9 out of 16 votes, putting him three votes shy of the Hall. Then, in the infamous shutout of December 2014 (nobody got the requisite 12 votes), Minnie got 8 out of 16.

In this piece, I’ll make the case for why Minoso, a dynamic player known as the Cuban Comet, is worthy of that ultimate honor.

Cooperstown Cred: Minnie Minoso (LF)

• New York Cubans (1946-68), Cleveland Indians (1949, ’51, 1958-’59), Chicago White Sox (1951-57, 1960-61), St. Louis Cardinals (1962), Washington Senators (1963), White Sox (1964, 1976, 1980)
• Career: .299 BA, .387 OBP, .461 SLG, 195 HR, 1,093 RBI, 2,110 Hits
• Career: 130 OPS+, 53.8 WAR (Wins Above Replacement)
• Led his league in triples 4 times
• Led the American League in stolen bases 3 times
• Hit by Pitch 195 times in his career (10th most in MLB history)
• Hit over .300 11 times
• 7 years as A.L. All-Star
• 3 Gold Gloves
• Finished 4th in the A.L. MVP voting 4 times

(cover photo: si.com)

Note: this piece was originally posted in 2018. It has been updated to reflect Minoso’s new-found status as an inducted Hall of Famer and to include Minoso’s now-official MLB statistics from his three seasons in the Negro Leagues.

The Legend of Minnie Minoso

For baseball fans of my generation (I was born in 1967), Minoso was an oddity, a Bill Veeck-inspired promotional gimmick. In 1976, twelve years after his final year with the White Sox, Minoso, at 50 years of age (or 53, as we believed at the time), was hired as a coach and convinced by owner Veeck to make a couple of appearances as a designated hitter.

Minoso had eight plate appearances for the 1976 team and became, allegedly, the oldest player in baseball history to get a base hit.  The accomplishment was memorialized by a special Topps baseball card, which was all a lot of young fans like me knew about him.

Minoso came out of retirement again in 1980, with two at bats that made him only the second player in baseball history to appear in five different decades (the other being Nick Altrock).

You’ll notice that the Topps card calls Minoso the oldest player to hit safely in a baseball game. As we now know, however, there were a couple of others who were older (more on Minoso’s age to come).

Hall of Famer Jim O’Rourke had a cameo at the age of 54 with the New York Giants in 1904 and went 1 for 4 (a tribute to O’Rourke’s unique career can be found here). Altrock got a hit for the Washington Senators at the age of 53 in 1929. Finally, in 1934, Charlie O’Leary got a pinch-hit single for the St. Louis Browns at the age of 58, just 15 days shy of his 59th birthday!

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The Excellence of Minnie Minoso

For me and probably many other fans that weren’t old enough to remember his prime, these ceremonial appearances by Minoso distracted from what was an excellent career. Including the statistics from three seasons with the New York Cubans in the Negro Leagues, The Cuban Comet finished his career with a .299 batting average, 2,110 hits, 195 home runs, and 1,093 RBI.

Until very recently, Minoso’s official statistics were a .298 BA, 1,963 Hits, 186 HR, and 1,023 RBI. Those numbers didn’t gain him much support from the baseball writers when it came time to consider his Hall of Fame candidacy (he topped out with 21% of the necessary 75% of the vote in 1988).

In the last decade, however, modern analytics have placed a higher premium on some of his skills that didn’t grab one’s attention in the past. For example, in addition to his .299 batting average, Minoso sported a .387 on-base percentage.  During his eleven years as a regular player in the American League (1951-1961), look at how he ranks in many statistical categories, including WAR, OPS+, and Runs Created (RC).

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Virtually every player above Minoso in any of those categories is in the Hall of Fame, and almost all are legends. In addition to his offensive game, Minoso was an excellent defensive player; he earned three Gold Gloves in five years (starting with the first year the award was issued in 1957).

The Cuban Comet was also a fearless player, willing to take first base for his team when the ball ventured towards his body. He led the league in being hit by a pitch ten times and is 10th on the all-time list with 192 HBP.

One of the factors that almost certainly has kept Minoso out of Cooperstown was that his Major League Baseball career was too short. He appeared in parts of 20 seasons (including the cameos in his 50s and the three years in the Negro National League) but only logged over 200 plate appearances in 12 of them. He simply didn’t compile the career numbers that are expected of a Hall of Fame player, and, until last year, when Negro League statistics were added to the official record, his career hit total was recognized at 1,960. (No player since Jackie Robinson has been inducted to the Hall with less than 2,000 hits). This is why Minoso’s actual age is really important.

If he was born on November 29, 1925, as listed on most internet sites, including Baseball-Reference and SABR (the Society of American Baseball Research), then he made his debut in the American League at the age of 23 and became a full-time player at 25.

However, if Minoso was born in 1922, as the White Sox official statement stated on the day that his death was announced in 2015, then he didn’t become a full-time player in the majors until he was 28. If so, that makes it reasonable to claim that Minoso lost three to five of his prime years due to segregation and racism at the time. This is a very important distinction that I’ll revisit near the end of this piece.

Minnie Minoso’s Early Years

Minnie Minoso grew up in Cuba with the given name Saturnino Orestes Armas Arrieta, known mostly as “Orestes,” with the name “Arrieta” being his mother’s maiden name. He unofficially adopted the last name Minoso after his older half-brother and was known as Orestes while growing up in Cuba, adopting the nickname Minnie after reaching the United States.

Minoso’s first foray into American baseball came in 1946 when he was signed to play for the New York Cubans of the Negro National League. One of his teammates was Luis Tiant Sr., father of the flamboyant hurler of Red Sox fame (who remains a frequent Eras Committee candidate for Cooperstown). Two years later, towards the end of the 1948 season, Minoso was signed by the Cleveland Indians.

Before Jackie Robinson made his debut for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947, Major League Baseball was off-limits to blacks, whether they born in the U.S., Cuba, or Mars. However, a total of 39 Cuban players of lighter complexion appeared in major league games throughout the first half of the 20th century.

Only one of them could be considered a star: that was pitcher Dolf Luque, who won 194 games in the National League and was a member of both the World Series champion 1919 Reds (who beat the infamous Black Sox) and the 1933 Giants.

Anyway, Minoso, now a member of the Indians organization, finished the ’48 season with the minor league “Class A” Dayton Indians. He made a great first impression, batting .525 with 21 hits in 40 at bats.

Minnie broke camp with the big club in the spring of 1949 but was shipped back to the minor leagues after the first four weeks of the season. He did not return to the major league club in Cleveland despite dominant performances in nearly two years with the San Diego Padres in the Pacific Coast League. In 1949, Minoso hit .297 with 22 home runs, 75 RBI, and 13 stolen bases in 137 games.  The following season, he hit .339 with 20 home runs and 115 RBI. Still, he did not get the call back to the majors.

Was Minnie Minoso’s Career Shortened by the Color of his Skin?

It’s been written that perhaps Minnie Minoso languished with the minor league Padres for those two seasons because of the color of his skin.  When he was sent to San Diego in May of 1949, only three major league teams had integrated.

His team, the Indians, was one of those three teams, having added future Hall of Famers Larry Doby in 1947 and Negro League legend Satchel Paige in 1948. The Indians owner, Bill Veeck, was arguably the Branch Rickey of the American League. Veeck was progressive-minded, a showman, an entrepreneur, a risk-taker, and a master promoter.

Veeck was not a deep-pocketed owner like many of his peers; he was merely the leader of a syndicate of stockholders in the franchise. Besides Doby, Paige, and Minoso, Veeck also signed a 20-year-old African-American outfield prospect (Al Smith) in 1948 and two more Negro League players in 1949, Luke Easter and Harry Simpson.

With the big club, Doby and Paige became the first black players to feel the joy of a championship ball club; the Indians won the World Series in 1948.

Let’s look at the record: certainly, it is true that Minoso didn’t get much of a chance in 1949. He appeared in 9 games total (starting 6 of them in a row) before being shipped out west. In that brief trial, Minnie hit .188, with 3 hits in 20 at bats. Quoting from the book African American Pioneers of Baseball, player-manager Lou Boudreau felt that Minoso needed more experience after his time with the Cubans: “he was a raw star in the beginning, but in only two years, he was a seasoned ballplayer.”

The history of baseball has thousands of examples of young players who, after going 3 for 20 or similar at the beginning of a major league season, get shipped back to the minor leagues. Boudreau tried a total of 6 right fielders in his starting lineups at the start of the 1949 season before settling on veteran Bob Kennedy as his primary starter (Doby and Dale Mitchell were the other mainstays in the outfield).

Anyway, to say that Minoso was denied a big-league opportunity in 1949 because of racism is speculation at best: it would imply that Boudreau, Veeck, or General Manager Hank Greenberg held him back because he was black. Greenberg, remember, was the first Jewish superstar baseball player and was the subject of enormous abuse and antisemitism, a level of abuse his teammate Birdie Tebbets said was second only to Jackie Robinson himself.

Now, let’s remember that the 1948 Indians had won the World Series with two black players (Doby and Paige). Is it unreasonable that Boudreau, as the player-manager, would stick with some of the players who had been a part of that championship squad rather than insert an untested rookie into his everyday lineup?  The players I’m talking about are Kennedy, Allie Clark, and Thurman Tucker.

History shows that Minoso turned out to be a much better player than any of those three but, again, baseball history is littered with examples of veterans who held onto roles over more talented younger players because the organizations didn’t realize yet what they were missing.

The 1949 & 1950 San Diego Padres

Incidentally, in 1949, another rookie player on the Indians was sent to the AAA Padres: his name was Al Rosen, a 25-year-old third baseman whose path to a starting role was blocked by Ken Keltner, a 7-time All-Star. Keltner managed to start only 67 games in ’49, but the Indians still saw fit to leave Rosen in the minor leagues for a good chunk of the season. Rosen finally got his full-time chance at 26 (in 1950), hit 37 home runs with 116 RBI, and would become the American League MVP in 1953.

So, what about 1950? Kennedy was the Tribe’s full-time right fielder despite the monster season Minoso was having in San Diego. But it’s pretty clear that Kennedy, a respected major league veteran, and World War II fighter pilot, had earned the job with his performance in the 2nd half of 1949. In the final 67 games of that season, he emerged as a solid offensive player, batting .316 with 41 runs batted in and a.842 OPS (only 13 points less than Minoso’s in the minors). Kennedy was also a solid defensive outfielder with a good arm.

Also, the narrative that Minoso was held back in 1950 due to racism is not supported by the fact that his 1949 Padres teammate, Luke Easter, a 33-year-old power-hitting Negro League veteran, had surpassed him on the Indians’ organizational depth chart. Look at the 1949 numbers of Minoso and Easter in San Diego:

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Easter, a huge man who hit prodigious blasts, quickly became one of the biggest stars and gate attractions in the Pacific Coast League.  Easter was so good that year that in August, after missing six weeks due to a broken right knee, he was promoted to the big club in Cleveland, with the popular Allie Clark getting dropped to the minors to make room.  In May 1950, the Indians traded 2-time All-Star first baseman Mickey Vernon to Washington to make room for Easter at first base.

With the 1950 minor-league Padres, Minoso was joined (and surpassed, at least in the power department) by another talented young black player, Harry “Suitcase” Simpson, also an outfielder.

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Note: the 1950 Pacific Coast League, with all teams on the climate-friendly West Coast, played a 200-game season.  Simpson played 178 games, Minoso 169.

Anyway, with Satchel Paige having been released at the age of 43 before the previous season, the Indians began the 1951 campaign with four black players: Doby, Easter, Simpson, and Minoso. Here is where there is some documentation that race played a role in what happened next.

Despite having guided the Indians to a World Championship in 1948 and solid 89 and 92-win campaigns in the seasons that followed, Lou Boudreau was released as a player after the 1950 season and fired as manager.

Financially strapped because of a divorce, Veeck had sold the team after the 1949 season; Greenberg was still the General Manager and he hired Al Lopez to be the team’s skipper for 1951, which would be the beginning of Lopez’s Hall of Fame managerial career.

According to multiple reports, including the Sporting News and the book The Integration of Major League Baseball”, it was felt by “everybody” in the organization that four black players on the Major League Roster were too many. Hence, with Doby and Easter as established starters and Simpson having had superior statistics with San Diego in 1950, Minoso was traded to the Chicago White Sox in a 3-way deal that also involved the Philadelphia Athletics.

The Indians received only one player in return, pitcher Lou Brissie (from the A’s). From 1951-53, the big, left-handed throwing Brissie pitched mostly in relief for Cleveland, posting a 3.59 ERA in 208 innings before his career came to an end. At the time, Greenberg did seem to realize the quality that he was giving up in the deal, saying that Minoso “has a chance to become one of the really good players of our time.”

Minnie Minoso Breaks the Color Barrier in Chicago

Minnie Minoso was distressed by the trade from Cleveland. It was now up to him to break the color line in Chicago rather than play with other black players in Cleveland.

Despite his anguish, Minoso flourished both on and off the field.  The trade would become really distressing to the Indians, as they watched the Cuban Comet become an immediate star on Chicago’s south side.

Minoso hit a home run in his first at bat and helped the team to a 14-game winning streak; he made the 1951 All-Star team, beginning his spectacular 11-year peak. The right-handed hitting Minoso split time between third base and all three outfield positions before settling in as a left fielder in 1953.

Off the field, while Jackie Robinson was understated, Minoso was flamboyant, embracing his new-found celebrity, driving a green Cadillac around his new hometown while wearing bright-colored shirts and wide-brimmed hats.

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Minoso hit .326 with a .422 on-base% in his first season with the White Sox; he also stole 31 bases and scored 112 runs. It was a season that placed him 4th in the AL MVP voting and 2nd in the Rookie of the Year balloting; he barely lost to Yankees rookie Gil McDougald.

In his first seven seasons with the Chisox, Minoso had five different campaigns in which he hit over .300 with an OBP of over .400.

Minoso was an AL All-Star in each of his first four seasons in Chicago. In both 1953 and 1954, he finished fourth in the MVP voting. Going by WAR (a statistic that wouldn’t be invented until about 50 years later), he probably deserved to win the MVP trophy in ’54. In that magical season, Minoso had a slash line of .320/.411/.535; he had 19 home runs, 18 triples, 116 RBI, and 119 runs scored, all while playing superb defense in left field. Retroactively, this translated to an 8.2 WAR, best in the AL.

1957 was the first year that Gold Gloves were awarded, and Minoso earned the hardware in ’57, ’58, and ’60.

Back to Cleveland; Back to Chicago

After 7 superb seasons in Chicago for a team that always played above .500 but could never capture the AL pennant, Minoso was traded back to Cleveland in a deal that sent future Hall of Famer Early Wynn to the White Sox. Minoso had two productive seasons in Cleveland before being re-acquired by the Chisox in December 1959.

Back in Chicago, Minoso had a stellar campaign in 1960. He led the AL with 184 hits while hitting 20 home runs to go with 105 RBI and a .311 batting average. Minoso won his third Gold Glove and was the AL’s starting All-Star left fielder twice in 1960 (there were a few years around this time in which the All-Star Game was played twice per year). For his efforts, the Cuban Comet finished 4th in the MVP voting.

Minoso had a decent campaign but fell off a bit in 1961, and he was traded to the St. Louis Cardinals. This was essentially the end of Minoso’s career as an everyday player. With the Redbirds in 1962, a broken wrist limited Minoso to just 39 games. Minoso finished his MLB career with the Washington Senators in 1963 and played his “final” season back with the Chisox in 1964. At the age of 38, Minoso’s career was essentially finished, save for the cameos in 1976 and 1980.

Despite the end of his career in the majors, Minoso kept playing baseball in the Mexican League until the age of 48. From his SABR bio, Minoso is one of the few players in baseball history to accumulate over 4,000 hits as a professional. He had 2,110 hits in the majors (including 147 in the Negro Leagues), 429 in the minors, 838 in the Cuban League, and 715 in the Mexican League, giving him a total of 4,092.

What did Minnie Minoso Lose Due to Racism?

So, back to the question at hand: did racism shorten Minnie Minoso’s career and perhaps deny him the extra years of statistical accomplishment that might have turned him into a Hall of Famer much sooner? This is something we can never truly know of course but the evidence suggests probably not. Although history has proven it to be a mistake, the Indians prioritized two other black players over Minoso because they had better production than his minor league teammate.

What I do believe is legitimate is that the Indians chose to keep Minoso in San Diego as a full-time player rather than keep him as a part-time player with the major league club. During the early years of integration, if you were going to put a black player on the roster, that player had to be a great one, Jackie Robinson-great. It turned out that Minoso was nearly Robinson-great but the Indians just didn’t see it.

All of this is not to minimize in any way the struggles that Minoso and all of the other black players faced during this era. He and all of his brethren had to put up with endless racist, horrible, and vile epithets that would cause most of us to despair or lash out. From everything I’ve read, it seems that Minnie embraced his role in a Robinson-esque manner, turning the other cheek but exacting his own retribution in the best way he knew, on the diamond.

When pitchers threw at him deliberately because they didn’t like the color of his skin, he just took his medicine, took his base, and proceeded to score runs. When pitchers didn’t throw at him deliberately but threw just a bit inside, he was a master at taking that one for the team; by crowding the plate, he mastered the art of reaching base by bruise.

“Well, sure, I led the league [in HBP] a lot of years. But I was not a power hitter, although I could hit 18 triples one year. What was I doing wrong in the game, that they’d purposefully want to hit me? They didn’t do it because I’m nice-looking, and I didn’t do it to get the record. I crowded the plate, because if you only have to look middle-outside, you can kill a pitcher, and if it’s outside it’s a ball… My father and my mother taught me there was a way to pay somebody back, if they tried to break your arm or break your face: Pay them back on the field with a smile on your face. I used to keep my teeth clean all the time, just to make sure that’s how I gave it back to them that way all the time.”

— Minnie Minoso (to espn.com’s Christina Kharl), February 25, 2015

The 2012 & 2015 Golden Era Ballots

Minnie Minoso appeared on the BBWAA Hall of Fame ballot 15 times, never receiving more than 21% of the vote (in an election that requires 75% approval). He appeared on three Veterans Committee ballots between 2003-07 but got nowhere close to 75%. (No Hall of Famers were elected on those ballots).

As previously noted, the closest Minoso ever came to making it into the Hall of Fame was on the 2012 Golden Era ballot, whose votes were conducted in December 2011. A 16-member panel was convened to consider the candidacies of 10 mostly highly-qualified candidates. The panelists elected Ron Santo to receive a plaque in Cooperstown, with 15 of the 16 committee members voting “yes.” For the family of Santo, the honor was bittersweet in that the longtime Chicago Cubs third baseman had passed away one year prior. On that 2012 ballot, Jim Kaat got 10 votes (2 shy of the 12 needed for induction); Gil Hodges and Minoso received 9 votes each, with Tony Oliva getting 8. (It’s interesting that, ten years later, all four men who got 50% or more on that 2012 ballot matched or exceeded the 75% bar with last December’s vote).

The most famous near-miss for Minoso and others was in December 2014 on the 2015 Golden Era ballot. Besides Minoso, the ballot was graced by the presence of Dick Allen, Oliva, Hodges, Maury Wills, Ken Boyer, Kaat, Luis Tiant, Billy Pierce, and Bob Howsam. As previously noted, that committee failed to elect a single player.

RIP Minnie Minoso

Less than four months after the disappointment of the 2015 Golden Era ballot, Minnie Minoso died. On March 1, 2015, while sitting in the drivers’ seat of his car, Minoso passed away due to a tear in his pulmonary artery.

When Minoso passed, the tributes came from the world of baseball and elsewhere:

“Minoso was the Jackie Robinson for all Latinos; the first star who opened doors for all Latin American players. He was everybody’s hero. I wanted to be Minoso. Roberto Clemente wanted to be Minoso.”

— Orlando Cepeda (born in Puerto Rico), in the Chicago Tribune

“Every young player in Cuba wanted to be like Minnie Minoso, and I was one of them. The way he played the game, hard all the time, hard. He was very consistent playing the game. He tried to win every game.” 

— Tony Perez (the only Cuban-born MLB player in the Hall of Fame)

“Minnie may have been passed over by the Baseball Hall of Fame during his lifetime, but for me and generations of black and Latino young people, Minnie’s quintessentially American story embodies more than a plaque ever could.”

— President Barack Obama

Minoso passed at the age of 89 (or 90, or 92, depending on who you ask).

An Age-Old Issue

Let’s finish here by tackling the issue of Minnie Minoso’s age. Was he 28 when he finally got a chance to be a full-time player? Or was he 25? This is a huge issue because the 25-to-28 years are often where Hall of Fame players are at their peak. For most of the 20th century, it was believed that Minoso was born in 1922.  But the true story, missed by many, was confirmed in Minnie’s own memoir:

“I was 19 years old when I arrived in the United States in 1945, but my papers said I was 22. I told a white lie in order to obtain a visa, so I could qualify for service in the Cuban army. My true date of birth is the 29th of November, 1925.“

The three years difference is profound. Shortly after learning of Minoso’s passing, I scoured the internet looking for the true story and I found it on the website SB Nation in a post by Rob Neyer. Later, this quote was repeated in other online obits, including in the New York Times.

What was interesting to me is that Neyer, a well-respected writer, and baseball analyst, went on to write that he used to think that Minoso belonged in the Hall of Fame “when I thought he was born in 1922. It’s funny how three years makes such a difference. Now I’m not sure what to think.”

Neyer is right, of course. If Minoso didn’t get a chance to play in the majors until the age of 28 because of the color of his skin, it’s easy to extrapolate a career that is Cooperstown worthy. Personally, I think he belongs either way.

The Cuban Comet was one of the top players in baseball in the 1950’s. If you believe in WAR, he was the 7th best position player for that decade behind six Hall of Famers and ahead of five others (among those who logged at least 5,000 plate appearances during the decade).

In addition, whether Minoso’s career as a major leaguer was shortened by one year or five years due to racism, he was still a pioneer. He was a pioneer as the first black player in the city of Chicago and he was a pioneer as the first true Latino superstar.

Tributes to Minnie Minoso

Minnie Minoso is clearly a popular choice for the Hall of Fame. Here’s a sampling of reaction to the news last fall that the Cuban Comet would have a plaque unveiled in Cooperstown this summer.

“This tremendous honor would have meant a great deal to my dad, and it means a great deal to us. My dad lived the American Dream. He was able to open doors and break barriers all while doing what he loved, fulfilling his lifelong dream of being a Major League Baseball player. He devoted his life to baseball, to all the fans, to the community and to Chicago, which he loved. He was so proud to be Black, to be a Cuban, to be an American and to be a professional baseball player for the Chicago White Sox. He also would have been so very proud to be a Hall of Famer.”

— Charlie Rice-Minoso (Minnie’s son, in a statement issued Sunday night)

“He was good on and off the field. He fought through all the obstacles put in front of him. He did great. He was a real hero, because I cannot imagine doing all the things that he did at that time. And to me, he was a hero, and he deserves to be in the Hall of Fame.”

— Former White Sox pitcher Jose Contreras (who was born in Cuba)

 “Minnie Miñoso was the Latino Jackie Robinson, hands down. And what he did in his game is noteworthy and certainly justifies Hall-of-Fame merit. But what he meant for legions of Latino ballplayers, to know that they, too, could have the dream of playing in the major leagues, cannot be understated.”

— Bob Kendrick (president of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum)

Minoso was one of two former members of the Chicago White Sox to be inducted into the Hall of Fame today; the other was Jim Kaat, who won 283 games in Major League Baseball. Minoso also has a crossover with Gil Hodges, who managed the Washington Senators in 1963 when Minoso was a player there late in his career. Minoso is the first and only player from that “second version” of the Senators (who later became the Texas Rangers) to make it to the Hall.

The election of Minoso posthumously is somewhat bittersweet. If there had been a greater understanding of his career impact a decade ago, he would have been able to enjoy the honor. In an interview posted on espn.com just days before he passed away (and a few months after another Hall of Fame ballot disappointment), Minoso expressed regret that he hadn’t yet been recognized by the Hall of Fame.

“Truly, I’m hurt. You know why? Because I’ve seen so many guys — and all of my respect is for them — get inducted [into Cooperstown], but my records are better. And I played more years. That’s what’s breaking my heart… Don’t tell me that maybe I’ll get in after I pass away. I don’t want it to happen after I pass. I want it while I’m here, because I want to enjoy it.”

— Minnie Minoso (espn.com), February 25th, 2015

Minoso was not able to enjoy his induction today, but his wife, children, and grandchildren were on hand to celebrate Minnie’s ultimate honor. Congratulations, Minnie.

Thanks for reading. Please follow Cooperstown Cred on Twitter @cooperstowncred.

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