195.6 - RIP: Minnie Minoso

RIP: Minnie Minoso

We have an RIP this week. In fact, it's a belated RIP because I wanted to do this last week but time simply did not permit.

Minnie Minoso died of natural causes on March 1. He was 90 - or maybe 92, there was some question about his age.

I expect there are at least a few people saying "Who the heck was Minnie Minoso?" and a few others going "Oh, yeah, I remember him."

Minnie Minoso

Minnie Minoso was a baseball player. He was the ninth black and the first Cuban player in the major leagues, where his speed - he lead the American league in triples and steals three times each - earned him the nickname "The Cuban Comet."

In his 17 years in the big leagues, most of them with the Chicago White Sox, he had a .298 batting average, with 186 homers and 1,023 RBIs. He was a seven-time All-Star. What's more, he was a three-time Gold Glove winner, despite the fact that the award didn’t exist for the first eight years of his career.

I grew up in New Jersey, so I didn't get to see a Chicago White Sox player play much. But I did follow a lot of baseball, and I always thought that Minnie Minoso was a cool player and from what I knew of him, a cool guy. And I remember him.

So RIP, Minnie Minoso.

Sources cited in links:
http://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/mlb/2015/03/01/chicagos-1st-black-major-league-baseball-player-minoso-dies/24218219/
http://minoso.com/
http://time.com/3727958/major-league-baseballs-first-black-latino-star-minoso-dies/
http://www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/la-me-minnie-minoso-20150302-story.html