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Hispanic players are propelling the Phillies

The Phillies' current 25-man roster contains as many players from Venezuela (6) as from the California, Texas and Florida teams combined. In all, there are 12 Phillies of Hispanic descent, including the team's leaders in batting average, home runs, RBIs, stolen bases, wins and ERA.

The Phillies' current 25-man roster contains as many players from Venezuela (6) as from the California, Texas and Florida teams combined. In all, there are 12 Phillies of Hispanic descent, including the team's leaders in batting average, home runs, RBIs, stolen bases, wins and ERA.

All that represents a high-water mark in both quality and quantity for a franchise whose history with non-Anglo ballplayers dates back 81 years but who until recently failed to capitalize on that enormous talent resource.

While National League rivals such as the Cardinals, Pirates and Giants were riding Latino players to pennants and world championships, the Phillies were slow to dip their toes into the Caribbean.

Their all-time Hispanic roster is relatively thin. The first was Mexican Chile Gomez in 1935. Their first All-Star was Tony Taylor in 1960. Their first .300 hitter was Tony Gonzalez two years later. And it wasn't until Juan Samuel arrived in 1984 that they produced a homegrown Latino star.

Now, with such a significant dugout presence, it's easy to forget all the awkwardness and indifference that marked baseball's long and slow Latino assimilation.

"Every team has three, four, five Latinos in their lineup now," said Taylor, one of the first and most popular to play for the Phillies. "Things are very different than when I was playing."

Taylor was a dark-skinned Cuban. Before the color barrier fell in 1947, the majors were open only to light-skinned Hispanics. The earliest of them also came from Cuba, where the game, introduced in 1864, was wildly popular.

The Phillies' first and only pre-1950s Latino was Jose Luis "Chile" Gomez, a Mexican infielder who played for them in two last-place seasons, 1935 and 1936.

Besides the considerable baseball challenges they faced, Gomez and other Spanish-speaking pioneers had to endure language and cultural hardships. And they did so in isolation. Many had no one to talk to on their teams and few to socialize with in their adopted cities.

As a 1954 Philadelphia A's rookie, Puerto Rican Vic Power ate nothing but chicken because that was all he could order in English.

The colorful Power and others also brought a flashier style to baseball, something that often irritated American opponents. Cuba's Minnie Minoso, perhaps as a result of his flair and aggressive base running, led the American League in getting hit by pitches eight times in the 1950s.

"Those early Latinos played a lot like they did in the Negro Leagues, where some of them had played," said Jorge Iber, a Texas Tech administrator who has written about baseball's Latin pioneers. "Snatching a fly ball, twisting your body, twirling your bat in the batter's box, those things hadn't been seen in the big leagues."

Sportswriters frequently hung demeaning nicknames on Hispanics or printed verbatim their halting English responses to questions.

When Cubans Armando Marsans and Rafael Almeida debuted with the Reds in 1911, a Cincinnati newspaper described them as "two of the purest bars of Castilian soap ever floated to these shores." The Senators' Roberto Estalella was once quoted in Washington as saying a teammate's pitching was "berry, berry good."

By the time Estalella's grandson, Bobby, reached the Phillies in 1996, conditions were changing. That year, the percentage of Latinos in the majors topped 20 percent for a first time. Teams were providing translators and English lessons.

The Phillies were late to develop a Latin pipeline. But gradually, with increased success and attendance, they began to expand their Caribbean presence, especially in Venezuela and the Dominican Republic.

While Dominican Maikel Franco could become the first, the team has yet to develop a Hispanic superstar of its own. Except for Juan Samuel and Carlos Ruiz, the best of the Phillies' Latinos have been acquired in trades.

The door opens

Marsans and Almeida, the two Cubans who played in the 1910s, were, according to an Encyclopedia Britannica entry, the first "significant" big-league Hispanics.

Not many followed until the desperate Washington Senators signed a few in the 1930s. The Phillies, another forlorn, cash-starved franchise, added their first Latino in 1935.

Gomez, 26, who had gone to high school in Los Angeles and barnstormed with integrated teams, joined the club midway through that season. After an 0-for-3 July 27 debut, he went 3 for 4 a day later. But in 175 games over two seasons he hit only .231 and never homered. He also made 39 errors.

He departed following the '36 season and didn't surface again until the war-depleted Senators called on him in 1942. The Phillies wouldn't have another Latino for two decades.

Jackie Robinson's historic arrival opened the door for dark-skinned Hispanics like Power, Minoso and others. By the late 1950s, the Caribbean influx had begun. Hispanics took eight percent of baseball's roster spots that year, and Orlando Cepeda, Roberto Clemente, Luis Aparicio and Juan Marichal were developing into Hall of Famers.

Meanwhile, in the late 1950s, players such as Tony Curry, Pancho Herrera, Chico Fernandez and Valmy Thomas had brief, undistinguished Phillies careers.

Surprisingly, given the difficulties some early black players had here, Philadelphia's first Latinos reported little discrimination. In fact, Taylor, traded here from the Cubs in 1960, became one of that era's most popular Phillies.

"Early on in their baseball experience, you don't really find some of the terrible things the first blacks had to deal with," said Iber. "But, of course, many early Latinos were light-skinned.

"Once black and mulatto Latins began to be sent to minor-league teams in the South, you started to see some issues," he said. "It wasn't just their color. It was that they couldn't understand the language. Teams just signed them and threw them down there. No translator. No instruction in rudimentary English."

Late to the party and with no Latino pipeline, the Phils traded for Cuban shortstop Chico Fernandez in 1957 and in 1958 added a countryman, first-baseman Pancho Herrera. Neither delivered any promise, but Herrera at least helped in the development of Taylor, who that year became the team's first Hispanic all-star.

Devastated by his trade here, Taylor's transition was eased by the paternal Herrera. Eventually, the young second-baseman became both comfortable and beloved in the city.

"I was young and knew nothing about Philadelphia," recalled Taylor, 80, now living in Miami. "But Herrera showed me how things were done here. I had someone to talk to and have dinner with. . . . The fans there, they were great. If you played hard, they loved you."

Alienation issues

The cultural estrangement Taylor battled was common among that generation of Hispanics, few of whom spoke English on arriving in organized baseball. That alienation made at least one a prime target for gamblers.

Humberto Robinson was a string-bean pitcher on the '59 Phillies. With no fellow Panamanians to socialize with on the team and few in the city, he lived alone in the Rittenhouse Hotel.

It was while having dinner in that Center City hotel's bar on Sept. 21 that he was approached by Harold Friedman. Friedman offered Robinson $1,500 to lose his next start, in the second game of the following night's doubleheader with Cincinnati.

Robinson rejected his offer at least twice but was terrified that the encounter might jeopardize his career. Not knowing where to turn, he said nothing until arriving at Connie Mack Stadium the following afternoon. Teammate Ruben Gomez advised him to tell manager Eddie Sawyer.

Friedman was later arrested. Robinson won that start - allowing three hits and two runs - but, unnerved by the incident, would never win another in a big-league career that ended a year later.

Cookie Rojas was an invaluable utility man for Gene Mauch's Phillies during the 1960s. In 1979, Manny Trillo, a Venezuelan who would become a four-time All-Star and a key member of the Phillies' 1980 world champions, arrived in a deal with the Chicago Cubs.

Trades brought most of the Phillies' all-star Hispanics here, but a few - notably Samuel and Ruiz - were homegrown.

Samuel, a Dominican who is now the third-base coach and father figure on the Latino-laden Phils, had a few sensational seasons in the 1980s. Julio Franco, a Phillies' signee, went to the Indians in 1983's infamous 5-for-1 Von Hayes swap and collected all but eight of his 2,586 hits elsewhere.

Perhaps the Phillies' greatest Latino talent was Bobby Abreu, the enigmatic Venezuelan who came in a 1998 trade with Houston. The sweet-swinging rightfielder hit .300 or better six times and collected 195 home runs and 814 RBIs in nine seasons with the Phillies.

All of that was prelude to what fans now see on the 2016 Phillies, a team stocked with young, exciting and talented Latinos.

"You look at that team now and there are so many," said Taylor. "I couldn't have believed it in 1960."

ffitzpatrick@phillynews.com

@philafitz