eyeblack history: Pat Ellington Jr. reclaims the fullness of Black history through the lens of baseball

Before Twitter was cultivated into a watering hole for Nazis to monetize their smear campaigns against Somalians, it was a place where you got to meet cool people. One of those cool people I met was a college kid named Pat Ellington Jr., who had a vested interest in exploring the stories of Black people in baseball.

So did I! But not like Pat.

The Morehouse undergrad would, unlike anybody I knew, discuss Black American stars like Mookie Betts, Hunter Greene, and Derek Jeter in the same breath as Latin players Ronald Acuña Jr., Luis Severino, and Roberto Clemente. While if you were to look at any of these players without knowing their Spanish-sounding names, I suspect most would see them as Black. But because they are foreign born, from Spanish speaking countries, they are frequently categorized into a completely discreet class of their own. When people, self-included, lamented the decline of great Black starting pitchers — especially the rarity of those likely to reach the statistical 20-win milestone, Ellington would push back on any analysis that risked excluding Hall of Famers like Pedro Martínez and Luis Tiant because they were born in countries with accents, tildes, and God-tier mofongo.

Ellington wouldn’t accept the binaries forming between Black American descendants of slaves and those who could trace their roots across the Caribbean, South America and beyond. I soon learned that through his blogging and reporting, on MLB.com, and most distinctly, from his Red Black Green Baseball newsletter, that he had been actively developing journalism and analysis of Black baseball from a global framework. And through his work, developed a rigorous and expansive understanding of Black history that radically reinterpreted of the Black presence in Major League Baseball today. Ellington’s work invokes the same feeling in me that Bad Bunny did through his Super Bowl halftime show, where he connected Puerto Rican, Latinidad, and U.S. history, showing our shared history on plantations. ¹

Who but Ellington would maintain a database of every Black minor league baseball player alongside their nationality and ethnic background that he updates regularly?

Your favorite beat writer could never. Your least favorite baseball writer would never. Which is why I knew I had to ask Ellington about the lane he’s carved for eyeblack.

Ellington told me about the baseball stars who drew him to deeper study of the Black diaspora, the pushback he receives— even from other Black baseball fans, and why viewing baseball from a global lens enriches what we know of ourselves.

eyeblack: How did you first start to consider non American manifestations of Blackness in baseball?

Pat Ellington, Jr: You remember when Ronald Acuña, Jr. and Ozzie Albies came up together with the Atlanta Braves, and the bromance they had? Or Francisco Lindor and Jose Ramirez in Cleveland? It kind of just made a light bulb flick off of my head. And mind you, I was at a prominent HBCU [Morehouse] where I was not just front of African American people. I was surrounded by some of the best and the brightest from all over Africa and the diaspora. There’s some history there too: during the 1890s and early 1900s Booker T Washington and Mary McCloud Bethune put together programs where they hand picked Afro Cuban students to attend Bethune-Cookman University and Tuskegee Institute. There’s a chance that the Cuban players who have been playing today had great grandparents, great great, great great grandparents, uncles, cousins, etc, who might have gone to an HBCU. Watching the Black Latino players like Luis Robert who kneeled with African American players when George Floyd died, that really opened my eyes even more. There’s also the fact that you have people like Hall of Famers Rod Carew, Fergie Jenkins or current players like Tristan McKenzie, who are of Afro Caribbean descent. And of course, the autobiographies of Felipe Alou and Luis Tiant discussing what it meant to be Black and Latino in America. All these complex identities were being flattened, and hardly anyone I could find was putting these connections together.

You know, I was regularly at MLB games in the press box during that George Floyd era, and I drew almost the opposite conclusion about Latinos in baseball. Which may have just been my ignorance, straight up. But, I didn’t see many foreign born Latin participation in the George Floyd uprising. I’d see the American born Afro-Latinos like Giancarlo Stanton kneel, or I’d chat with Dellin Betances at an event for The Players Alliance. What were you observing about the immigrant Latin-born Black community?

I was also informed by my interactions and interviews with Black Latino players in the minor leagues. There’s Josue De Paula. Sean Ross, who's an Afro-Puerto Rican catcher in the Pirates system, or George Valera. They were really adamant and casual about claiming their Blackness, on record. You also got to look at the history too. There's an actual history of Latin Americans who were proudly Black, and it's pretty much just been overshadowed and stamped out.

What Afro-Latino histories do you believe we’re overlooking?

We could spend our entire time talking about Roberto Clemente and how he should be in the echelon of Black activist athletes with Muhammad Ali, Pele, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Clemente’s not included in that collective by the sports community even though he should be. If anyone knew anything on Clemente, they would know how personally insulted he would be by that being wiped away from this detached from his legacy. It's not like these guys get enlightened to the fact that they're Black when they come to America. Some of these people come from historically Black areas of Latin America that have a rich culture in their in itself.

One of my favorite recurring interests in your writing is your approach to discovering Black enclaves in Latin America that Americans are unlikely to know about. What provokes that research?

For me, it really starts with the personalities of some of these Latin players. There was an MLB pitcher named Fernando Rodney who is from the Dominican Republic and used to pretend to shoot an arrow into the sky whenever he successfully closed a game. That drew me to him. And if you ever listen to his interviews, he speaks perfect English. I learned that he’s from a Dominican enclave of English speaking people of African American descent. As I started reading, I learned that community clung to their identity for hundreds of years, in a country that went from being very pro-Black because of their Haitian roots, into becoming very anti-Black once it became part of the Dominican Republic. I learned that Rodney’s province was the wealthiest province in entire Dominican Republic until the 1930s or 40s, because it was the Dominican Republic's only port, and that wealth and ingenuity allowed his community to fund their schools and maintain themselves. They withstood hundreds of years of God-knows-what, and still have their culture, Black church hymns.

Can you explain your research process?

I'm sure you've done this as a reporter or just a baseball fan and click around on Baseball-Reference, going from team to team, player to player, just looking at stuff? For example, I wound up on David Green's Page, who was a Jamaican from Nicaragua, and it led me to the history of Jamaicans were playing baseball in Nicaragua, and from that, the Negro Leaguers who played there in the offseason. From there, I'm reading research articles about African slaves who escaped British custody in Nicaragua and came in contact with the Miskito tribe in Central America. Between them, the Jamaicans who moved there in the 1850s for work and education, and the Spanish-speaking Afro Nicaraguans, all of a sudden, a Baseball Reference page has exposed me to three distinct groups of Black people in Nicaragua and digging up every book, article and interview I can about their experiences. I also keep a database of Black minor leaguers across the diaspora so I can reach out and hear from these players.

Your deep dives into the Black diaspora are so unique.

I've had Black writers push back heavily against me wanting to write about black Latinos and Africans and Caribbeans. I've had a lot of pessimistic Black people try and tell me about the people I'm talking to. I tried to build a relationship with a Black scout that fell apart after he found I wrote about more than just Black American baseball. There was an older Black writer who asked me once, “Why do you write about the Latinos?” I remember when Torii Hunter said that Afro Latinos were “imposters.” I want to ask Torii, “How are you gonna call Fernando Rodney an imposter?" I can't recall any time where a Negro Leaguer said, “Hey, you can't play here because you're Latino.” But no one's gonna question my Blackness even though my name is Patrick, because I was raised in Cleveland and Youngstown, Ohio. No one's gonna question your blackness even though your name is Bradford William Davis² because you're raised in New York City. Why do that to the current Latinos deal with that because they have a Spanish name? If you're gonna disrespect their history at some point, you're gonna be disrespecting your own.

Chronicling Black global baseball history appears to be something that doesn’t just interest you, but an issue that you feel a real responsibility to protect.

I think it’s worth it to zig where everyone else is zagging to write compelling stories about Black baseball. Nobody's talking to these Afro Latino players about this. Like the fact that someone like you never really fathomed the idea to ask Fernando Rodney³ about growing up in a small Dominican village where he spoke English and Spanish to his parents? It all kind of goes back to the perception of Latinos and Latino culture that misses this side of them. I can find every magazine issues with people like Roberto Clemente and Felipe Alou. It wasn’t always this way — if you look deeper in Black American magazines like Ebony and Jet, they would compile lists of Black athletes to inform their readers about, and those lists would include black Latino players like Clemente and the Alous alongside the African American players.

I love that your work is reclaiming Black history and present day Black experiences lost by flattening and segregating Black and Latin identity as our own. Something that we, as Black Americans from the U.S., can embrace.

I’m bringing a Pan-African approach to studying the game. Baseball is the last place where these intersecting identities should be erased. The anticolonial elements of Black baseball culture do not get emphasized enough. You had, less than 100 years ago, Black players from Cuba and Alabama playing across the United States and the Americas. Black baseball players who were discriminated in their hometowns were treated like celebrities in South America. Before Jackie Robinson was allowed to play on a Major League field, he did a tour of Venezuela alongside Josh Gibson and other Negro League stars. There's an idiom in Venezuela that’s something like “Don’t pull a Willie Mays.” Why? Because when Willie Mays was in the Venezuelan Winter League, he struggled for a week. That’s the level of cultural impact they had. I want to preserve those stories.

What do you hope people understand through your research?

When you think about Black baseball whether learning about the past or engaging with the present, don’t just think about someone from New York City or someone from Alabama or someone from California. Remember the Cubans, certain parts of the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Nicaragua, Jamaica. There's like four or five, six, half-African outfielders in Japan right now, and Japanese players doing camps in Uganda and Nigeria as well. There are African teenagers throwing 97 miles per hour with sweepers.

Word?

When people see the first Ugandan closer come in and tear some stuff up, they're gonna flip.

Usually, this is where I might include a gentle request to consider paying for a subscription for eyeblack. (And look, if you tryna throw $9 my way, I won’t say no!) But, for the budget conscious readers choosing between one place to support — go with Ellington and Red Green Black Baseball. Pat’s approach to baseball and history is essential. Pat’s work shouldn't just survive, but thrive. I urge you to join him in that work.