Alex Pompez Marquee Hall of Fame 2006

Alex Pompez owned and ran the New York Cubans, whose records include 145 players, five of them Hall of Famers. Born in May 1890 and dead in March 1974, he was elected to the Hall in 2006 as an executive through the special Negro Leagues committee.

He was Cuban-American, from Tampa, and ran numbers in Harlem before and while he ran a ball club, which is how the club was financed and which forced him out of the country for a spell when Thomas Dewey prosecuted the rackets. He came back and won the Negro National League pennant in 1947.

When the color line fell he became the Giants' scout for Latin America and the Negro Leagues, and the players he brought in include Willie Mays, Monte Irvin, Orlando Cepeda and Juan Marichal. That pipeline is a large part of why the Giants of the 1950s and 1960s looked as they did, and it is the reason he is in the Hall of Fame rather than the numbers racket.