Cuban Giants

The Cuban Giants were the first salaried Black professional baseball club, formed in 1885 out of a group of waiters at a Long Island hotel. Neither the players nor the management were Cuban. The name was chosen as cover: the players were said to speak nonsense on the field in the hope that crowds would take them for foreign visitors rather than Black Americans, which was thought to draw less hostility on the road.

The archive holds only 11-13 across three seasons, and that gap is the point. The club played several hundred games a year against white semi-professional and college teams, almost none of which were recorded in the league tables this record is built from. What survives is a fragment.

Two Hall of Famers played here: Frank Grant, who was the best Black player of the nineteenth century and spent years in white minor leagues before the color line closed against him, and Sol White, who later wrote the first history of the Black game. It played out of the Long Island Grounds. The club's name was copied by rivals for twenty years, which is why several Cuban Giants appear in this archive.