Every April, Major League Baseball salutes the accomplishments of Jackie Robinson, and his role in racially integrating what, before 1947, was a sport populated by white men. In 1997, MLB retired Robinson’s iconic #42, and on April 15 of every year, every MLB player wears his uniform number.

Robinson was signed by the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1945 and debuted with them two years later, becoming the first black player in MLB. A man named Jorge Pasquel sent an agent with a huge offer to try to persuade Robinson to come to Mexico shortly after Robinson signed with Brooklyn. He refused.

How history may have been altered (or at least delayed) had Robinson chosen to go south of the border is certainly a matter of conjecture. Would there have arisen another “Jackie Robinson” in MLB had the great groundbreaker decided to venture to Mexico? Or, would history simply have happened a year or two later, with a new year replacing “1947” in the textbooks?

Nevertheless, Mexico played a little-known, but important role in baseball’s integration in the middle of the 20th century.

“The Mexican Steinbrenner”

The late Monte Irvin, himself an MLB and Negro League star, called Jorge Pasquel the George Steinbrenner (New York Yankees owner, 1973-2010) of Mexico. Pasquel was the proprietor of the biggest import-export business in the country at the time. Rich, handsome, and fierce, Pasquel, according to Cesar Gonzalez in his 2015 Remezcla article, knew no limits. His larger-than-life persona included dating Mexico’s biggest movie star of the 1940s and 1950s, María Félix. He brought glamour to Mexico’s baseball diamonds at the same time he wrangled for popularity as a politician.

Officially, Jorge Pasquel became the owner of the newly-formed Azules de Veracruz in 1940, providing his entrée into the Mexican Baseball League. Before that, he was the main sponsor of the league, signing and paying black stars to play for all the league’s teams. The new owner stuck to the name despite the fact that the team was actually based in Mexico City, 250 miles west of Veracruz.

“I remember my time in Mexico fondly. It was one of the best years of my life,” says Monte Irvin who played in Mexico in the early 1940s. Irvin was one of the biggest young stars in America’s Negro Leagues (Newark Eagles, 1938) before he went south to play for the Azules de Veracruz in that crescent-shaped state on the Gulf of Mexico.

Four-Base Monte

Irvin’s career in Mexico amounted to no more than just 63 games played in the 1942 season, but his feats on the diamond were enough to earn him the Triple Crown and an MVP award.

According to ESPN.com in June 2017, Irvin once described his relationship with Pasquel in order to showcase the businessman’s eccentricity. Down 1-0 in the 1942 season’s final game with a runner on, Pasquel pulled Irvin away from the batter’s box and ordered him to hit a walk-off.

“That was the first time, and only time, that I was ever commanded to hit a home run,” Irvin wrote in the foreword for John Virtue’s book, “South of the Color Barrier.”

Irvin obliged, and Pasquel ran onto the field. “When I got to home plate, Jorge was there to greet me and he had 500 bucks in his hand.”

Irvin wanted to return to Mexico for the 1943 season but he got drafted and joined the Army during World War II. When Jackie Robinson shattered MLB’s color barrier in 1947, Irvin was one of the talents who got the attention of the bigger clubs and made his debut with the New York Giants in 1949, where he, ultimately, became a star. For all his notable accomplishments with the Giants, Irvin is now a member of the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. He passed away in January 2016 at his Houston home at the age of 96.

Per Cesar Gonzalez, “Monte Irvin is the perfect example of the quality of black players that came to the Mexican League in those years. There were more than 150 black US players that came to Mexico from 1937 to 1946, looking for better salaries and social conditions. Fourteen of them are now Cooperstown Hall of Famers, including the greatest pitcher of segregated baseball, Satchel Paige, and the greatest hitter, Josh Gibson.”

“It was the first time in my life that I felt free,” adds Irvin. “We could go anywhere we wanted, eat anywhere we wanted, do anything we wanted and not have to worry about anything. We just had a wonderful time, and I owe that experience to Jorge Pasquel.”

While Irvin eventually returned to America and took his place among other MLB greats, some of his African-American teammates found the glamour and social equality that Mexico offered too alluring to give up.

“Wild Bill Wright liked it so much, he never came back,” Bob Kendrick, president of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, told ESPN. Wright, the former Negro Leagues outfielder and Mexican Triple Crown winner, died in Aguascalientes, a city where he even became a local business owner.

“The Best Ballplayer of All Time”

With his connections and willingness to spend, Pasquel once recommended a black Cuban superstar to the Aguila, also in Veracruz in 1937. Martín Dihigo carried the team to the championship in 1937 and 1938. Dihigo, nicknamed “El Maestro,” was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1977, and was an early two-way player. In 1938, he threw the first no-hitter in the history of the Mexican League, hit over .300, and led the league in strikeouts. His lithe build and graceful movements reminded many of Joe DiMaggio.

Buck Leonard, legendary first baseman in both the Negro Leagues and the Mexican League, called Dihigo “The best ballplayer of all time, black or white.”

The Mexico City Agrario team, arch-rival to the Aguila club, countered Pasquel’s Dihigo move by signing the legendary Satchel Paige, the greatest black American pitcher of the time, who, in 1938, became the first African-American to play in the Mexican League.

By 1940, there were 63 African-American players in Mexico, a diamond paradise Gonzalez calls a “Mexican Field of Dreams.”

Pasquel’s perennial vision was to have major league caliber baseball in Mexico during the summer season. To do this, he strengthened his relationship with the winter Cuban League to guarantee that his stars would work year-round.

Under Pasquel’s leadership, the Mexican leagues thrived. Cool Papa Bell, regarded as the fastest black man in baseball, won the Triple Crown playing for Veracruz. In 1941, Josh Gibson, the greatest black power hitter of his time, blasted 33 homers in just 358 at-bats, also for Veracruz. Hall-of-Fame and stars of the Negro Leagues Ray Dandridge and Willie Wells would also prove to be rousing favorites among the Mexican crowds.

Avoiding “The Devil”

Wells, nicknamed “El Diablo” for his aggressive style of play, was an early mentor to both the younger Jackie Robinson and Monte Irvin. “Wells showed me everything he knew,” Irvin once revealed.

Related: Willie Wells, Reverend Downs, and the Texas Influence on Jackie Robinson

The legend of Willie Wells spread quickly to players in the Mexican League, who were known to warn others, “don’t hit it to shortstop because ‘El Diablo’ plays there.” Cool Papa Bell recalled, “Of the shortstops I’ve seen, Wells could cover ground better than any of them. Willie Wells was the greatest shortstop in the world.”

A Wider Net

Pasquel, ever the adventurous tycoon, eventually cast his net wider than the Negro Leagues, and began courting players of all races to play ball in Mexico. By 1944, Veracruz was being managed by Hall of Famer Rogers Hornsby. Shortly after, Pasquel signed Cubs catcher Mickey Owen and Cardinals pitcher Max Lanier to big contracts.

Fantastic stories accompanied those dealings. Pasquel reportedly made offers to Ted Williams and the Cardinals’ Stan Musial, according to the ESPN article. It is the St. Louis outfielder who famously found “$50,000 in hard cash” on his hotel bed in Florida before rejecting the offer.

Pasquel’s antics did not go unnoticed by Major League Baseball. Commissioner Happy Chandler threatened players making the jump across the border with a five-year ban.

“Field of Dreams” Dissolves

Jackie Robinson’s 1945 signing with the Brooklyn Dodgers organization marked the beginning of the end for Jorge Pasquel’s grand experiment of integration, using the Mexican League as a conduit.

Young black stars such as Larry Doby, Sam Jethroe, or Don Newcombe, whose natural destination in earlier years would have been Mexico, appeared in the major leagues between 1947 and 1950, instead. Other veteran black stars like Claro Duany or Silvio García opted not to return south. Some of them would become huge stars in the major leagues, like Roy Campanella. In the next 10 years, 57 black players would play for MLB, depleting the Mexican League.

The final demise of Jorge Pasquel and the Mexican “Field of Dreams” occurred in 1951, when he announced the Azules would be dissolved and that he was leaving the league.

Pasquel died tragically in an airplane accident in March 1955, but his legacy, Cesar Gonzalez writes, “was showing black baseball players that not only could they be treated as equals to whites, but that they could be better. The white players learned that they could share a clubhouse with black players, and that colorblindness was the best way to win games.”

Pasquel was inducted into Monterrey’s Mexican Professional Baseball Hall of Fame in 1971.

“Here, in Mexico…”

“I am not faced with the racial problem,” Willie Wells once said. “We live in the best hotels, we eat in the best restaurants. We don’t enjoy such privileges in the US. I didn’t quit Newark and join some other team in the United States. I quit and left the country. I’ve found freedom and democracy here, something I never found in the United States. Here, in Mexico, I am a man.”

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