By John Klima
Staff Writer

Picture for a moment the Angels without Vladimir Guerrero, the Cardinals without Albert Pujols, and the Red Sox without Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz. Try to envision the Mets without Jose Reyes, the Tigers without Magglio Ordonez, or the Marlins without Hanley Ramirez.

And for a moment, you have an idea of what it was like for Minnie Minoso to be a young Latin ballplayer in the big leagues a long time ago.

Winter is officially over, even if the calendar says it is not. The calendar, somehow, has never seemed to apply to Minoso, who well into his 80s, still embodies the goodness that baseball can represent. The only five-decade player in major league history will be honored in early March when the Arizona Diamondbacks and Chicago White Sox play an exhibition game in Hermosillo, Mexico, where Minoso is still remembered as a Mexican League All-Star.

Minoso arrived at a time when baseball was learning what it meant to be a diversified game. And yet, he was caught on the in-between hop. The black players, his former competitors in the Negro Leagues, never quite considered him one of their own. To Latin players, he was as important as Jackie Robinson was to blacks.

Hermosillo is a baseball town, and the White Sox and Diamondbacks coordinated the occasion to celebrate Minoso’s contributions to the game. He’ll never be as famous as Ted Williams or Joe DiMaggio were in their 80s, but Minoso still signifies so much of where baseball has come from to where it is now.

He will be honored with the Buck O’Neil Award from the Baseball Hall of Fame later this summer, which is fitting for a player who never quite belonged to finally belong in one sense of the word. When he came to the majors in 1949, most white players assumed he was black. Just as they were getting used to the idea of playing with blacks, Minoso opened his mouth, and Spanish came out.

Isolated first by his skin and later by his language, Minoso persevered with a personality much different than Robinson. It worked for him, especially in Chicago, where he is still employed by the White Sox in community relations and is a legendary figure in Chicago baseball.

Minoso was a Hall of Fame talent who doesn’t have Hall of Fame numbers because of factors that were out of his control. In what he could control, he excelled. His major league numbers, 1,963 career hits, are misleading. When he came to the Indians in 1949 at the reported age of 23, he was already a few years older than he really was. He wasn’t the only player to shave a few years off his age to ensure that a major league team would look at him favorably.

This wasn’t a case of a player who was blocked because of a large contract in his way. This was a player who was blocked because he came from Cuba by way of Harlem, where he played for Alex Pompez’s New York Cubans. It would be difficult to assemble a complete and accurate record of how many hits Minoso actually had at the various levels of winter ball and Negro League baseball. You could take a realistic guess and come up with the number of 5,000, which probably wouldn’t be a stretch. He played in the Pacific Coast League, which had 180-game seasons. Tack on winter months in Mexico and the Dominican Republic. Who knows how many games he would have played in the Negro Leagues, where teams played as many games as they could possibly book and double-headers were as common as sunshine.

But just as race was an issue then, numbers are the issue now. Does a player who didn’t spend his entire career in the majors, who couldn’t, deserve the same consideration as the player who stayed in the majors for as long as his talent warranted it? Minoso, who dealt with the same adversity Robinson fought, proved himself and proved that other Latin players could play here and succeed. Shouldn’t that be enough for legitimate recognition with a player plaque in the Hall of Fame?

In this era where players are going to be banished en masse from the Hall of Fame because of the steroid era, should we, as a baseball community, stop looking for who we can throw under the bus? Should we try to elevate someone who elevated himself and his people in the eyes of an entire community which has heretofore failed to recognize decades of contributions?

Maybe I’m a romantic and maybe that’s a bad thing. Maybe the weak collective memory of the baseball population – a version of which the writer Gore Vidal refers to as the ‘United States of Amnesia’ – works against a player such as Minoso.

Maybe baseball looks as bad now as it did then. The great game always finds a way to ignore that which it should celebrate. Perhaps that’s why this is still the National Pastime, the game that loves to adore its image, but can’t be happy unless it is picking at its sores.

I do know this. The Angels would be worse without Guerrero, the Cardinals worse without Pujols, the Mets worse without Reyes. Take that idea right down the line. Remember that a baseball life should not only be honored for what it achieved on the field, but for what it helped create long after the spikes collected rust. Baseball was better with Minnie Minoso.