Miñoso’s long journey to Hall ends with his day in the sun

Minnie Miñoso’s induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame Sunday culminates a long and complicated journey to Cooperstown, New York, that few imagined would end this way.

The former Chicago White

Sox legend — who joined David Ortiz, Jim Kaat, Tony Oliva,

Buck O’Neil, Gil Hodges and

Bud Fowler in the 2022 class — repeatedly was deemed unworthy from his original retirement in 1964 to his death at 90 in 2015.

Miñoso was an afterthought in the minds of the Baseball Writers Association of America, which originally kept him out of the

Hall during his years of eligibility. Early veterans committees shot him down as a viable candidate, as did a revamped veterans committee in 2003 consisting of Hall of Famers and those who had earned plaques in Cooperstown through broadcasting or writing about the game. (The

Hall disbanded the 15-member veterans panel after Bill Mazeroski’s election in 2001, feeling it was too political.)

But Miñoso, known as the “Cuban Comet,” still fared poorly with his peers, finishing with only 16 votes by the 85-man committee, which was tied for 10th place and well below the 61 votes necessary for election. His candidacy barely even registered with the Chicago media, who focused on the Hall of Fame quest of former Cubs third baseman Ron Santo, who fell 15 votes shy in 2003.

When MLB created the Committee on African-American Baseball in 2006 to elect Negro Leagues greats who had been overlooked, Miñoso felt he had a realistic chance. But his threeyear stint in the Negro Leagues was considered too brief, even combined with his major-league career, so Miñoso was not one of the 18 Black players elected.

By 2011, he seemed resigned to his fate.

“I’ve kept it inside me,” Miñoso told the Tribune that April at U.S. Cellular Field. “It will go with me when I die . ... I’m mad because it seems a lot of people ignore a lot of things I do in baseball.”

But in the fall, Miñoso again found himself listed on the 10-person ballot for consideration by the Hall’s Golden Era Committee, which replaced the

coming to the United States. He tolerated them so he could play professional baseball and fulfill his own American dream. Little did he know, as a pioneer, that he was opening doors for countless others behind him.”

Tony Oliva, a three-time batting champion from Cuba for the Minnesota Twins, called Miñoso “the Jackie Robinson in America” for people from his country. Oliva, 84, was inducted nearly 46 years after his final game. His former Twins teammate Jim Kaat finally made it for a pitching career that stretched from 1959-83.

Kaat, 83, is old enough that the major leagues were still segregated when he attended his first game, at Briggs Stadium (later known as Tiger Stadium) in Detroit in 1946, when he was 7 years old. He had made peace with his position on the outside of glory.

“I had the Hall of Fame in my rearview mirror,” Kaat said after his speech. “I wasn’t bitter about it, but I came to the conclusion that it was for dominant, opening-day guys. This might be the first time they rewarded durability and longevity.”

Former players are first considered by the Baseball Writers’

Association of America, with 75% of the vote needed for election. Hodges peaked at 63.4%, Oliva at 47.3%, Kaat at 29.6% and Miñoso at 21.1%. None has been eligible on the writers’ ballot since 1999, and various committees had passed them over since.

Now, at last, their contributions will be preserved forever in the plaque gallery, which will probably need another boost from a small committee to have much of a ceremony next year. There are no compelling newcomers to the next writers’ ballot besides Carlos Beltrán, and only one returning candidate, Scott Rolen, topped 52% last year.

Three polarizing players ran out of eligibility on the writers’ ballot: outfielder Barry Bonds and pitcher Roger Clemens, who have ties to performance-enhancing drug use, and pitcher Curt Schilling, whose incendiary rhetoric on social media soured some on his case. They could be considered by a small committee this December, but only if a different panel puts them on the ballot.

If all that sounds a bit confusing, or perhaps convoluted, Ortiz is a surprisingly uncomplicated exception. Although, as reported by The New York Times, Ortiz’s name surfaced on a list of players who tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs during survey testing in 2003 — when results were supposed to be confidential — he made it to Cooperstown on the first ballot, with 77.9% of the vote.

Ortiz, who said he had only taken over-the-counter supplements, was all but exonerated by MLB commissioner Rob Manfred in 2016. He never served a suspension, and he hit 452 of his 541 career homers in the testing era, when he won all of his championships. Ortiz was released by Minnesota in 2002 before rising to stardom with Boston.

“Even though it didn’t work out the way everybody expected,” Ortiz said in his speech, referring to the Twins, “I learned from my time there that once I get my shot in any other place, I was going to work hard to never let it go until the last day I play.”

The first sentence of Ortiz’s plaque cites his “legendary postseason performances,” and he joins Willie Stargell and Mariano Rivera as the only Hall of Famers to be named MVP in both a league championship series and a World Series.

Rivera was a guest at Ortiz’s party here Saturday night, as was another former Yankee rival, his Fox Sports colleague Alex Rodriguez. Several of Ortiz’s former teammates also came to town, including Johnny Damon,

LaTroy Hawkins, Mike Lowell, Trot Nixon, Dustin Pedroia, Tim Wakefield, Kevin Youkilis and Pedro Martinez, a fellow Hall of Famer from the Dominican Republic.

Many fans waved Dominican flags for Ortiz, who pitched for his homeland in his speech — “We have a lot of good and happy people, beautiful beaches where you guys can go when you are freezing here,” he said. Ortiz’s daughter, Alex, sang the United States’ national anthem before the ceremony, and Ortiz spoke in his speech about his mother, Angela Rosa, who died in 2002.

“Going through this speech and putting it together, I cried a lot, to be honest with you, even this morning, every time I touched base about my mom,” Ortiz said. “It just got to the point, repeating over and over and over, it kind of cured it a little.”

For Ortiz, the honor was exquisitely timed. He was shot in the back in the Dominican Republic in 2019, and it is chilling to think of how close he came to missing his own ceremony. Instead, he is healthy and strong — the full Big Papi on the biggest day of all.

“Thank God I’m good to go, I don’t have any injuries, I’m back to normal,” Ortiz said later. “I always appreciate that and thank God for everything.”