Minorities Gaining in Big Leagues

Five years after former Dodger general manager Al Campanis said that blacks lacked the “essentials” to become major league baseball managers, the lot of minorities in those positions is beginning to improve.

Well, sort of.

Late last month, the Cincinnati Reds signed former slugger Tony Perez to manage the team in 1993. That action came only a few days after the expansion Colorado Rockies hired Don Baylor, a black, to the same post with the Denver-based club.

Perez, 50, was the Cincinnati hitting instructor and first base coach the past six seasons. He played 23 years in the majors, most of them with the Reds, and was one of the team’s most popular players during its Big Red Machine days in the 1970s. He becomes the fourth major league manager in history who is Cuban and the 7th overall who is Latino. Three others, including the manager he replaced, Lou Piniella, are of Spanish origin.

Baylor, 43, who played six years with the Angels, was the batting coach for the St. Louis Cardinals last season. He will be the sixth black to manage a major league team, not a great track record.

Those two appointments are encouraging, but other franchises apparently are not so eager to follow suit. Take the Florida Marlins, for instance, which along with the Rockies will play in the National League next season.

The Marlins will play their home games at Joe Robbie Stadium north of Miami and are expected to draw well from the large Latino community there. The Cubans and Nicaraguans, in particular, are devoted baseball fans.

Yet the Marlins overlooked some of the more viable Latino managerial candidates and chose Rene Lachemann, who managed at Seattle and Milwaukee. Lachemann was the Oakland A’s third base coach the past six seasons.

The Marlins said they wanted someone with major league managerial experience. That eliminated several Latinos, including Dodger special assignments coach Manny Mota, former Minnesota coach Tony Oliva and Perez. Baylor has never managed in the majors, either.

The Marlins also ignored three former managers: Atlanta coach Pat Corrales, their own scout Cookie Rojas and Nick Leyva, now at the helm of Toronto’s Triple-A affiliate in Syracuse, N.Y. Corrales managed nine years at Philadelphia, Texas and Cleveland; Rojas managed the Angels in 1988 and Leyva managed Philadelphia from 1989 through the middle of 1991.

“There are a lot of fans here who would have liked to see a Latin at the helm,” said Fausto Miranda, a Miami sports columnist for the Spanish-language daily, El Nuevo Herald. “But I think that in the long run we’ll see more Latins (managers in the majors).”

Over the summer, Marlin general manager Dave Dombrowski agreed that a manager with ties to the Latino community in South Florida would have been a plus for the club. But he said then, and also after hiring Lachemann, that the club wanted the best person available.

For Mota, who managed six winter league seasons in his native Dominican Republic, the almost complete absence of Latino managers in the majors is troublesome.

“They should give (managerial) opportunities to former Latino players,” said Mota. “There are a lot of (former) players who produced at the major league level who have vast (baseball) knowledge and talent.”

Mota cited as a step in the right direction the hiring last May of fellow Dominican Felipe Alou to manage the Montreal Expos after Tom Runnells was fired. Alou, who received a one-year contract extension through the 1993 season, took the Expos from the doldrums to challenge Pittsburgh for the National League East title.

When Campanis made his remarks in 1987, Corrales at Cleveland was the only minority managing in the majors.

Last season, there were only two black managers among the 26 major league teams--Hal McRae at Kansas City and Cito Gaston, who took Toronto to the World Series victory.

Perez drove in more runs (1,028) than any player in the big leagues from 1967 to 1976. Now Perez, who hit 379 career home runs, must keep the Reds in contention next season or his stay could be a short one. But at least he has the chance that many other capable minorities have never gotten.