Justice Batted Last: Ernie Banks, Minnie Miñoso, and the Unheralded Players Who Integrated Chicago’s Major League Teams

On May 1, 1951, Orestes ＂Minnie＂ Miñoso took the field for the Chicago White Sox and broke the color line for Chicago major league baseball. Ernie Banks integrated the Chicago Cubs two years later. The future Hall of Famers began their Chicago baseball careers against the backdrop of a 1951 race riot in suburban Cicero, where a white mob abetted by local police attacked a building that had rented to Black tenants.

Don Zminda’s account looks at these interconnected events alongside the little-known chronicle of Chicago’s slow track to integrating major league baseball. By the early 1950s, the Cubs and White Sox organizations had become rich in Black and Afro-Latino stars and talented prospects. Unlike Miñoso and Banks, however, most of these minor leaguers never advanced to the majors or, if they did, it was for little more than a cup of coffee. Zminda also profiles these players, from Charles Pope, the Cubs’ first Black signee, to larger-than-life fireballer Blood Burns.

Essential and dramatic, Justice Batted Last uses the lives and careers of two Chicago legends to tell a story of integration on and off the diamond.

Don Zminda is a sports historian and the former vice president and director of research at STATS LLC. He is the author of Double Plays and Double Crosses: The Black Sox and Baseball in 1920 and The Legendary Harry Caray: Baseball’s Greatest Salesman.