Identifying Rafael de la Rúa, a Cuban pioneer in the National Association, 1868.

When Esteban Bellán left St. John’s College in 1868 to pursue a career in baseball (with the Unions of Morrisania) he was not the only Cuban to do so.

Rafael de la Rúa, a native of Matanzas, Cuba, played 12 games for the Unions of Lansingburgh of the National Association in that same year of 1868. He was a pitcher, with a good screwball but some control problems.

De la Rúa joins Bellán as the first Latin player in an organized and highly competitive league. The National Association would not be considered a Major League until it became professional in 1871, and still that is debatable. But what is clear is that they are the first Latin ballplayers to compete at the highest level of baseball in the United States.

1895: The earliest images known in the history of Venezuelan baseball

On August 15th, 1895, Mariano Domingo Becerra makes a contribution for the magazine El Cojo Ilustrado in Caracas, Venezuela. He wanted to publicize the recent foundation of the Caracas club that was practicing a game, that even though had been played since 1892 in Venezuela, it was about to take new life in the country: the game of base ball.

El Cojo Ilustrado was a literary magazine published twice a month, and was a modernist icon in Latin America. Baseball could not be ignored in it, since it was a trend that the game was covered in publications devoted to literature and poetry during the 19th century, as was the case in Cuba.

This magazine prints in August, 1895, the earliest images known in the history of Venezuelan baseball which are of a notorious technical quality. El Cojo Ilustrado had a legendary team of photographers who were likely sent in assignment to register the action of the game.

Locating points where the Union B.B.C., first documented club in Mexico and Latin America played in 1869.

I visited Brownsville, Texas, last week. My purpose was to follow the historical path of the Union Base Ball Club of Matamoros, Mexico, whose appearance in newspapers from 1869 make it the earliest baseball club that has been documented in Latin America. I wanted to find the exact points where the games were celebrated according to the information contained in the newspaper reports from that year.

The Union Club crossed the border, marked by the Rio Grande river, from Matamoros to Brownsville to play in the grounds of Fort Brown, an important military garrison. Actually, the Fort was just some feet away from the international crossing point, and a portion of the huge grounds used then to play are at the present, a part of the american immigration facilities.

The rest of the playing grounds are now occupied by the facilites of the University of Texas in Brownsville and the Texas Southmost College. UTB is the institution that holds the collections used in this investigation.