The Caribbean Series: Latin America’s Annual Baseball Tournament, 1949-2024, by Thomas E. Van Hyning, is a comprehensive and much-needed addition to the historical baseball reference genre. Van Hyning is a tireless researcher of Latin American baseball, previously published books on the Puerto Rican Winter League (Puerto Rico’s Winter League: A History of Major League Baseball’s Launching Pad, 1995) and Puerto Rico’s Santurce Crabbers (The Santurce Crabbers: Sixty Seasons of Puerto Rican Winter League Baseball, 1999). His latest release provides a much-needed examination of Latin American baseball’s premier tournament history.
I am a Negro Leagues researcher, and through this path, I discovered Van Hyning’s work. Before Jackie Robinson re-broke Major League Baseball’s color barrier in 1947, Black and Afro-Latino stars were forced to ply their trade outside of «organized baseball.» This, of course, included league play in the Negro Leagues. But once you start learning about stars of the Negro Leagues, you realize that official league games were only a fraction of their career ledger. Negro League teams supplemented their schedules (and incomes) by participating in countless barnstorming or exhibition contests. When their team’s season was over, the top players continued to play domestically (through barnstorming tours) or outside the country.
For example, a look at Hall of Famer Willard Brown’s Baseball Reference page displays an 11-year career with the Kansas City Monarchs (plus his ill-fated 21-game cameo with the American League’s St. Louis Browns). Clicking through to Brown’s non-major stats, you see two more (non-major) seasons with the Monarchs, several seasons in the organized minor leagues, and a stellar 1940 campaign in Mexico. But I learned through Jorge Colón Delgado’s incredible Negro Leaguers in Puerto Rico site that Brown had an 11-season career in Puerto Rico where he hit .350, won three batting titles and two Triple Crowns, and was inducted into the league’s inaugural Hall of Fame class.
This discovery expanded my focus from the Negro Leagues into Latin America. Through Rubén Sánchez’s WinterBallData site, I learned Brown played two seasons in the Dominican Republic. Additionally, I found that Brown played in Cuba in 1937-38. This led to my purchase of Jorge S. Figueredo’s Cuban Baseball: A Statistical History, 1878–1961. An incredible number of Negro League stars played in the Cuban League over the years, and suddenly I had access to much more data, allowing me to form a more complete picture of them.
Figueredo’s book also included the statistics from the first twelve Caribbean Series (1949 to 1960). In those early years, the tournament featured the champions from Cuba, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, and Panama. The rosters of these teams were filled with not only Negro League and Latin American stars but also stars from the American and National Leagues. Figueredo covered the Cuban League through 1960-61 and the Caribbean Series through 1960 (after that, the Cuban League was no longer professional, and both competitions ceased to operate).
But that wasn’t the end of the Caribbean Series. The tournament was restarted in 1970 with Puerto Rico, Venezuela, and the Dominican Republic. To give you an idea of the talent level in the competition, the Santurce Crabbers (Puerto Rico’s entry) was managed by Frank Robinson and featured Reggie Jackson and Don Baylor in the outfield, Tony Perez and Sandy Alomar in the infield, Elrod Hendricks behind the plate, and Doyle Alexander and Juan Pizarro in the rotation.
Figueredo’s book may have satisfied my appetite for records through 1960 (very few Negro Leagues stars played beyond 1960), but it also left me wanting more. Unfortunately, there was no reliable statistical record of the post-1960 Caribbean Series—until Van Hyning’s new book.
The Caribbean Series: Latin America’s Annual Baseball Tournament, 1949-2024, was published by McFarland (also the publisher of Figuerdo’s book). Stephanie Nichols (snichols@mcfarlandpub.com) is the Sales & Publicity Specialist. It is roughly 300 pages of commentary and statistics. Van Hyning goes year by year, providing a description of each tournament’s storylines as well as statistics for select teams.
I immediately started using the book for a pair of research projects. First, I’m working to compile a complete professional win-loss tally for Puerto Rican pitcher Juan Pizarro. In addition to 131 wins in the major leagues, he won 157 in Puerto Rico, 66 in the minor leagues, 38 in Mexico, among others. He had a pair of wins in the first iteration of the Caribbean Series, as I found in Figuerdo’s book. But Pizarro pitched into the mid-1970s, meaning he pitched in both the Interamerican Series and the relaunched Caribbean Series. This helped add a few more wins to Pizarro’s tally, now over 400.
I am also working on a project to identify players with 4,000 or more career professional hits. The list includes players like Hector Espino, Bobby Abreu, and Tony Perez, who collected several hits in the post 1970 Caribbean Series. Espino, for example, played in seven Caribbean Series and collected 46 hits (in 155 at-bats, hitting .297).
Van Hyning’s new book distills the history of the Caribbean Series (and Interamerican Series) into a comprehensive but digestible resource. Importantly, it fills a critical gap in baseball history by providing a much-needed account of this significant yet previously underreported aspect of these players’ careers. I highly recommend The Caribbean Series: Latin America’s Annual Baseball Tournament, 1949-2024, to researchers, historians, and baseball enthusiasts alike.
