Justice Batted Last

Ernie Banks, Minnie Minoso, and the Unheralded Players Who Integrated Chicago's Major League Teams

By: Don Zminda

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Hardcover | 11 March 2025

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280 Pages

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On May 1, 1951, Orestes "Minnie" Minoso 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 Minoso 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.

Industry Reviews

"Justice Batted Last is an exhaustively researched, elegantly written account of baseball's long slow road to full integration after Jackie Robinson broke its color line. In telling the story of how Minnie Minoso joined the White Sox and Ernie Banks became a Cub, Don Zminda has given us an inside look at a crucial and often overlooked era in baseball history."--Ron Rapoport, author of Let's Play Two: The Legend of Mr. Cub, The Life of Ernie Banks

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