Pedro Sierra: One of the last Negro League pitchers persisted for the love of the game

From NJ.com - February 14, 2021: Story and photos by Arlene Schulman

Pedro Sierra poses on a concrete mound facing an imaginary batter. He tucks a baseball into his palm, hands as large as catcher’s mitts, setting up pitches based on physics, syncopation and deception. As his windup begins, his dark 82-year-old eyes fix on his intended victim like a cat ready to ambush a mouse.

Hands above his head, the pitch is a mystery to onlookers until it reaches his opponent in a pugilistic style that takes him back to ballfields cluttered with rocks and thorny bushes in Cuba, where he first played the game. Almost every kid played baseball in Havana, including Sierra who was 5 or 6 when he first grabbed a stick and hit a worn ball.

“There were so many people who played baseball,” he recalls, listening to Miles Davis in his two-bedroom, poster-filled home in Mays Landing. “It was in our blood. Rafael Almeida, Armando Marsans. They were the talk of the neighborhood. … I wanted to be like them.”

His neighborhood in Havana was once saturated with prizefighters, baseball players and musicians, the smell of cigars and beats of son, mambo and rumba. Families like Sierra’s were squished into one-room tenements with toilets and washing stalls outside. A shower was a bucket of water heated up on the stove. Sierra, the son of a welterweight contender named Perico who shined shoes, was too small to box, instead, he found his music in baseball. So, he headed to the United States, where local heroes had gone to play the sport.

Almeida and Marsans, passing for white, hustled around the bases with the Cincinnati Reds. Meanwhile, Black Cubans like Isidro Fabre and Minnie Minoso, the “The Cuban Comet” and first Black Cuban in the major leagues, played in the Negro Leagues. Sierra worshipped Minoso.

Metal-lined caps

Rube Foster founded the Negro Leagues in 1920 in a segregated America.

The Pittsburgh Crawfords. Kansas City Monarchs. Indianapolis Clowns. The Detroit Stars. They had extraordinary athletes like Satchel Paige, Hank Aaron, Willie Mays, Jackie Robinson, Smokey Joe Williams, Roy Campanella and more.

Fewer than 150 Negro League ballplayers survive. Sierra is one of them.

Night games, shin guards for catchers and batting helmets first originated in the Negro Leagues. Three women, including second baseman Toni Stone, played ball. “She could pick dirt,” Sierra says, complimenting Stone’s fielding skills.

In 1947, Robinson, who had played with the Monarchs, became the first Black player to integrate major league baseball, wearing baseball caps lined with metal inserts to protect him from balls that racist pitchers might throw at his head.

Sierra threw a fastball as sharply as Kid Gavilan’s bolo punch, a combination of a hook and uppercut that sliced through the air like a machete through sugar cane. Baseball scout Maximo Sanchez, impressed by the teenager’s pitching speed and control, signed Sierra to a $100-a-month contract with the Clowns in 1954. Instead of graduating from high school, a 16-year-old Sierra boarded a turboprop, cardboard suitcase, baseball glove and spikes under his arm, and flew from Havana to Miami to meet up with the team. They played once a day, sometimes twice, from April through late August in everything from cow pastures to stadiums.

Not taught to hate

They traveled in hot, beat-up buses and faced hotels and restaurants with “whites only” signs. Players wore their pride under flannel uniforms in the heat and humidity of the South and raced to get on the bus, which would leave a lone Black man on the side of the road under swaying trees at night if he were not fast enough.

“I knew that racism was bad in the United States,” Sierra says. “I didn’t know until later the impact of the word n----. My dad told me, ‘You hear it but you don’t listen.’ They called me all kinds of names but I didn’t pay it no mind.”

Still, the racism was harder for the Havana teenager than it was for other teammates. “I had some tears. I knew English and what they were saying. I had to sit back and take it,” he recalls. Older Cuban players told him to ignore insults and to focus on his game. “I wasn’t taught to hate. The only thing I hated was when people hit home runs off of me.”

A newspaper account called him a curveball artist. But his best pitch, he says, was a brushback, a pitch thrown within an inch of the batter, forcing him to step back to avoid being hit.

Sierra pitched for the Indianapolis Clowns in 1954-55 and moved to the Stars in 1956. He says he was one of the last Negro League players to sign a major league contract, with the Washington Senators in 1959. But he was drafted into the Army, pitching for the Fort Hood Tanks. He played baseball for 22 years, including on the Minnesota Twins farm system. The closest Sierra got to the majors was pitching batting practice for the Senators in 1970.

“I have no regrets,” he says. “The happiest time of my life was on the baseball field.”

A Legacy of Men

He did short stints in the minor leagues and the Mexican leagues and retired from baseball in 1975 after his oldest son asked why the family was not together. He settled in Maryland, where he created a sports program to help at-risk youth stay out of trouble and ran it for 25 years.

The Negro Leagues Museum in Kansas City, Missouri, has documents and artifacts, but much of the information about the league, including Sierra’s pitching record, is missing or incomplete. Sierra says he won more than he lost and threw faster than 90 miles per hour.

“His story captures the transitional era of baseball with the hardships and small triumphs of integration, as well as the pivotal impact of the Latino players on the game,” said Raymond Doswell, the museum’s vice president of curatorial services.

For Sierra, the Negro Leagues is more than Jackie Robinson and Satchel Paige: It is an interlocking legacy of men who played for the love of the game.

Last year marked the 100th anniversary of the Negro Leagues. From his home in California, Dave Winfield, 69, a Hall of Fame outfielder with the New York Yankees and San Diego Padres, tips his cap to Sierra and celebrates his baseball past.

“You have to know where you’ve come from to know where you are going and what you can accomplish. Knowing history does that for you,” Winfield said. “It was a motivation for me that I could succeed. It’s important to tell the history of people like Pedro Sierra and what they were all about.”

Negro Leagues historian Phil Ross, a close friend of Sierra’s, said that “he was talented and persistent. He never gave up. He, unfortunately, ran into the problem of playing in the major leagues when there was a quota that prevented dark-skinned players from joining teams.”

Close to Atlantic City

Sierra, his skin the color of tobacco, sits in an overstuffed bachelor-brown recliner, beneath vinyl photographic prints of his three sons and six grandsons on the living room wall and across from a Santeria altar of cigars, photographs of his grandparents and clear glasses of Lucite “water,” a tribute to his ancestors in Cuba.

He lives in a neighborhood of spiritless gray, attached homes, the only Cuban and the only resident with a thriving business of selling posters that he has designed depicting his baseball career and that of other Negro League ballplayers.

Sierra is as guarded about his personal life as he was at guarding his pitches. Married in 1967 and divorced, he has lived near Atlantic City since 2004. His sons, who are 54, 50 and 47, and their sons, live in Maryland.

“I’m all about baseball,” he says.

Sitting at a desk in his office filled with cardboard mailing tubes, he works at two Dell computers using Print Artist software, neatly manicured nails clicking on keys that bring up grainy black-and-white photographs. He removes the backgrounds and plops them into vibrant Red-Grooms-style posters. At the moment, he is designing his showpiece, a poster with Negro League players from every state.

“It’s a lot of work to do a poster,” he says. His bestseller is one that depicts Sierra over the years; it took him three days to produce. Sierra drives to Staples, jazz beating on the stereo, where they are printed out on vinyl. He sells autographed posters from $40 on up, signed postcards with his photograph for $10 and signed baseballs for $20. Some collectors sell the items on eBay.

“The Negro Leagues don’t mean anything to them,” he says. “That’s taking advantage. I’m not a $5 player. People make money off of me.”

Sierra is one of the last surviving Negro League players in the New York/New Jersey area after Jim Robinson, a Monarchs infielder, died in September. Lionel Evelyn, 91, who played with the Brooklyn Royal Giants and New York Cubans, lives with dementia in Far Rockaway, his baseball memories gone.

“Someone has to be the last one,” Sierra says. “I will try to make people understand what the Negro Leagues were, what they really meant. It’s part of American culture.”

Sierra sets up another pitch in the air that tastes faintly of salt and throws it to another imaginary batter.

“Was that a fastball?”

“It was,” he glares, “a strike.”