Ozzie Virgil Sr., who became the first Dominican native in major league baseball when he played third base for the New York Giants in 1956, and who took the field two years later as the Detroit Tigers’ first Black player, has died. He was 92.
His death was announced by Major League Baseball. The announcement did not say where or when he died or cite a cause.
Playing in the major leagues for all or part of nine seasons, mostly at third base, Virgil was an outstanding fielder, but he was a weak hitter and struggled to get into his teams’ starting lineups. He was later a coach and a scout.
His son Ozzie Jr. was a two-time All-Star catcher who played for the Philadelphia Phillies, the Atlanta Braves and the Toronto Blue Jays over 11 major league seasons.
Ozzie Sr. received little notice for his skin color or his ethnicity when he made his major league debut, against the Philadelphia Phillies, on Sept. 23, 1956. The Giants already had the brilliant Willie Mays in center field, and Ruben Gomez, who was from Puerto Rico, was a mainstay of their pitching staff. Players from Cuba, Puerto Rico, Venezuela and other places in Latin America had made other teams’ rosters; some had played in All-Star Games.
But Virgil was in the vanguard of the hundreds of Dominicans who would join the major leagues, including the Hall of Fame pitchers Juan Marichal, who was Virgil’s teammate with the Giants, and Pedro Martinez, as well as the outfielder Vladimir Guerrero Sr.
Virgil appeared in only three games for the Giants in 1956, at the end of the season, and in 96 games in 1957, their last year at the Polo Grounds before they moved from New York to San Francisco.
The Giants were active in signing players from Latin America in the late 1950s and the ’60s — among them Marichal and the Dominican outfielders Felipe, Jesus and Matty Alou.
But in January 1958, they traded Virgil to Detroit. At the time, the Tigers and the Boston Red Sox were the only major league teams that had never fielded a Black player.
Virgil told Michigan History magazine in 1997: “I knew that the Tigers did not have any Black players, nor had ever invited one to spring training. I wondered what they were going to do with me.”
The Tigers sent Virgil to their minor league system. But facing pressure from Black activists, who threatened to boycott their home games if the team remained all white, they called him up in June 1958.
Virgil, as he recalled, received little encouragement from Tiger fans.
“It was hard being ignored by both the white people and the African Americans, who didn’t always accept us Latinos as Black,” he told The Detroit Free Press in 1999. Larry Doby, the future Hall of Fame outfielder who became the first Black player in the American League with the Cleveland Indians in 1947, also became the Tigers’ first African American player in 1959.
Virgil batted .244 in 49 games for the 1958 Tigers before being sent back to the minors. He played for the Tigers again in 1960 and split the 1961 season between Detroit and the Kansas City Athletics. He played in one game for the Baltimore Orioles in 1962 and in 39 games for the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1965.
The Giants obtained him in a trade after the 1965 season, sending Matty Alou to Pittsburgh. Virgil saw limited action with the 1966 Giants, then spent 1967 and 1968 with their Phoenix team in the Pacific Coast League. He served as a coach as well.
When Clyde King, Virgil’s manager with Phoenix, became the Giants’ manager in 1969, he hired Virgil as his third-base coach. Virgil also appeared in one game that season, as a pinch-hitter, ending his playing career.
He remained with the Giants as a coach through the 1972 season, while also managing teams in Caribbean winter baseball and scouting for the Giants in Latin America. He returned to the Giants as their third-base coach in 1974 and 1975, then joined the Montreal Expos as a coach in 1976. He was a coach under Dick Williams when Williams managed the Expos from 1977 to 1981 and, later, the San Diego Padres and the Seattle Mariners.
Playing in 324 major league games, Virgil had a career batting average of .231 with 14 home runs.
Osvaldo Jose Virgil Pichardo was born on May 17, 1932, in the city of Monte Cristi, near the Dominican Republics’s border with Haiti, to Henry Virgil, a boat pilot, and Isabel Pichardo.
When Ozzie was a teenager, his parents moved to the Bronx with him and his brother, Carlos. He attended DeWitt Clinton High School there but didn’t play baseball for the school team, instead joining a predominantly Puerto Rican local team.
While in the Marines from 1960 to 1962, he played for the Marine baseball team at Camp Lejeune, N.C. He was signed by the Giants for a $300 bonus (about $3,500 in today’s currency) in 1953 and played in their minor league system until being called up in 1956.
Information on survivors, in addition to his son, was not immediately available.
Virgil worked for many years as an instructor at the Mets’ Dominican baseball academy. The Osvaldo Virgil National Airport opened in the province of Monte Cristi in 2006.
Reflecting on his groundbreaking legacy, Virgil told the website Simonetti Sports in 2015, “I may not have been the most talented, and I may not hold the records or any huge numbers, but I’ll always have a special number: number one.”
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