Papa Joe Cambria Part 3
Player #165: Joseph C. "Joe" Cambria Part 3. "Papa Joe" (born Carlo Cambria) was an American professional baseball scout and executive who was a pioneer in recruiting Latin American players. From 1929 through 1940, he owned several Minor League Baseball teams, as well as the Negro league Baltimore Black Sox. He is best known, however, for his work as a scout for Major League Baseball, especially for his work in Cuba. From the mid-1930s until his death in 1962, he recruited hundreds of Cuban players for the Washington Senators and Minnesota Twins. Cambria was described as the first of many scouts who searched Latin America for inexpensive recruits for their respective ball clubs.
A more pronounced flop was Cuban pitcher Rene Monteagudo, whom Cambria had had on his Greenville, South Carolina, club. Monteagudo beat the Senators in an exhibition game and Griffith took him on, but his career in the big leagues was very brief. In 33 games with the Nats over two years, he was 3-7 with an atrocious earned run average of six runs per game. It had been said that Monteagudo's chief asset in terms of pitching in the big leagues was that he could speak English. This would have made him easier prey for Joe Cambria who, surprisingly, knew very little Spanish. On one occasion, after Clark Griffith had been unsuccessful in attempts to elicit some information from a Latin player, he asked Cambria to speak for him. Cambria went up to the player and asked the same thing Griffith had, in English, but he asked louder.
Next on the Cuban prospect list, and considerably more successful, was Alejando Alexander Aparicio Elroy Carrasquel, a name which might possibly been rendered even mor elegant had his parents left out the "Elroy." Certainly, Alex Carasquel was an elegant pitcher. His age was officially given as 27 when he joined the Nationals for the 1939 season, but some Cubans who had played with him during a tour of Florida insisted that he was more like 35. At his first training camp, all Carrasquel could say in English was, "Me peech good."
What Alex Carrasquel was for sure was a man fond of the rumba and the night life, and the owner of a nice fastball. Following his rookie season in 1939, in which he went 5-9 for another underachieving Washington ballclub, Carrasquel would find his niche with the Senators as a reliever throughout the war years. His fastball became a prized commodity on a staff which would be comprised almost entirely of knuckleballers, and his 50-39 career record, amassed on losing clubs, attests to his competence. Eventually, like Bobby Estalella, Carrasquel would be banned from baseball for jumping to the Mexican League, but would later make a brief return to the majors, with the White Sox, in 1949.
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