The Cuban Major Leaguers Database

This is every Cuban-born player who has appeared in a major league game — all 403 of them, from Chick Pedroes in 1902 to the 29 who played in 2026. It is searchable, sortable, filterable by province, and you can download what you are looking at as a CSV.

As far as we can establish, the list has never been assembled in English in one place before. That is not because it is hard to want — it is because it sits across two record-keeping traditions that were only merged five years ago.

What counts as a major league here

In December 2020 Major League Baseball reclassified seven Negro leagues, covering 1920 to 1948, as major leagues, and folded their records into the official register. That single decision added 166 Cuban names to the list of major leaguers — more than a third of this database.

Cuban players were central to Black baseball in a way that has almost no English-language documentation. The Cuban Stars, the New York Cubans and the All Cubans drew on the island continuously through the 1920s and 1930s, at exactly the time when the American League and the National League would take a Cuban only if he could be presented as white. Both facts are in this table, side by side, for the first time.

The table tags every player accordingly: AL/NL, Negro leagues, or both. Seven men are in the last category, and the most famous of them is Minnie Miñoso, whose first major league seasons were with the New York Cubans, before Cleveland signed him.

Cuban-born major leaguers, all time	403
American League / National League only	237
Negro leagues only	159
Both	7
Born in Havana province	194 (48%)
Hall of Famers	6 — Martín Dihigo (1977), Tony Pérez (2000), José Méndez and Cristóbal Torriente (2006), Minnie Miñoso and Tony Oliva (2021)
Most Valuable Player awards	3 — Zoilo Versalles (1965), José Canseco (1988), José Abreu (2020)
Appeared in the 2026 season	29
First	Chick Pedroes, two games for Chicago in the National League, 1902

One note on the first entry. Chick Pedroes played two games for Chicago in 1902 and is, on the record, the first Cuban-born major leaguer. The players usually credited as the first Cubans in the majors are Rafael Almeida and Armando Marsans, who debuted for Cincinnati on 4 July 1911 — because they were the first to arrive as Cuban players, and the first the sport had to argue about. Their story is on the Cincinnati Reds page.

The database

Click any column heading to sort. The Career column gives major league totals only — games, average, home runs and runs batted in for position players; games, win–loss record and earned run average for pitchers. For players whose careers span the Negro leagues and the American or National League, the totals combine both, which is what MLB’s own register now does.

Where the data comes from

Identity, birth dates, birthplaces and cross-reference IDs: Wikidata, which is released under CC0 and carries Baseball-Reference, Retrosheet and Chadwick Bureau identifiers for most of these players. 244 of the 403 are matched to a Baseball-Reference register entry.

Appearances, seasons, teams, leagues and career totals: MLB’s official public statistics interface, which since the 2020 reclassification returns Negro league records alongside American and National League ones. Every player in this table has been confirmed to have appeared in a game — roster membership alone was not enough to qualify.

Provinces have been normalised by hand. The source data mixes modern provinces with the pre-1976 ones (Oriente, Las Villas), carries a handful of encoding errors, and occasionally records a city where a province belongs. Historic provinces are labelled as such rather than silently reassigned. 39 players have no recorded province and are shown with a city only, or with neither.

Where a claim on this page rests on something outside the database — a Hall of Fame election, an award — it comes from the same official register.

What is not in here yet

This is the major league layer, and it is the easy half. The Serie Nacional is the half that matters and the half nobody has published in English. Sixty-five seasons since 1961, several thousand players, and no machine-readable release anywhere — which is the single biggest gap in the English-language record of Cuban baseball.

Also outstanding: minor league careers, Japanese and Mexican league service, the Cuban winter league before 1961, and coaches and managers. Each is a layer on the same spine, joined on the identifier columns already in the download.

Using it

The complete file is here: cuban-major-leaguers-2026-08-29.csv — 403 rows, including Baseball-Reference, Retrosheet, Wikidata and MLBAM identifier columns that the on-page table does not show. The Download CSV button exports whatever the table is currently showing, filters and search included — so you can pull just the Negro leagues cohort, or just the players from Matanzas, without downloading the lot.

If you use it, a link back to this page is all we ask. If you spot an error, we would rather hear about it than not: contact us. A formal versioned release, with the identifier columns and a licence file, is the next step for this dataset.

The team pages, built from this

Cuba Dugout keeps a franchise-by-franchise page for every club with a real Cuban history: Chicago White Sox, Washington Senators and Minnesota Twins, Cincinnati Reds, New York Yankees, Miami Marlins, Detroit Tigers and Houston Astros. For the players active right now, see Cubans in MLB 2026.

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