The period saw a substantial influx of players of eastern and southern European ancestry -- sons of people who'd come to the United States as part of the great tide of "New Immigration" beginning in the 1880s. Migrating from Italy, Greece, Romania, Poland, Russia, and the multiethnic Austro-Hungarian Empire, these later arrivals, unlike earlier immigrants from northern and western Europe, who'd been mostly Protestant and largely English-speaking, spoke in a multiplicity of languages and dialects and were Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox Christians, or Jews. In language, religion, personal habits, and often physical appearance, they were different from (and often considered inferior to) settled, "old-stock" Americans.

So while Anglo-Saxon (English), Celtic (Scottish, Welsh, and Irish), and German names continued to predominate, big-league rosters came to include a growing number of players with names such as Comorosky, Ogrodowski, Vosmik, Urbanski, Kowalik, and Bejma (Polish); Niemiec and Kreevich (Serbian); Medwick (Hungarian); Kampouris (Greek); Krakauskas (Lithuanian); and even Coscaret (Basque). Some players Anglicized or otherwise simplified their names, of whom the best-known was Aloys Szymanski, who became Al Simmons when he entered professional ball. Others were John Bolinsky (Joe Boley), Anthony Pietruszka (Tony Piet), Joseph Dimaria (Frank Demaree), Harold Troyavesky (Hal Trosky), and, maybe oddest of all, Peter Jablonowski, who as Pete Appleton pitched for seven big-league teams over fourteen years.

Baseball players altered their names for the same reason as did immigrants and their offspring in other areas of American life: the United States was a country in which not only racial but ethnic and religious prejudices and stereotypes had always been and continued to be basic to the way people looked at and understood one another. And while the National Pastime was supposed to exemplify the expansive, democratic American way of life, inherited attitudes died very slowly -- if they ever did die.

Any player with even a fraction of American Indian ancestry, for example, was still called "Chief" and usually presumed to have peculiar ways -- and probably a weakness for strong drink. In what was supposed to be a salutary article on Elon Hogsett, "the Cherokee pitcher" (Hogsett was one-quarter Cherokee), Baseball Magazine's Clifford Bloodgood assured readers that the Detroit left-hander didn't possess a quiver and bow, wasn't wrapped in a blanket, and wasn't "leaping up and down brandishing a tomahawk fiercely threatening butchery." [Clifford Bloodgood,“Elon Hogsett, the Cherokee Pitcher,” Baseball Magazine, July 1933, p. 365.]

Because there had never been more than a few Jewish players, their presence in the major leagues had always drawn special attention. Relatively little notice was given to Mississippian Buddy Myer's Jewishness or that of Newark native Moe Berg (perhaps because, during fifteen major-league seasons with five teams, Berg played in a grand total of 662 games). But much attention focused on New Yorker Hank Greenberg and only somewhat less on Californian Harry Danning and Wisconsinite Morrie Arnovich. By 1938 Danning was being described as the Giants' "long sought Jewish hero" as well as "one of the best liked among fans and fellow players, a great credit to his race." Arnovich, an outfielder who enjoyed a couple of good years with the Phillies, was unmistakably Jewish, thought the editor of Baseball Magazine: "He looks the part, dark complexioned, thick black hair, prominent nose." [Ken Smith,“The Giants’ Jewish Catcher,” Baseball Magazine, March 1938, p. 474; Clifford Bloodgood,“Arnovich: A Superior Lad from Superior,” Baseball Magazine, July 1939, p. 347.]

But what occasioned the most commentary was the rapidly growing number of Italian-American players. Before 1930 a few had made it to the majors, such as Ping Bodie (ne´ Francesco Pezzolo), who played in the American League from 1911 to 1921. But Tony Lazzeri, a Yankees rookie in 1926, was really the first outstanding Italian-American player. A steady stream of Italian Americans followed Lazzeri, so many that by the mid-1930s sportswriters were suggesting that they must possess a natural affinity for baseball -- the same thing said about Irish Americans when they populated big-league rosters in the 1890s and early 1900s. "The Tonies take to baseball quicker than they take to spaghetti," commented a major-league manager in 1932. Once upon a time, he added, players were "all Pats," but "nowadays I can't even get a player on my team with the nickname of Pat." [“How Tony Gives a Latin Tone to Our National Game,” Literary Digest, July 2, 1932, p. 37.]

A year earlier, the Sporting News had announced that "the Italians have found baseball and they like it" and that soon the "sons of Caesar" would challenge the Irish "to prove their racial superiority." Italians, wrote Dan Daniel in 1936 (Joe DiMaggio's rookie season), were "an agile race, a sturdy, enduring and durable people, quick to learn and aggressive to the highest degree." [Sporting News, July 9, 1931, p. 4; Daniel M. Daniel, “Viva Italia!” Baseball Magazine, July 1936, p. 379. Daniel, whose given name was Daniel Margowitz, used the formal “Daniel M.” when he wrote for magazines.]

Ethnic stereotyping was particularly pronounced where Italian-American players were concerned. For years Joe DiMaggio was "Giuseppe" in Daniel's columns, and in its July 1936 cover story on DiMaggio, Time attributed his "solemn, almost embarrassing humility" to his being "like many young brothers in large Italian families." Henry Luce's other weekly magazine, the vastly popular Life, reported that DiMaggio "speaks English without an accent" and "never reeks of garlic." That kind of thing continued in DiMaggio's second season, with, for example, Dan Parker of the New York Daily News observing that the Yankees' young star was a strong guy even "before taking aboard his cargo of pasta fagiole." [Time, July 13, 1936, p. 43; Charles C. Alexander, Our Game: An American Baseball History (New York: Holt, 1991), p. 177; Sporting News, September 9, 1937, p. 4.] (It ought to be noted, though, that stereotyping could also be a matter of how one was willing to be perceived. Just as a couple of generations later well-to-do white Southerners might call themselves "rednecks," DiMaggio seemed to take satisfaction in his teammates' referring to him as "Daig" or "the Big Dago.")

Lou Smith of the Cincinnati Enquirer referred to Vince DiMaggio as "the stoop-shouldered, spaghetti-strangler," while the Pittsburgh reporter Charles J. "Chilli" Doyle wrote of Johnny Rizzo, "When you look at his thick chest, his pearly teeth and his raven locks, you might surmise that he had landed with one of the late Italian quotas, although he has yet to see the land of Mussolini." In St. Petersburg in the spring of 1939, Sam Breadon didn't know what to make of Cardinals rookie infielder Joe Orengo: "He's an Italian from San Francisco -- or maybe he's a Spaniard -- somebody says he's a Greek. If they can't figure out a man's name, they call him a Greek." [Cincinnati Enquirer, March 5, 1940, p. 14; Sporting News, March 5, 1938, p. 3; New York Times, March 17, 1939, p. 20.] (Breadon actually had it right the first time.)

Melo Almada, a native of Huatabampo, Mexico, played for four full seasons (1935–1938) in the American League, with Boston, Washington, and St. Louis, before he was released by Brooklyn in 1939; and over the decades, a trickle of ballplayers from Cuba -- all supposedly of unbroken European ("pure Castilian") ancestry -- had performed within Organized Baseball. Probably the best known had been Mike Gonzalez, who was mostly a backup catcher in a seventeen-year playing career and then a coach and scout for the Cardinals, and Adolfo Luque, who posted twenty-seven wins in 1923 for Cincinnati and 193 in a twenty-year career with three clubs. By the late 1930s, a few more Cubans and other Latin Americans were coming into the major leagues -- a development largely attributable to the efforts of Baltimorean Joe Cambria, who invested in both minor-league and black franchises and scouted the Caribbean region for the Washington Senators.

Cambria's first Latin American signee was the Cuban Roberto "Bobby" Estalella, who put in three years (1935–1936, 1939) as a part-time outfielder for Washington and, after a year in the American Association, went back up to the Browns. Estalella was still with Washington in spring training 1939, as were the Cubans Rene Monteagudo and Robert Ortiz and the Venezuelan Alejandro "Alex" Carrasquel. Washington controlled about ten other Cubans in the minor leagues.

Although describing the stocky Estalella as "gorilla-shaped," the journalist Bob Considine otherwise wrote sympathetically of the difficulties that Washington's Latin American contingent encountered. Estalella had been a regular target for American League hurlers "of that peculiar big-league mold which is almost psychopathically opposed to Roberto and his coffee-colored colleagues." So, "isolated by their lack of English, brutally snubbed by the dumber portions of Clark Griffith's predominantly southern ball club, the Washington aliens are among the unhappiest lot of athletes in the kingdom of sports." Senators manager Bucky Harris had to warn his American players to stop making slurs on the Latins in training camp. "They're all good boys, these foreigners," said Harris, "and the first punk who shows any resentment will get a fine slapped on him." [Cincinnati Enquirer, March 16, 1940, p. 14; Bob Considine, “Ivory from Cuba,” Collier’s, August 3, 1940, p. 19; Sporting News, March 16, 1939, p. 6.] Carrasquel was the only one of the four players who finished 1939 with Washington; the Venezuelan won five games and lost nine and went on to pitch for seven seasons for the Senators.

But Spanish-speaking players were hardly alone in having to put up with insults and indignities. Bench jockeys zeroed in on physiognomy, walk, talk, marital difficulties, and whatever else they could make use of -- but most of all one's ancestry. As Hank Greenberg put it, "Everybody got it. Italians were wops. Germans were krauts, and the Polish players were dumb polacks. Me, I was a kike or a sheeny or a mockey. . . . They reserved a little extra for me." [Hank Greenberg, The Story of My Life, ed. Ira Berkow (New York: Times Books, 1989), p. 42.] (Greenberg might have added that for city boys such as himself, Southerners were usually "hillbillies.")

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