The forgotten all-star game: 50 years ago, baseball’s Latino legends played in Polo Grounds’ last game

By Robert Dominguez, New York Daily News

It was the all-star game few baseball fans witnessed, and fewer today know it was ever played at all.

Fifty years ago, on a warm and sunny autumn afternoon in New York, two teams comprised of Latino players from the Major Leagues squared off at the Polo Grounds for an exhibition game billed as a charity event to benefit a new Latin American Hall of Fame.

Held on Oct. 12, 1963 – a week after the Los Angeles Dodgers swept the New York Yankees in the World Series – it would be the last baseball game ever played at the ramshackle Polo Grounds, which had housed the expansion Mets in their first two seasons while Shea Stadium was being built in Queens.

It was also the first – and only – time baseball’s Latino players would be squarely in the spotlight, especially in an era when a Spanish surname was still a rarity in the Major Leagues.

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