Connie Marrero, a chunky right-hander from Cuba with a windmill delivery and a wicked curveball, was nearly 39 years old when he reached the major leagues with the 1950 Washington Senators.
He went on to become an All-Star in his second season, when he threw a one-hitter against the Philadelphia Athletics, and he won 39 games in five seasons with lackluster Senator teams.
When he died on Wednesday in Havana at 102, two days short of his 103rd birthday, Marrero was the oldest former major leaguer. But his time with the Senators was only one chapter of a long career in which he became a cherished figure in Cuban baseball.
Marrero was one of Cuba’s leading pitchers in both the amateur and professional ranks. After pitching for the Senators, he tutored many young players in Cuba, having remained there after Fidel Castro took power in 1959. In the late 1980s he was a part-time pitching coach for the Cuban League team in Granma Province, on the southeastern end of the island.
When the Baltimore Orioles played exhibitions against the Cuban national team in Havana in 1999, Marrero was selected to throw out the ceremonial first pitch. He was so enthusiastic that he could not stop. After he hurled several pitches, with the Orioles’ Brady Anderson standing at the plate, officials finally called a halt to his unofficial comeback.
At age 87, Marrero could be excused for imagining that he was back in his prime, when, in the words of Felipe Alou, the longtime major league player and manager, he confounded batters with “a windup that looked like a cross between a windmill gone berserk and a mallard duck trying to fly backwards.”
When Marrero put on his pitching performance against the Orioles, the sportscaster Bob Wolff, who had broadcast Senators games during Marrero’s time with them, remembered how “Connie was one of the Senators’ all-time popular players.”
“He was a wily, chunky guy, always with a cigar, even on the bench,” Wolff told The New York Times. “He could really make the ball do tricks. He was an excellent pitcher on a lousy team.”
His death was confirmed by his grandson Rogelio Marrero, The Associated Press reported. Marrero had lived with his grandson in Havana.
Marrero’s death leaves Mike Sandlock, 98, a catcher and infielder who played for the Boston Braves, the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Pittsburgh Pirates, as the oldest living former major leaguer.
Conrado Eugenio Marrero was born on April 25, 1911, in Sagua La Grande, on Cuba’s northern coast. He left school as a boy to work on his father’s small sugarcane plantation and became a talented sandlot pitcher as a teenager.
“I started as an infielder, playing at third base, but one day I caught a bouncer in the face and lost some teeth,” he recalled in a 1999 interview with Peter C. Bjarkman, author of “A History of Cuban Baseball, 1864-2006.”
“That was it for me. Pitching seemed easier and definitely much safer.”
Marrero was 27 by the time he joined Cuba’s organized amateur baseball, pitching for a team in Cienfuegos, but he went on to become a star, appearing in international tournaments. He later pitched pro ball in Cuba for Almendares Alacranes and in Mexico.
Listed as 5 feet 5 inches (a few inches taller by some accounts) and 160 pounds or so, Marrero joined the Senators’ organization in 1947, one of many Cubans they signed over the years.
After pitching three seasons of minor league ball with the Havana team in the Florida International League, he made his debut with Washington four days before his 39th birthday. Delivering off-speed breaking balls, he became a mainstay of a pitching staff that included his fellow Cubans Sandy Consuegra and Julio Moreno at a time when there were few Latinos in the major leagues.
Marrero was an 11-game winner twice, with a career record of 39-40 and seven shutouts.
After being released by the Senators early in 1955, he pitched occasionally for the International League’s Havana Sugar Kings, a Cincinnati Reds farm team, then developed young Cuban players.
Blind and using a wheelchair, Marrero reflected on his life while a month away from his 101st birthday.
“I’m Cuban, and I came back to my homeland, to the place I was born,” he told NPR. “I wish our countries could be united again, just like the way they used to be.”
He was still listening to Cuban baseball games on the radio at night, and he grasped a baseball to show the grip he had used for his curveball.
“I’m ready to pitch again,” he said, “but I don’t have a catcher.”
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