Inducted in 2011
Professional Baseball Player, Major League Baseball & Cuban League
"Father of Cuban Baseball"

Induction Video

Like many Cuban families seeking to distance themselves from their Spanish colonial rulers in the 1860s, the parents of Esteban and Domingo Bellán decided against sending their young sons to study in Madrid. They chose Fordham, New York instead — specifically, the Second Division of St. John’s College, as Fordham Prep was originally known. 

Born on October 1, 1849,  a 14-year-old Esteban (whose name is listed in school records by the variant spelling Estevan) entered the equivalent of a modern-day freshman class in 1863. Three years later, he would complete his Second Division education as an honor student, winning several premiums, or awards, for his exemplary work in religious studies, Greek, history, penmanship, and music. He also excelled in a new game — baseball.  Just a few years before the Bellán brothers' arrival, the Prep, or Second Division, had established its own team, the Live Oaks. A year before that, First Division, or Fordham University, had fielded its team, the Rose Hills, in the historic first-ever collegiate game played with nine men on a side. When Bellán arrived here at Fordham to find the sport as the unrivaled pastime of the day, it was the start of something big.

By the fall of 1866, after finishing his Second Division years, Esteban moved on to First Division, and had joined the elite College varsity squad — the Rose Hills — as catcher and lead-off batter. During his post-Prep years at Fordham, he would have been among the first college students to live and take classes in First Division Hall. Completed in 1867, it is today known as Dealy Hall, named for fellow Hall of Honor inductee Rev. Patrick Dealy, SJ, Class of 1846, the beloved and dynamic 13th president of Fordham Prep and University. 

In June of 1868, during a game against an amateur team that was part of the National Association of Base Ball Players (NABBP) [baseball was written as two words in those early days], Esteban had four hits and came home twice, impressing one of the umpires. As it turned out, the moonlighting ump was an infielder for another NABBP club, the Unions of Morrisania. He must have recruited young Bellán on the spot, because within 11 days of that fateful game, Esteban would leave Fordham and join the Unions. Esteban helped the Unions snag the NABBP Championship for the 1868 season. While it is true that the NABBP had a policy against “colored” players, Esteban, whose mother, Hart Bellán, had been born in Ireland, was never questioned about his background.  Little is known of Hart's husband.

In 1869, Esteban joined an upstate team, the Troy Haymakers, and his mother and sister, Rosa, apparently came to live in Troy with him. In 1871, when the Haymaker organization declared itself a professional club, Esteban would become the first Cuban and Latin American to play professional American baseball. Now playing third base with elegance and speed, he acquired the nickname “The Cuban Sylph.” During the 1871 season, Esteban played in all 29 of the Haymakers’ games and was credited with 32 hits, three doubles, and three triples; his batting average was a .250 for the season.  From the Troy Daily Whig:

“Steve has courage and activity, laces the hottest liners [and] grounders and [is] an accurate thrower to the bases”

— all in the age of bare-handed baseball.

The Troy Haymakers would later style themselves the New York Giants, and then eventually, the San Francisco Giants.

Esteban played with Troy until 1872 and then joined the New York Mutuals. In 1874, he became a naturalized American citizen and immediately obtained a passport, intending to visit his native land, but to return to New York quite soon. Arriving in Cuba, however, he found that baseball had become a political lightning rod. The colonial government on the island had even outlawed the sport in the 1860s, calling it an “anti-Spanish game with insurrectionist tendencies” — the Spanish preferred that the Cubans maintain their allegiance to bullfighting. But Cuban people thought of baseball as a modern game of concentration and skill that was played by a team and could be watched by women and children — different in every way from the bloody, choreographed, one-man-versus-one-bull spectacle preferred by their colonial overlords.  In its own way, baseball was an act of defiance and an assertion of an emerging independent Cuban identity, which made the game even more appealing.

And so, instead of returning to the States, Bellán stayed in Cuba and served as player and manager of the newly minted Club Habana baseball team. He was the brains and brawn behind the first professional baseball game ever played in Cuba, on December 27, 1874, at Palmar del Junco Field. Club Habana beat Club Matanzas by a rather decisive score of 51-9.

In 1878, two other Cubans who had also attended Fordham Prep, brothers Enrique Teodoro de Zaldo and fellow Hall of Honor inductee Carlos de Zaldo, both Class of 1877, founded the Almendares Club, which became a heated rival of Esteban’s Habana team. Some baseball historians credit the colorful rivalry between Habana and the Almendares with piquing interest in baseball throughout Latin America. By 1900, baseball was played in Venezuela, the Yucatan Peninsula, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic. Fordham is glad to know it played its part in this athletic phenomenon.

Esteban continued to play for and manage Club Habana until 1886. He was the first person credited with hitting three home runs in a single game in Cuba. He led the team to three Cuban League championships during that time, and he is still considered the

"Father of Cuban Baseball."

A statue of him was erected in Havana in the early 1900s; it is not clear if it still exists.

Esteban E. Bellán left baseball and public life in 1886. Little is known of his later years. He died in Cuba on August 8, 1932.

Esteban Bellán was inducted into the Fordham University Athletic Hall of Fame in 1990, and later into the University's Hall of Honor. He has become a celebrated figure in baseball history and has been featured in an exhibit at New York Historical Society in Manhattan. At the time of Bellán's induction into the Prep Hall of Honor, roughly one third of major league baseball players were Hispanic — what an extraordinary legacy.