Claudio Manela was the first minor league baseball player from the Philippines. He was working on a Filipino steamship when he left to settle as a musician in New York. He signed with the Cincinnati Cuban Stars in 1921, going 4-10 with a 4.00 ERA. Technically, he was the first Filipino in the Negro Leagues. In 2020, MLB took the step to recognize 100+ year old Negro League stats retroactively to acknowlege the contribution of Black Americans to the great American pastime.
The WPA, a federal government agency, allows free use of their photos, at least for noncommercial use. This is a rare photo for Filipino American history as the first Filipino American residence and restaurant in New York. Claudio lived here for years, and I like to imagine that Claudio is the Filipino dancing in this photo.
Let’s look at over 100 years ago, during the days of our Manong. He filled out a World War II draft card, with a birthdate of April 12, 1893, showing him living in Newark, New Jersey. He appears several times as a crew member on ship manifests from 1946 to 1948. Claudio Manela played baseball before the great Jackie Robinson broke the color line and became the first African American to play in Major League Baseball for the Brooklyn Dodgers on April 15, 1947.
Both Robinson and Manela played on the same team in Jersey City at Roosevelt Stadium around 1921. Claudio started baseball in the semi-pro colored league even before the great pitcher Satchel Paige. He also appears in the Social Security Death Index, still residing at the time of his death in November 1975 in Newark.
The 1921 Cincinnati Cuban Stars had Claudio Manela in 1921-22, a Filipino lefty who lived in Brooklyn in the late 1910s and early 1920s. This is the headline from Diario de la Marina that confirmed it (October 27, 1921).
“Manela is not, as we had thought, a product of a ‘sapatico de asentén’ [?] or a local product, but is instead a true ‘Chino-Manila’, that is to say, a legitimate Filipino, who left the crew of a steamship that called at Havana during the war, and was brought into contact with our baseball by Cueto, who had known him as a pitcher for a club in the American industrial leagues.”
…Claudio Manela thus joins a rather select company of professional Filipino ballplayers to have come to the United States; to my knowledge, Manela was, I think, the only Filipino to play in the Negro Leagues.“
It turns out that there was a dispute over the drafting rights to Manela between Hartford and Jersey City of the International League. The Hartford Senators were assured the services of the swarthy heaver when he was notified by Secretary Farrell that Jersey City disputed the property of the pitcher, who ruled the Cuban belonged to the Senators. (Courant 3/29/1922)
Lou Gehrig signed a contract with the Yankees on April 30. Gehrig returned to the minor-league Hartford Senators to play parts of two seasons, 1923 and 1924, the same year when Claudio, Gehrig joined the Yankee major team, indeed, the luckiest man alive.
Manela’s grave can be found at the Bloomfield Cemetery NJ. 75 years later, Bobby Chouinard became the second Filipino baseball player. Chouinard was listed as the first until the Negro Leagues were given major league status in 2020. He was briefly with the Hartford Senators in 1922. In 1925, he allowed nine hits and nine runs (five earned) in 4 2/3 IP for the Cuban Stars.
Filipinohome.com 
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