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With reverence trembling in his gaunt fingers, Rogelio Carvajal Toro¹—recently the founding Deputy Commissioner of Liga Hostos, and imminently the victim of an illness whose cause and precipitous progression had already flummoxed the Insular Republic’s medical community—took the message from the postman’s hand.

The young man, a tall and supple twig drowning in four shades of unstandardized blue that betrayed his humble standing in the Correos Insulares², retracted neither hand nor step. After a moment under his expectant glare, Carvajal Toro replaced the letter with the first coin he dug out of his pocket.

Justly rewarded, the boy snapped a perfunctory salute, made the best he could out of replacing his cap, and continued on his journey, doubtlessly thrilling to the number of other hardworking civil servants he could glare into coughing up enough money to put together a meal.

That, Carvajal could not begrudge him; of the dangers his Revolutionary experience had included—polluted water, cannon fire, the occasional thrown object from an irate legislator—hunger had been mercifully absent.

At least he knew how arduous the young man’s journey to his landing had been. For all the architectural soundness of the stout old building where the Commissioner and his deputies were ensconced, replacing the shipping firm Narváez y Roldán—whose close ties to Spain enticed their retreat to friendlier precincts further east—the early quarters of La Central, neither yet deserving of such a grandiose antonomasia nor armed with the colossal bibliogenic apparatus that served its later scholars, left much to be desired.

In those days, before the Insular Government was able to convince the heirs of Samuel Morse that Catholic money spent just as readily, no matter how straightforward or how mechanically delivered, every message to the marshals of the Empeño Nacional³ had to pass muster with the stern custodians who guarded the palace doors, then wend its way across a courtyard and three flights of heavy wooden stairs tiled in beautiful mosaic, before finally, if it had not been interprehended during its sojourn, reaching its intended recipient on the patriotic red-and-blue patterns that adorned the Commissioner’s floor.

Sadly, this particular message faced a problem that had not yet become all too frequent: the Commissioner himself was not in, due undoubtedly to some required session with the plumbivores that made up the Interior Ministry’s founding staff.

So it was that Carvajal Toro, to whom the missive had not been addressed, drew a letter opener from his desk, and on his second attempt managed to slash open the seal of the Soria family that held the envelope closed.

On good, thick white paper, treated more properly than anything Carvajal Toro had in his own office, it said:

Carvajal bit off a whine, despite being a man, alone in his office, keeping an incredibly unsteady grip on a letter opener. The last time Commissioner Brugman had heard a complaint from him, he’d nearly been sent back to his family in Mayagüez.

The thought of the impassive line of his father’s lips as he would dismount from the carriage in sudden defeat, the stern eyes that would refuse to follow him into the house, and the hands that would remain decidedly at his father’s sides, denying the younger Carvajal even the barest grace due a fellow gentleman—a simple, halfhearted clasp—was enough to inculcate the necessity of silence in the Deputy Commissioner.

Or, at least, it had sufficed most of the time.

“He can’t do that,” the sickly man said under his breath, the stress encroaching in a deep darkness upon his overwhelmed brows. “He cannot do that to me!”

In the end, Jaime Flores did play for Ponce in 1871, albeit only after Carvajal Toro slashed several weeks off his own lifespan by quietly brokering an agreement between the team’s directors and the unusually-recalcitrant player, who, to hear the Sorias tell it, had besmirched the reputation of their team by entering his name on the selection rolls without any actual intention of playing baseball games.

Whatever counterargument Flores made to this claim, assuming it was ever submitted in writing, is now lost to the vagaries of time and church fires, but we presume it primarily centered around his being thirty-eight years old and, despite his ability to bat from both sides of the plate and willingness to play at four different positions, a blessedly unremarkable athlete.

Either as a gesture of unnecessary dominance towards a stubborn employee or because they genuinely thought the club’s chances at a postseason run would be improved by having a versatile benchman like Flores, the Ponce directors insisted that a Selección contract was a binding agreement to play for the first season, correctly intuiting that Carvajal Toro had neither the mental inclination nor the physical capability to simply dissent.

Fortunately for Flores, regular practice and playing time provided ample evidence that, had the Sorias given him the freedom he had requested, Ponce could have simply replaced him with innumerably equivalent players from the well-populated scrap heap of the 1870s.

Whether his modest performance was intentional is another of those eternally befuddling questions about the 1871 season. Under the private agreement he had struck with Ponce, Flores had a rather twisted incentive: if he did outrageously well in his limited appearances, the Soria family could renege on their commitment to release him at the end of the season and rely on the lack of public records to protect their reputation.

With the benefit of extensive hindsight, we can say that Flores was successful in his mission.

Not only did Flores effectively play himself off the roster, but in providing thoroughly-average bench ballast, he also became a microcosm of La Nobleza’s bizarre founding squad.

On June 19th, 1871, the last day of the first official regular season in Liga Nacional Puertorriqueña history, Ponce’s final loss of the season put them at a 20-18 record that, while unimpressive, would have been enough to win the banner in six divisions.

Unfortunately, Ponce shared their circuit with Juana Díaz, whose record also stood at 20-18 after a loss, and Villalba, who had won their final game to end at 20-18.

Seven tiebreakers followed, but in the end, Juana Díaz entered the playoffs with a 22-18 record and, due largely to their execrable fielding, were sent unceremoniously home in the first round.

Had Flores’ own Rojigualdos managed to get that far, they would have likely fared equally poorly.

Ponce’s first-round selection, Mateo Campas, had pitched in all 38 games of the season; started 35 of them, finishing with a 14-14 record and a save; completed only 17 of those starts, including one shutout; and walked 28 batters, the sixth-most in Liga Hostos that year. After a similarly disappointing campaign in 1872, Campas went to the reserves and never returned.

Luis Díaz, who took the ball whenever Campas was tired and had slightly better results in 1871, overcame those shakedown pains to become a mainstay of the Ponce rotation, logging double-digit starts through the rest of the 1870s and most of the 1880s.

Perhaps, in declaring his intent to retire from professional baseball before he had ever swung a bat or fielded a ball, Flores had unwittingly cast aspersions too accurate for the famously querulous scions of Soria. This was not a team who inspired pride in the players they selected.

If it has stricken you as unusual that the nature of Jaime Flores’ wartime service has gone unmentioned so far, be of good cheer: its relevance has just arisen.

While the Army of National Liberation eventually acquired the edge over the Spaniards in numbers and munitions, they were never quite able to match them in terms of skilled soldiers, capable of carrying out specific missions. Flores, as capable a marksman as the island boasted in those days, would have been very valuable to the rebel armies as a source of steady leadership.

Unfortunately, when the Revolution began, Flores was already serving that role—in the Civil Guard, where he was a sergeant under the command of the colonial government, and was apparently in charge of assigning patrols.

When Flores proved uninterested in murdering his fellow boricuas and made his stealthy way out of the capital to join the Insular Forces, his sanjuanero origin and status as a soldier initially earned him serious distrust from the same Army that, in recognition of his existing rank, promoted him to sergeant.

For months, despite an obvious need for his skills at the front, Flores remained behind the battle line, supervising patrols and setting up supply lines for the combatants, at both of which he proved just as capable.

That experience, combined with what had to have been some very depressing surveys of the Ponce clubhouse, infused Flores with a deep appreciation for the harmony of good teamwork, and the deft touch required to create an environment that allowed it to happen.

Which was why, shortly after the 1871 season came to a close and Jaime Flores became the first player in the history of the Liga Nacional Puertorriqueña to announce his retirement, he also became the first former player in the history of the Liga Nacional Puertorriqueña to advise teams that he was interested in serving as a director.

Flores may have been first, but he was not alone.

Thirty-six men, all position players—albeit only one catcher, and no official center fielders—retired after the 1871 season.

Almost a third of them have left us with nothing but their names, what team selected them, when they were selected, and for what position.

Not even their ages have been recorded, because none of the league’s microsocopic staff thought to centralize the collection of such data until well into the first season.

We certainly hope that these men went on to live worthwhile lives, but in the grandiose parlance that suffuses every publication dealing with the history of the early Liga Nacional Puertorriqueña, they are known as Los Once Perdidos: “The Eleven Lost Ones.”

No pitchers lurk among the remaining twenty-five players who retired after the 1871 season, which perhaps suggests the value of a functional arm in those early days.

To the modern baseball fan, it is unsurprising that these men, selected in their late thirties and early forties by teams that prized steady demeanor and leadership ability above the physical and mental talents that tended to win ballgames—or else by executives who understandably had no idea what they had gotten themselves into by agreeing to sponsor a ballclub—would choose to define the rest of their lives by another pursuit.

At the time, however, the prevailing sentiment found it inexplicable that anyone who had suffered through the terrors of the Revolution, and been rewarded for it with a selection to a team, would return the honor after only one year in uniform due to age or exhaustion.

For those first prophets of the sport, who already in those old days boasted of the same omniscience every baseball fan has since considered their own, the only legitimate cause of such precipitous flight was obvious: these players had left because they were incapable of playing the game at the level their teams demanded.

Unfortunately for their hubris, and for everyone who had to listen to them, there was more than a whisper of truth in that claim.

Most of these men had been selected in late rounds, when teams sought to fill out rosters with warm bodies whose owners had expressed some desire to play baseball.

They had not been selected for their unlikely brilliance, but for their certain existence.

Flores had recognized this, and attempted to spare himself and Ponce the mutual shame that would result from giving him regular at-bats. Their private agreement at least ensured that he had a chance to contribute in a few games and make a positive impression—without becoming indispensable.

In 1872—after spending the year working as a supervisor of a Sureña rail depot, thanks to a recommendation from the Sorias—Jaime Flores was hired as director-general of Moca. The Ley Brugman⁴ had not yet become an ironclad rule of the Liga Nacional Puertorriqueña, and there was general surprise that a team seeking to win games would hire a man whose qualifications for the role consisted entirely of his experience in uniform.

Like Ponce, Moca ended the 1871 season with a record barely above even. In Flores, they sought a man who had experienced that sort of mediocrity and had thought about how to counteract it.

In the next few years, other teams sought similar wisdom from this group, who had seen the earliest baseball the island had to offer, and learned from its oddities. Of the 25 first-year retirees, only four—Aldaña, Andújar, Cervantes and Jiménez—never caught on as coaches after their playing careers.

Many of the others would stay for a very long time, and only one for longer than Jaime Flores himself.

Many of these coaches were part of their teams’ golden ages. Burnías, the only longer-tenured member of the group than Flores—and his teammate in Ponce—was the manager in the dugout for both of Juana Díaz‘s titles; Espino helped build the Rincón sides that were nicknamed “La Máquina,” for their ability to win the title like clockwork; Nava managed Vega Baja from a joke to a contending team; Ríos won four championships with Santa Clara teams he built; Lajas won both of their titles under Rostro; and if Adjuntas never missed the postseason, they won their only championship with Trujillo at third base.

Incredibly, not only did none of these thirty-six men ever hold the record for longest tenure in the offices of professional baseball—they could not even come close.

Before any of them had even begun their service, two men had already spent years in the hallowed halls of the Liga Nacional Puertorriqueña’s teams.

For his part, Flores was not interested in setting records for longevity. He saw his role as doing everything possible to build competitive rosters for his employers.

How did he do?

One month after becoming director-general, Jaime Flores made his first transaction.

The 1873 Moca side went 34-42, two wins better than the previous season, and after more of Flores’ tinkering, managed to hit the .500 mark in 1874. They would not do so for the rest of the 1800s, no matter how hard he and his successors tried.

In fact, Moca would become infamous for logging some of the worst seasons in Liga Nacional Puertorriqueña history: a .183 (23-103) line in 1889, a .198 (25-101) record two years later, and a .188 (26-112) two years after that.

Both of their playoff appearances would come with losing regular-season records . . . and long after Flores had moved on to Juncos.

The Naranjetes had hovered at an average record of .389 for the first seventeen years of their history.

Under Flores’ management, which saw the same small trades and curious reluctance to compete for premier free agents that had become typical of Juncos roster building—his first signing happened in 1890, three years after he had first assumed his position—that percentage would drop to .352.

Most infamously, it was Flores who had to assuage the understandable pain and anger Juncos fans felt after the 1890 season, when their beloved baseball team managed to win exactly fifteen games.

Fifteen wins would be a pitiful record in any season of the Liga Nacional Puertorriqueña, but in 1890, those were fifteen wins out of 126. The Vales had won just over one out of every ten games they played.

That .119 winning percentage, by the end of the 19th century, was somehow only the second-worst in Liga Nacional Puertorriqueña history, but by far the worst produced by a team that had constructed a roster according to the league’s usual norms.

In the wake of that total disaster, Flores was finally given a freer hand in assembling his rosters—a rare privilege for a Juncos director-general—but he was unable to return the club to respectability, and after the 1894 season, left the team, returning to the Sureña railway he had worked for two decades earlier, expecting to spend the rest of his life managing a depot staff.

Instead, in 1897, Aguada—which had lost 17 wins in the previous year and promptly fired Inocencio Parras, by far their most successful executive—gave the infamous Jaime Flores, captain of baseball, one last chance to show his quality.

This time, Flores promised himself, he would brook no interference. He would assemble a coaching team that could train a competitive team, sign the players that would form the core of that contender, and watch them rise out of the mediocre muck his former teams had been unable to escape.

In 1901, when Flores retook the reins of his team after the United States invasion had been properly repelled, Aguada—by now more often than not nicknamed the Arzobispos—won 70 games.

In 1902, after Flores made plenty of small moves around the nucleus of his roster, they won 75, and he felt the leash beginning to tighten once again.

So in the days approaching the 1903 season, as his team fought their way through primaverales that suggested another losing season, Flores made an uncharacteristic move: to further bolster the pitching staff he had fortified with Pabón and Rojas, he convinced Aldo Sotelo, whose bat had inexplicably gone unsigned deep into March, to become an Arzobispo for a relatively small first contract.

This edition of the Arzobispos shocked every other team in Betances. Buoyed by Sotelo’s ability to hit for doubles and triples, and with a pitching staff that could actually prevent opponents from scoring runs, the Arzobispos finished with a 93-75 record.

That won them admission to the torneo, where they were promptly swept by Vega Alta in the first round—but for Jaime Flores, it was the first time a team under his control had ever played after the regular season.

In fact, it was the first time a team under his control had ever finished over .500.

A month after the season was over, Flores retired, this time for good. He was seventy years old, and had been involved with baseball—in some form or another—for nearly half his life, since Ponce had chosen his number before that fateful first season.

Flores, as a player, had never hit a home run, nor stolen a base, nor even drawn a walk; as a director, he had never signed a top-ten prospect, nor had he ever developed the kind of player whose talent attracted other players to a given roster.

In both roles, it was Jaime Flores’ specialty to be just good enough to hold down his post—usually, for far longer than anyone expected, him included.

Surely, a single visit to the torneo was the least the gods of baseball could do for him.

Notes

1. As is about to be mentioned, first Deputy Commissioner of Liga Hostos (1871-73), who ended his service to the Liga Nacional Puertorriqueña early by the unfortunate expedient of working himself to death. Chosen personally for his role by Commissioner Brugman, who saw potential in the young clerk’s twitchy disposition as the Deputy Notary to the Insular Assembly, though he failed to correctly attribute it to the still-unidentified illness that would kill said clerk a few years later. A first cousin of catcher Eugenio Carvajal. ↩︎
2. Official mail carrier of the Insular Republic of Puerto Rico. Despite being an enumerated power of the Insular Government under the 1869 and 1876 constitutions, run as a semi-private concern until it was declared the second Empeño Nacional (see below) in 1880, which elevated it to a dedicated government ministry. Replaced by the ministerial-level agency Correos de Borínquen in the early 20th century, which then rebranded as Boricorreos in 2004. ↩︎
3. lit., “National Endeavor.” Designation of the Insular Republic for an industry, service or other activity that provided, according to the 1879 law that established it, a “specific and necessary advantage” for the Insular Government, and should therefore be entitled to make certain demands on public resources, usually counterbalanced by requiring greater involvement from the state. First used to bring the messy network of squabbling independent railways under a coordinating ministry. One of the earliest nicknames for the Liga Nacional Puertorriqueña, used (somewhat derisively) by opposition papers since the late 1880s, just a few years after the league was declared (ironically) the fourth National Endeavor. Abolished under the 1901 Constitution; periodic attempts to revive the status have not prospered. ↩︎
4. lit., “Brugman Law.” Customary policy of the Liga Nacional Puertorriqueña that prefers all positions, at both team and league levels, should be filled by promoting “baseball people,” broadly defined as former ballplayers or people currently employed by a baseball team, so that the Liga Nacional Puertorriqueña does not become simply another business. Detractors believe this to be responsible for the LNP’s extremely insular and (until recently) overly-masculine work culture, though the Ley now usually includes employees of teams outside of the LNP system and allows for the hiring of entry-level positions outside of the organization. ↩︎