Armando Marsans Mendiondo was a Cuban professional baseball player who played as an outfielder in Major League Baseball from 1911 to 1918. He played in three different major leagues in his career: with the Cincinnati Reds in the National League (1911–1914), with the St. Louis Terriers in the Federal League (1914–1915), and with the St. Louis Browns and New York Yankees (1916–1918). 612 hits and 2 home runs in 8 MLB seasons.
Six years before Cincinnati, Marsans and Almeida played "Negro baseball" in the United States as 1905 members of the integrated All Cubans. Marsans also played Negro league baseball in 1923 for the Cuban Stars. Marsans played winter baseball in the Cuban League from 1905 to 1928 and was one of ten players elected to the Cuban Baseball Hall of Fame in its 1939 inaugural class. Marsans was also a long-time manager in the Cuban League and won a championship in the winter of 1917 as manager of the Orientals team.
From Marsans' SABR biography: Though almost universally well-liked, Marsáns was known for being headstrong and temperamental, which in 1914 led to the biggest scandal of his career. During spring training he got into a heated argument with his new manager, Buck Herzog, who accused Marsáns of lying about suffering an injury. Herzog suspended Marsáns, who then demanded to be traded, a request that was refused by Herrmann. Then on May 31, Herzog berated Marsáns for getting ejected from a game. “He is too sensitive,” Herzog said. “He should remember that baseball is a red-blooded game for rough and hardy men.”
Herzog’s comments, according to one observer, were “not at all to the liking of the classy outfielder,” and Marsáns responded by jumping his three-year contract with Cincinnati. After being wined and dined by the owners of the St. Louis Terriers, he signed with their outlaw Federal League franchise. Marsáns was offered a three-year, $21,000 contract by the Feds, which he accepted after giving the Reds 10 days’ notice, the same notice a ballclub was required to give before terminating a contract with a player. Cincinnati immediately filed a lawsuit (in federal court because Marsáns was not a US citizen) claiming that its “property” had been jeopardized. After Marsáns had played only nine games with St. Louis, an injunction was issued barring him from playing in the Federal League pending the trial’s outcome.
Marsáns’ case, along with that of Hal Chase, became a cause célčbre for supporters of the Federal League. Baseball Magazine dubbed it “the sensational Marsans case, one of the series of recent legal battles which have thrown the baseball world into an upheaval, and which threaten to wreck the entire game.” Unable to play while the two sides battled it out in court, Marsáns could do little but return to Havana, where he spent his days shark-fishing in the bay. “We are not restraining Marsáns and Chase from playing, but trying to get them to play,” Herrmann insisted. “It is the Federal League that is keeping them from playing, if any one is.” The Reds, who had been half a game out of first place when Marsáns jumped, finished the season dead last.
Because the National Commission had threatened to ban any player who competed against Marsáns, he was forced to play the 1914-15 Cuban Winter League season under the assumed name “Mendromedo.” In February 1915, with Marsáns still on the sidelines, his friend John McGraw visited him in Cuba, offering to trade for Marsáns if he would return to the National League with the Giants. But Marsáns would have none of it. He believed that the press, and New York writers in particular, treated him unfairly, saying they “always thought it funny to poke jokes at me.” Moreover, Marsáns said, the St. Louis owners “have treated me like a white man should be treated, and I am going to stick with the Feds.” Finally, on August 19, 1915, a federal judge in St. Louis set aside Herrmann’s injunction, ruling that Marsáns could play in the Federal League until the case was decided in appeals court. Marsáns returned to the Terriers the next day, and the team finished the season only percentage points out of first place.
https://www.net54baseball.com/attach...1&d=1639315267
https://www.net54baseball.com/attach...1&d=1639315291