Reggie Otero

This article is based on the article “Reggie Otero” at Baseball-Reference.com’s Bullpen, accessed November 7, 2006. The Bullpen is a wiki and its content is available under the GNU Free Documentation License.

Otero died of a heart attack in Hialeah, Florida, on October 21, 1988.

In Major League Baseball, he served as a coach for the Cincinnati Reds (1959–65) and Cleveland Indians (1966). In 1967, he became a scout, working for Cleveland and the Los Angeles Dodgers into the 1980s.

After his playing career ended, Otero managed the Havana Sugar Kings from 1954 through mid-1956. He also managed in the Cuban league and the Mexican League, but gained the most notoriety in the Venezuelan League. There he led the Industriales de Valencia to three titles (1955–56, 1957–58, 1958–59) and the Leones del Caracas to four titles (1961–62, 1963–64, 1966–67, 1967–68). His seven championships are the most in the league’s history.

Born in Havana, Otero made his organized baseball debut in 1936 with the York White Roses/Trenton Senators club of the New York–Pennsylvania League, where he hit .243 with no home runs and 22 runs batted in. He also played for the International League’s Albany Senators that year, but hit only .111. The following year he returned to the Senators but still had trouble, hitting .136 with 0 HR and 3 RBI. In 1938 he moved south to the St. Augustine Saints (Florida State League). There he hit .308, still with 0 HR, but with 52 RBI.

In his homeland, Otero played in 480 games in the Cuban Professional League for thirteen years from 1936 to 1953. He began his career with the Club Acción Republicana before joining Habana (1936–37), Santa Clara (1939–40), Cienfuegos and Almendares (1945–46) and then the Havana Reds of the Cuban National Federation before returning to Cienfuegos, where he played for seven years from 1947 to 1953. Otero hit .242 in the Cuban league with 499 hits in 2068 at-bats with 177 RBI.

Regino José Otero Gómez (September 7, 1915 – October 21, 1988) was a Cuban professional baseball player who had a long career in the minor leagues in the United States (1936–53), and played briefly with the Chicago Cubs of Major League Baseball in 1945. He also played 13 years in the Cuban Professional League. A left-handed batting first baseman, he threw right-handed, and was listed as 6 feet (1.8 m) tall and 165 pounds (75 kg). After his playing career ended, he managed in the U.S., Cuba, Mexico and Venezuela, spent eight years (1959–66) as a coach in the U.S. major leagues, then worked as a scout for two MLB clubs for more than a decade.