José Meléndez

José Miguel Ángel Meléndez (April 8, 1908 – December 4, 1985), nicknamed El Chino, was a Nicaraguan baseball pitcher. He played extensively with the Nicaragua national baseball team in the 1930s and 1940s, and also played professionally in Mexico and Panama.

Club career Meléndez was raised in Las Jaguitas, on the outskirts of Managua, playing with an amateur team there as a catcher. In 1935, he signed with Indios del Bóer, and led the team to a national championship. He later played with the General Somoza club, named in honor of dictator Anastasio Somoza García, the Carazo club in 1940, and returned to Bóer from 1941 to 1945. That year, his second season with Cerveceria Nacional, he worked to a 5–4 record. The next year, he moved to organized baseball in the form of the Arizona–Texas League, playing with the Indios de Ciudad Juárez in 1948 and the El Paso Texans in 1949 and 1950.

When the Nicaraguan Professional Baseball League was founded in 1956, Meléndez returned to Indios del Bóer. Despite being 48 years old, he finished the season with a 6–1 record. In total, he participated in 17 Amateur World Series games with a 3–3 overall record; he worked to a 2.66 cumulative ERA over 64 innings pitched, with 23 strikeouts and 28 walks. Cuban manager León Rojas named Meléndez as one of the premier amateur pitchers of the 1940s, alongside figures such as Pedro "Natilla" Jiménez and Alberto Romo Chávez. Nicaraguan baseball historian Tito Rondon opined that Meléndez, in his prime, was among the players that never made the majors but were "almost certainly major-league caliber." Writing in 1958, The Sporting News described him as Nicaragua's undisputed "king of the mound for nearly 25 years."