Lou Castro

Luis Miguel Castro (November 25, 1876 – September 24, 1941), nicknamed "Jud" and "Count", was a professional baseball infielder who was born in Medellín, Colombia. He is considered the first Latin American to play in recognized Major League Baseball. Castro was a second baseman who played 42 games with the Philadelphia Athletics in their pennant-winning 1902 season.

Early life Luis Miguel Castro was born to Nestor Castro, a banker, and Inez Agnes Vasquez in Medellín on November 25, 1876. Castro's father fled the country during a renewed period of civil war; that experience was apparently traumatic for the young Castro, who told a Philadelphia reporter in 1902 (during another period of civil war) that he would "never go back home" because of the political violence. "If they don’t have a rebellion every few months the whole country gets an impatient idea that something has gone wrong. Then they begin a revolution to right it."

Castro attended Manhattan College, a Catholic school, then located in Harlem. In 1895, at 18, he joined the college's Manhattan Jaspers baseball team, playing as a right-handed utility infielder, outfielder, and even as a pitcher; he was named by Sporting Life as one of the top college players on the East Coast by 1898. According to the Society for American Baseball Research, Castro is at Division 10, row 9, number 18 in this cemetery. On July 20, 2021, Queens State Senator Jessica Ramos unveiled a new tombstone for Castro on Colombian Independence Day at the cemetery.