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Manuel Rafael Mota Geronimo, more commonly known as Manny Mota (born February 18, 1938), is a Dominican former Major League Baseball outfielder who played 20 seasons for the San Francisco Giants, Pittsburgh Pirates and Montreal Expos, as well as being a
Baseball-Reference, retrieved October 28, 2020
He served as a coach for the Dodgers from 1980 through 2013. His 34 consecutive seasons as a Dodger coach set a team record and is the second-longest such streak in MLB history, following Nick Altrock, who coached for 42 consecutive seasons with the Washington Senators. Mota currently works as a minor league hitting instructor and serves as a Spanish-language television broadcaster for the Dodgers.
Mota began 1959 with the Class A Springfield Giants of the Eastern League and was later promoted to the AAA Phoenix Giants of the Pacific Coast League. In 86 games combined, he hit .304. In 1960, he played in 141 games for the AA Rio Grande Valley Giants of the Texas League, hitting .307. In 1961, with the AAA Tacoma Giants, he hit .289 in 142 games.
On November 30, 1962, the Giants traded Mota to the Houston Colt .45's (with Dick LeMay) for infielder Joey Amalfitano.
On May 16, 1970, Mota hit the first batted ball in major league history to cause a fatality. In the bottom of the third against the Giants at Dodger Stadium, Mota fouled one off of Gaylord Perry along the first base line. The ball struck 14-year-old Alan Fish in the left temple. Four days later, Fish died of an inoperable head injury.
In 1973, Mota was selected to the National League All-Star team after leading the league in batting average. From 1974 through 1979, Mota was continuously called upon for late inning heroics, where he averaged 10 pinch hits for six straight seasons. The Dodgers appeared in the 1974, 1977, and 1978 World Series. In 1979, he established his place in the record books by becoming the all-time leader in . He had a compact swing and often half-swung just to push the ball beyond the reach of the first baseman for a hit.
In 1981, Mota appeared in his fourth World Series, this time as a coach. Mota retired as a player from the Dodgers after the 1982 season, a year in which he had only one plate appearance. He ended his playing career holding the all-time major league record for career pinch-hits (149), which has since been broken by Mark Sweeney and Lenny Harris, an overall lifetime batting average of .304, and a .299 pinch-hitting average (149-498) along with four home runs and 115 RBI in that role. His .315 batting average is second best (1,800 or more at bats) in Los Angeles Dodgers history, trailing only Mike Piazza.
In the off-season, Mota and his wife Margarita resided in the Dominican Republic, where they run the Manny Mota International Foundation. Established over 30 years ago, this humanitarian organization provides needed resources and other assistance to disadvantaged youth and their families in both the Dominican Republic and the United States.
Mota was inducted into the Hispanic Heritage Baseball Museum Hall of Fame on August 23, 2003, in a pre-game on-field ceremony at Dodger Stadium. Mota was inducted into the Baseball Reliquary's Shrine of the Eternals in 2013. "Shrine of the Eternals – Inductees". Baseball Reliquary. Retrieved 2019-08-14.
Mota worked as a color commentator on the Fox Sports en Espanol television broadcast of the 2007 World Series and worked as a Spanish-language broadcaster for the Dodgers on select PrimeTicket broadcasts; he became a full-time broadcaster on the Spanish-language feeds of SportsNet LA in 2014.
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