Yoenis Cespedes, one of numerous Cuban-origin players who made it to the Show the hardest ways. Now MLB wants to play ball with the Cuban tyranny for Cuban talent—in a kind of protection racket.
Posted on 12/29/2018 12:56:02 PM PST by EveningStar
Yoenis Cespedes, one of numerous Cuban-origin players who made it to the Show the hardest ways. Now MLB wants to play ball with the Cuban tyranny for Cuban talent—in a kind of protection racket.
Contrary to the supposition of Joe and Jane Fan and the aphorism of Hall of Famer Willie Stargell (“The umpire doesn’t say, ‘Work ball!’)” playing baseball professionally requires work, and lots of it, to play competently. Unfortunately, for some players, the work includes things not customarily required at the ballpark or in the gymnasium. Players hailing from Cuba, for example. The work they must do just to play baseball in the United States has been a literal matter of life and death...
[Yasiel] Puig was a subject of the Castro regime who escaped his $17-a-month existence in the FBC, the Cuban Baseball Federation, with a lot of risky assistance from smugglers whose only concern about him was the profit they could earn by hustling him on his way to the United States.
Los Angeles Magazine cited baseball’s “Byzantine rules” and the federal Treasury Department’s “outdated restrictions” in revealing Puig’s journey, under both of which “the only way for a Cuban ballplayer to become a free agent—and score a fat contract—is to first establish residency in a third country. That detour is a fiction, winked at from all sides, and one that gives traffickers command over the middle crossing.” One false move, as they used to say in the movies, and it’s likely to be the proverbial dirt nap. In the end Puig had to buy his freedom from the traffickers before the Dodgers could buy him. And he’s not the only Cuban player who paid prices like that for his freedom...
(Excerpt) Read more at throneberryfields.com ...
I hope to live to see the day a Cuban team is admitted into the MLB.
The Havana Sugar Kings were a minor league team decades ago.
It’s quite possible Havana will get a team, after they throw off the shackles of their totalitarian quasi communist regime.
In light of his handling of North Korea, I wonder what DJT would think of that idea!
Two MLB teams from Cuba, in the future!
I was on a mission trip in Havana back in November. We were able to go to a couple of Industrailes (the Yankees of the Cuban league) games.
It was like high A ball. I never saw a pitch over 90 mph and 6 runs was the most scored in either game against suspect pitching. However, the defense was quite good.
I noticed that just like MLB the ball was tossed out of play when the pitch was in the dirt. A couple of pitches later they ran the same balls back to the umpire.
Politics aside, Cuba takes their baseball very seriously and some amazing players have come from there. As a baseball geek, I have to admire them for that.
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