As the old saying goes, there’s nothing better than baseball except for talking about it. And so, with this in mind, we set off with Yasel Porto, a young sports journalist, and Martín Socarrás, an expert researcher and writer about 19th century baseball, to the westernmost province of Cuba, Pinar del Río. Waiting for us was yet another fan and expert on everything baseball, the amiable Juan Antonio Martínez de Osaba, author of several biographies about the region’s most distinguished baseball players in the last half century, outfielder Luis Giraldo Casanova; third baseman Omar Linares, and the right-handed pitcher Pedro Luis Lazo. It’s well known that Casanova was a versatile ballplayer, nicknamed “Mr. Baseball Player” by commentator Bobby Salamanca; “Kid” (“El Niño”) Linares was a superstar when he had hardly reached adolescence and still holds the batting average record in the Cuban national series (368 in 20 seasons); and the giant Lazo is the king of the pitchers, with 257 victories.

 

It’s not odd that a person should write so many baseball biographies or that an entire road trip in Cuba be dedicated to baseball. Baseball has been part of the fabric of Cuban life since the 1840s, and Cuban players have helped popularize the game throughout Latin America and the United States. The challenge—as we found in this excursion to Vuelta Abajo—is if it can keep its status and image in a changing baseball world.

 

Throughout the trip, we chatted about the upcoming National Series, a competition frankly in decline from the viewpoint of the game’s quality. To make things even worse, this year there will be one more team since the old Havana Province team has divided into two new groups, Artemisa and Mayabeque, at the same time that the anachronistic and weak Metropolitanos team survives as a branch of Industriales, without any possibility of reaching a championship ever. The former Havana teams suffer from a dangeous imbalance, because one (Artemisa) has great pitchers and weak offensive players, while Huracanes de Mayabeque has exactly the reverse. And we ought to add that this year, the ball itself will be less “alive”—the Mizuno 200— and the pitcher’s mound will be higher, theoretically to protect the pitchers from the furies of the batters.

 

Of course, we also talked about the most recent setbacks of the national team in the World Cup and the Pan American games, where it lost to teams that didn’t have nearly the history and tradition of Cuba in baseball—such as Holland—and barely beat out unlikely rivals such as Germany. All this has to do, obviously, with deficiencies of our players in their technical and tactical approaches, such as: a lousy pitching rotation; the lack of pitchers who—rather than pitch complete games—would appear in relatively short innings (the so-called opening-preparing-closing system now used in the major leagues and other international baseball circuits); our players’ lack of international experience; and the impossibility of becoming familiar with more advanced versions of the sport by inserting themselves in other area federations such as Venezuela, the Dominican Republic or Mexico’s two leagues, and even a few outside the region such as South Korea and Japan.

 

As we approached Pinar del Río, the topic turned to another danger for Cuban baseball, fomented by the media. We talked about incessant broadcasting of professional Latin American and European soccer and the scant programing of major league baseball or other professional games. As a result, children and youth are getting interested in playing soccer, leaving baseball aside and becoming fans of great European clubs like Real Madrid, Barcelona, Milan or Manchester United, which bear absolutely no relationship with Cuban soccer and certainly not with the cultural tradition of the island, which has been tied to baseball since the 19th century.

 

Upon arriving at the Pearl of the West—as Pinar del Río is known—and after partaking of a delicious meal along the riverbanks, we went off to Osaba’s cultural get-together at the Hermanos Loynaz Center, not far from where the great painter Pedro Pablo Oliva has his studio workshop. We kept talking about baseball and we listened with rapt attention to the mentor laureate of Vuelta Abajo, the man who has conquered the most titles in Cuban baseball, a charismatic figure with a special sensitivity to our national pastime of baseball. Jorge, a friend of ours, told us that when homerunner Hank Aaron hosted the Cubans in his home during the Olympic Games in Atlanta, the great black slugger spoke with great admiration and deference of the Cuban ballplayers.

 

Certainly, Tony Oliva was likewise a topic of conversation, since the Cuban three-time batting champion in the major leagues with the Minnesota Twins team was visiting his homeland right then. It’s a source of pride that he is a candidate for the Coopertown Hall of Fame, a hard-earned honor he has deserved for a long time now. Without a doubt, Tony is one of the greatest Cuban baseball players of all time, and his qualities as a player are coupled with a lengendary simplicity, even though the majority of Cubans are not aware of his outstanding sports trajectory.