Mystique of the Cuban Ballplayer Might Be Only That

For years after San Francisco’s deadly 1906 earthquake, the clock high above the city’s harbor remained frozen at 5:13, a silent reminder of the moment life changed forever.

In Cuba, time seems to have stopped in 1959. Corpulent Buicks, stylish Plymouth Furies and chrome-laden DeSotos still make their way up avenues squeezed by ornate buildings adorned with colonial cornices and Art Deco detailing. The Cold War still dominates politics there, just as it did the day Fidel Castro took power, and it’s the rare house that has a working telephone.

In many ways, the aura surrounding Cuban baseball is stuck in the ‘50s as well. Although the island’s national team is the most successful in the history of amateur sports, assessing the talent of the players that make up that team is frequently colored by events that happened long before the players were born.

As a result, recent defectors from the island’s national team have been rewarded with multimillion-dollar contracts only to flop as professionals, while those who have remained behind continue to coyly entice major league talent scouts by reputation more than talent. “They’re getting the big money because they’re Cuban,” one international scouting director complained, “not because they’re good.”

“People are getting all worked up and excited. And they shouldn’t,” says Fred Ferreria, director of international scouting for the Montreal Expos. “All the Cuban teams that are playing are playing amateur baseball forever . . . and it’s not always top-notch competition. They really haven’t jumped into anything such as American professional baseball.”

Before the Cuban revolution, when the island’s ballplayers were free to sign with professional teams, Cuba’s talent pool was the world’s deepest. By the end of the ‘50s, nearly one out of every 15 major leaguers had been born there--including half the Washington Senators’ starting rotation and stars such as Minnie Minoso, Mike Cuellar, Camilo Pascual, Tony Taylor and Zoilo Versalles. At the time, Cuba played host to a triple-A affiliate of the Cincinnati Reds and a winter league that featured teams stocked with big-name major leaguers and local standouts.

When Castro outlawed professional sports in the early ‘60s, however, the major leagues quickly turned to Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic for cheap talent while Cuban baseball soon grew as isolated as the island’s politics.

“Cuba, basically, has a similar system to what they’ve had in the past. They really haven’t kept up with the advances,” says Alberto Avila, director of Latin American operations for the Florida Marlins. “The players have the natural talent and they train hard. But their resources are limited, so consequently they have not advanced.”

Apparently, Avila is willing to wager a lot on that natural talent. Last winter his Marlins gave Cuban defector Livan Hernandez a record $2.5-million bonus for signing a guaranteed contract worth $2 million more. It may prove to be a good gamble, though, because Hernandez has more than a live right arm and good control on his side. He’s also only 21, which sets him apart from the rest of the players who have defected from Cuba’s national team over the past four years.

Ariel Prieto and Osvaldo Fernandez, who both defected at the age of 28, went straight to the majors after signing with Oakland and San Francisco, respectively. But after some initial success, both have struggled and have a combined professional record of 8-15. Rene Arocha, who started the five-year wave of defections when he walked off the Cuban Olympic team in Miami in 1991 at age 25, was only 18-17 with a 3.87 earned-run average in three seasons with St. Louis before injuring his arm last year.

And that list of disappointments doesn’t even include Osmani Estrada, Ivan Alvarez, Alexi Cabreja and Eddie Oropesa, among others, who were heralded as stars when they fled Cuba yet never made it past the low minors in the United States.

“The evidence seems to have been that there’s not this undiscovered mother lode that is going to suddenly come out and have this great impact on the majors,” says author and statistician Peter C. Bjarkman. “[The Cubans] have dominated amateur play, but they have not faced, on a day-in, day-out basis . . . the kind of talent that they would face at the major league level.”

Bjarkman, Avila and others argue, pointing to the case of New York Met shortstop Rey Ordonez. Ordonez, 23, who never played for the main Cuban national team, defected during the World University Games in 1993. Now, after two seasons in the Mets’ minor league system, he’s a leading candidate for the National League’s rookie-of-the-year award.