National Series Road Trip: Pre-Classic Report from Havana and Beyond
by Peter C. Bjarkman
Havana, Cuba (February 1, 2013)
For the past two weeks I have been back on the road again here in Cuba’s western-most provinces and one theme above all others has underscored this most recent sojourn. The more things change here on the Cuban baseball scene, the more they stay essentially the same. Anticipation is once more high for the upcoming third edition of the MLB World Baseball Classic (referred to universally here in Cuba as “El Clasico”) and almost every street corner debate or grandstand discussion involves the makeup of the latest national team pre-selection roster.
At the same time a revamped and highly controversial National Series has been wrapping up its novel 45-game first stage with exciting and crucial final series matches. The newly-instituted split season “elimination” format has been generating almost as much island-wide debate as the upcoming Classic. Opinions are divided regarding the experimental “split-season” format, with its first-stage 16-team elimination round and its second-stage eight-team championship round. One motivation for the new league structure was the necessity of again suspending play in the middle of a winter pennant race in order to accommodate Team Cuba’s participation in the MLB-sponsored event. Still another underlying motive was the apparent need (not universally acknowledged) to give up an island-wide 16-team circuit in favor of a more competitive eight-squad structure. The downside of improving Cuban League quality by shrinking the league size of course is the abandonment of a system that has for decades provided every island province with its hometown ball club and thus its usually fanatical local rooting interests. The complicated current effort at meeting both goals simultaneously within the same lengthy season (maintaining island-wide competition but also achieving tighter league competition) seems already to be providing as many problems as solutions.
But if this current season is spiced and fueled by such unusual features as the much-anticipated Classic III and the new league format, my most recent inside peak at the Cuban League has once again revealed that the same charms, thrills, inconsistencies and unmatched oddities still fill Cuban baseball at every turn. I the following paragraphs I will capsulate some of the latest odd twists and turns. I will also share some inside dope on Cuba’s WBC squad and its prospects, as well as some details concerning the pennant race headlines marking the final two weeks of an intense tussle for the eight available second-round qualification slots.
Polemics and Prospects Surrounding Victor Mesa and Cuba’s MLB Classic Team
The bulk of the controversy surrounding the latest edition of Team Cuban has involved the absence of long-time stalwart catcher and team on-field leader Ariel Pestano. The bypassing of the 38-year-old Pestano in favor of Eriel Sánchez (Sancti Spíritus), Frank Camilo Morejón (Industriales) and Yulexis La Rosa (Villa Clara) has been popularly laid mostly to a rumored personality conflict between manager Victor Mesa and his former Villa Clara all-star receiver. A secondary issue for debate has been the selection of crack Isla infield prospect Andy Ibañez over veteran third-base teammate Michel Enríquez. Ibañez is as multi-talented but raw newcomer while Enríquez still stands as Team Cuba’s career RBI leader during international play. Michel is admittedly not the same hitter or defensive stalwart that he was even two years back, yet he nonetheless proved as recently as September 2011 (Panama IBAF World Cup) that he could still efficiently hit big-time international pitching; and the game I saw him play in Cienfuegos last Sunday indicated also that he could still swing the bat productively and also still more than adequately defend the tough hot corner spot. The large advantage of Enríquez is that his service at third even for short spells would allow Yulieski Gourriel to man second, where Yulie in fact is an even more spectacular defender than at he is at third.
The pre-Classic selection of 19-year-old Andy Ibañez seems a mistake to this writer. The Isla second baseman (he also plays shortstop) is an admittedly strong prospect, but he did not overly impressive me last weekend as being ready for top international competition (of course I saw him in only two games). His infield range is limited and his arm is only adequate by professional standards. When it comes to eye-popping teenage prospects, Cienfuegos second baseman Johan Moncada (a recent standout on the youth national team) appears far more impressive; Moncada is only 17 and a talented switch-hitter as well as a glue-fingered glove man. And unlike Ibañez, Moncada is a true rookie now playing his debut season. All this is probably a moot point since talented José M. Fernández – a lanky lefty swinger, natural shortstop, and currently the league’s leading batsman with a .401 mark at this year’s mid-way point – will likely fill the second base assignment in Japan. It is still quite possible that Ibañez may even be dropped from the roster when final selections are made this weekend and when Victor Mesa and his staff have the opportunity to change up to five originally selected players.
In our brief discussions in both Matanzas and Artemisa this week, Victor was largely evasive in his comments concerning specific players. He defended the elimination of Pestano on purely physical grounds (his bat and foot speed are slow and his arm has diminished in recent years). It also has to be noted that Pestano has caught few league games in recent domestic campaigns, mainly serving as DH with Villa Clara. But Victor also indicated that the final catching roster might indeed change this weekend. There has already been a hint that Frank Camilo might be dropped, with the selection going instead to Yosvani Peraza (a member of the Classic 2009 team) who has enjoyed an impressive comeback year at the plate this season and has recently surged into the league RBI lead.
My own opinion is that Pestano – one of the greatest Cuban ballplayers I have witness in my coverage over the past decade and a half – is now at the end of his rope. He neither hit nor threw very well in Haarlem last July against far less severe competition than the Classic will surely provide. If there is a change Victor has to make, I believe it is to bring Peraza into the mix – clearly for his bat and not as a functional receiver. As a spare bullpen catcher Peraza could also still provide a strong additional pinch hitter (remember his game-deciding pinch homers in 2009 against Australia at the WBC round in Mexico and again against Spain during the IBAF World Cup round in Barcelona).
Victor has hinted to me that he is more than a little concerned about the inconsistent performance of Frank Camilo Morejón on defense and I largely concur (especially after the sloppy game I saw Frank Camilo play in Matanzas last Friday night that included a couple of errand throws on steal attempts; Morejón would repeat that sin on Tuesday night with a wild peg to third that gifted a crucial run to Cienfuegos). Victor also quietly voiced his strong concerns over the noticeable drop in recent performance by his own Matanzas right fielder Yadiel Hernández immediately after the initial provisional WBC roster was announced three weeks back.
Victor was thus also coy about possible changes among the six current outfielders; as just noted, one of the two outfield selections from his own Matanzas club – Hernández – has seen his batting average slump badly since he was named to a pre-selection roster spot earlier in the month. Hernández may now likely be facing elimination and there has been strong Havana-based fan supported for speedy Industriales center fielder Yasmani Tomás (only 22 years old). The emerging Industriales star certainly didn’t hurt is case last Friday with a pair of homers that sung Mesa’s own Matanzas nine in a crucial battle for third place. Nonetheless Tomás is still a noticeably undisciplined hitter who murders weak second-level Cuban League pitching but would be almost certainly overmatched by top professional hurlers who change speeds effectively and paint the corners of the plate. I mentioned this to Victor and he quickly concurred that Tomás didn’t yet seem prepared to step in against heavier pitching. Guillermo Heredia, Rusney Castillo and Alfredo Despaigne seem now irreplaceably lodged in the outfield, with Alexei Bell being the obvious fourth fly chaser simply because of his proven international experience and his ability to hit more clever big-league pitchers.
A Wild and Tradition-Busting Round-One National Series Race to the Wire
Perhaps a brief explanation of the new league format is an initial necessity here. Unlike the past two decades that featured 16 league squads divided into either two eight-team leagues (Oriental and Occidental) – or earlier, four four-team groups divided between the island’s eastern and western sectors – this year’s structure has collapsed all 16 clubs into a single circuit playing a 45-game December and January pre-WBC round robin. Only eight clubs would qualify for the season’s second round, a 42-game affair in which surviving ball clubs play each of the opposing seven squads in home and away three-game sets. That second championship round will not begin until April 1, after the two-month recess devoted to pre-Classic national team training and then the WBC event itself. When the season resumes, the surviving eight squads will drop five ballplayers from their current rosters and replace them with superior athletes drafted from the eight eliminated teams. One available “star” player will be chosen from the pool by each team drafting in the reverse order (the eighth-place team, Pinar del Río, will own the first section and the first-place team, Sancti Spíritus, will select last). The remaining four replacements on each squad will not be selected openly but rather assigned by a blind draw conducted by the central league office.
Most coveted among the replacement players of course will be Granma’s home run king Alfredo Despaige (my bet is that Pinar will quickly grab Despaigne), Artemisa ace southpaw Yulieski González, Santiago’s Alexei Bell, and hard-throwing Guantánamo right-hander Alex Rodríguez, among others. With the rich pitching already found in the camp of the pacesetting Gallos (including unbeaten Ismel Jiménez and capable starters Angel Peña and Noelvis Hernández), it is a reasonable bet that if Sancti Spíritus winds up with a single additional quality arm from this lottery they indeed will be tough to beat in the season’s second half. The top four squads at season’s end (based on cumulative records for the entire 87-game campaign) will square off in semifinal (first versus fourth and third versus second) and final championship series to decide the pennant winner. An oddity of the season’s first half is that of the eight round-two qualifiers only Villa Clara and Ciego de Avila (last year’s winner) come from the former Oriental League. While the previous two league system required an east-west matchup in the finals, this year it is more than probable that two western ball clubs will ultimate battle for the championship.
But the possibility of an all-western championship shootout is only one among several uncomfortable wrinkles in the new system. One boast of Cuban baseball has always been that the structure with teams in all fourteen provinces (plus Isla and the city of Havana) meant that a strong rooting interest was sustained in all corners of the island. Baseball in Cuba was always a truly national enterprise. But now suddenly the season’s second half will find eight provinces (including traditional hotbed Santiago) with no team and this without local top-level baseball. (A Developmental League – minor league – round robin schedule will be played simultaneously but will obviously not stoke the same strong fan interest as will the National Series.) And another long-standing boasting point of Cuba’s national pastime will now also fall by the wayside. Previously players remained with the local provincial club (with only a few odd exceptions) for an entire career. Now suddenly there will be 40 ballplayers appearing with two different squads during a single campaign – something unheard of in Cuba’s unique alternative baseball universe.
Most of the headlines of the final week here have been devoted to the thrilling race between five clubs to avoid second-half elimination. Isla and Villa Clara finally backed into the second round this past weekend although they both did so while losing rather than winning several key matches. Isla dropped a three game set in Cienfuegos while Villa Clara struggled with visiting Santiago; but none of the trailing squads (with the exception of Pinar, who climbed out of the second division down the final stretch) could win consistently enough to make up ground. Pinar’s charge to the wire under rookie manager Giraldo González stretched to the final day and peaked with a Thursday morning clinching 11-1 romp in Mayabeque. Most of the heroics for the Green Tsunami club were provided by bulky DH Yosvani Peraza who hit safely in 11 of 23 plate appearances during the final two weeks, slugged four of his nine round-trippers in the same stretch, and took over the league RBI lead with 42. Peraza (a memorable game-saving hero versus Australia in WBC 2006) not only rescued the season for his surging team but also may well have earned a last-minute elevation onto the current WBC roster.
In the end, then, it came down to a three-team struggle that stretched beyond the eleventh hour. Entering Thursday’s final morning and afternoon clashes, Las Tunas, Pinar del Río, and defending champion Ciego de Avila were all still staring at potential elimination. Pinar’s victory in Mayabeque was decisive because it meant that Las Tunas would finish with one less victory than the Vegueros, despite their own rain-delayed 7-5 afternoon triumph in Isla. It then all came down to the final televised Thursday night affair between Granma and defending champion Ciego (with ace Vladimir García on the hill) and the result was a 10-0 cakewalk for the Tigers that quickly sent Las Tunas packing.
At stake during the final days was not only the fate of the five (eventually three) teams sitting on the cusp of elimination, but also the issue of which stars from the three endangered clubs might be available for plucking by qualifiers for second-round action. Pinar featured Peraza (a prized slugger), Las Tunas could boast Joan Carlos Pedroso (now sitting only two short of 300 career homers), and Ciego owned the richest haul of all in pitchers García and Yander Guevara, plus national team center fielder Rusney Castillo (alongside longtime slugging stalwarts Yorelvis Charles and Yoelvis Fiss). The top clubs were of course also jockeying for lottery advantages and despite their identical records Matanzas slipped below Industriales into fourth slot since the Blue Lions took the head-to-head series between the two (the tie-break factor). The fact that Sancti Spíritus had one less loss than Cienfuegos was immaterial in determining first place (and thus the dubious honor of a last lottery pick), since even with a loss in the suspended game versus Villa Clara, the Gallos would have still held the top-slot advantage (having won the season’s series over the Elephants).
Win the possible exception of Peraza, no individual came up bigger down the stretch than José Dariel Abreu, whose back-to-back double-homer games on Tuesday and Wednesday in Latin American Stadium not only vaulted him back into the lead in the individual home run race but also provided a pair of thrilling extra-inning victories that kept Cienfuegos virtually even with the Sancti Spíritus Gallos. All four round-trippers were mammoth shots (two to the distant center field bleachers), two gave his team a temporary early lead during regulation play, and two were game-deciders during extra-inning play.
Reviewing the Latest Puzzling Collection of On-Field National Series Oddities
One simply cannot spend even as little as a full week on the baseball circuit here in Cuba without witnessing more than a fair share of the odd, the rare, and often also the totally unprecedented. This year’s tour proved no exception and the odd events ran the gamut from the spectacular (Abreu’s displays of awesome slugging) to the deafening (raucous packed stadiums at crucial Industriales games in Matanzas and Havana) to the very ugly (deteriorating playing conditions in Artemisa and a heart-wrenching injury in Latin American Stadium). A brief summary follows.
The newly renovated park that is home to the Artemisa Cazadores (“Hunters”) is for this writer unquestionably the most charming baseball venue on the entire island. The stadium (26 de Julio) itself is a rare treasure. A bright orange and blue concrete grandstand – one that lacks any individual contoured seats, divides into four separate covered cantilevered seating sections, and offers an outfield view of surrounding streets filled with horse-drawn carts and fifties-vintage American sedans – provides a setting not found in any North American park. The Artemisa ballpark offers a true time-warp journey back into the Mid-America minor league setting of the 1930s and 1940s era. But the same venue also reveals the dark side of Cuban contemporary baseball. For all the charming retro-type atmosphere, the playing conditions on the field and the viewing conditions in the bleachers are anything but ideal. Outfield walls provide little padding. Grandstands feature only endless rows of rock-hard cement “benches” with little shade from the burning sun. There are no lights for night games. And the right and left field bullpens are the league’s worst: pitchers are forced to warm up for game duty in a rough terrain of rock-strewn sand piles and without any elevated mound or visible target home plate.
This year’s single visit to Artemisa also provided the kind of occurrence possible only in the Cuban League among the world’s top baseball circuits. The Tuesday afternoon match I witnessed between Matanzas and also-ran Artemisa was scheduled for a 1 pm start but was delayed for more than two-hours by an absence of umpires and thus did not begin until almost 3:30 pm. Where were the league arbiters? – stuck in Havana, a distant 30 kilometers away. Why? – because of an ongoing dispute between the central baseball commission office and the local Artemisa sports officials who had apparently failed to make adequate payments for the taxi service that transports league umpires. Once started the game stretched on through the regulation nine-frames as a 4-4 deadlock and then had to be suspended because of the lack of stadium lights.
The concluding three-game set in Havana matching Industriales and Cienfuegos also featured the odd and the unexpected. The Tuesday-night opener saw the visitors take a late 3-1 lead on the strength of Piti Abreu’s first impressive circuit blast of the night. But after Alexander Mayeta’s bases-loaded two-out double knotted the affair in the bottom of the ninth, the clubs battled through the twelfth frame still knotted at three apiece. At that point the newly revamped international tie-breaker rules came into play. Hate it if you must (as not being traditional baseball), but the tie-breaker scenario certainly provides a full dose and then some of added late-inning diamond tension and excitement.
The new “Schiller Rule” format (named originally by this author for the IBAF President under whose administration it was introduced) adopted this year for use in WBC III is a vast improvement over earlier versions. The rule now goes into effect only after twelve frames, not after ten (as with the initial version debuted in the 2008 Beijing Olympics) or after nine (the method used in last year’s Cuban National Series). This means that teams have a chance to play at least two normal extra frames. The older version had managers selecting where to restart in their batting order, which usually meant putting the ninth batter and leadoff hitter on base and then sacrificing to set up runners in scoring position for the heart of the order. The new format has the teams continuing at the same point in the order that the previous inning found them; the two runners placed on base are the last two men to bat in the previous inning. The result of Tuesday night’s tie-breaker inning was an eight-run explosion by the visiting Elephants that was capped by Abreu’s second towering blast of the night – this time a grand slam smash that reached the foot of the scoreboard atop the center field bleachers.
Wednesday night’s Cienfuegos-Industriales match again stretched to extra frames and was again won by the visitors on the strength of a pair of Abreu round-trippers (numbers 12 and 13 of the season) – the second a “moon shot” center field game-winner in the top of the tenth. But the oddity of the night (and this time it was a painful and disheartening one) involved perhaps the worst injury I have personally ever witnessed during my half-century of ballpark visits. It occurred in the sixth frame when 29-year-old Cienfuegos catcher Adir Ferrán was felled with a vicious accidental blow to the back of the head by a bat swung by Industriales outfielder Stayler Hernández. Hernández swinging from the left side fouled a pitch into the dirt but his one-handed follow-through swing knocked a stunned Ferrán to the ground. Carried from the field on a stretcher (although he was still conscious) after a long on-field delay, the severely injured receiver had suffered a grave skull fracture and was successfully operated on several hours later. While the chances for full recovery are now reported to be strong, a bright future career on the diamond for one of Cuba’s better young catchers is now apparently prematurely over.
