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Cuba is in, adding credibility
Dan Graziano. The Star-Ledger,
NJ, January 21, 2006.
After a month of hiccups, Bud Selig's World
Baseball Classic just had a very good week.
It started with a successful arm-twisting
campaign against the Yankees' Alex Rodriguez,
as the world's best player decided to play
in the event. And then, yesterday, the U.S.
Treasury Department gave Major League Baseball
some great news.
Cuba, winner of the gold medal in baseball
in three of the past four Olympics, has
been granted a license to play in the tournament
in spite of this country's economic embargo
against Fidel Castro's communist government.
Now, this is no surprise. Our president,
a former baseball team owner, wasn't about
to let down his former fraternity brother
by sinking Selig's big money-making idea.
Selig and his gang just had to assure the
administration that Castro wouldn't make
any money off of the event. A delegation
from MLB went to Havana last week to secure
those assurances from a baseball-crazy dictator
who was happy to help.
"With Cuba's entry in the tournament
approved, the World Baseball Classic promises
to be an historic event and will guarantee
our fans the greatest possible competition
among the best players in the world,"
Selig said in a printed statement.
A noble sentiment, to be sure. But that's
not why this was so important to the event's
organizers. Sure, Cuba's team is likely
to be better than what fallback option Nicaragua
would have offered. But Castro's squad,
devoid of major-league players, is not likely
to have enough depth of talent to compete
with the All-Star teams from the United
States, Puerto Rico, Venezuela and the Dominican
Republic.
What the inclusion of Cuba does is add
legitimacy to the tournament. And right
now, a little more than a month away from
its beginning, this tournament needs all
the legitimacy it can get.
The World Baseball Classic, a contrived
exhibition in which Pennsylvania's Mike
Piazza is playing for Italy and Illinois'
Mark Mulder is playing for the Netherlands,
has no history and no real significance.
It needs to give people as many reasons
as possible to take it seriously. Rodriguez
helped on Tuesday. The Treasury Department
helped yesterday.
"It wouldn't seem right to have a
worldwide baseball tournament without Cuba,"
said Michael Hernandez, a Cuban-American
who was lunching at the Havana Sandwich
Queen on 48th Street in Union City yesterday
afternoon. "But I don't think they
would do very well. These guys are not used
to playing against Derek Jeter and Alex
Rodriguez."
Unlike the big-leaguers, who will be coming
out of sedentary off-seasons and asked to
play hard a month before they usually do,
the Cubans are in midseason. Their players
should be in the best possible shape to
play.
However, major-leaguers such as Orlando
Hernandez and Jose Contreras, who defected
from Cuba, will not be able to play for
their native country. Those pitchers are,
in Castro's view, traitors -- no longer
Cubans. They are not eligible to play for
Cuba in the way that Ichiro Suzuki is for
Japan and David Ortiz is for the Dominican
Republic.
And while Cuba's international baseball
success is legendary, they're not the team
they used to be. At the 1996 Olympics in
Atlanta, led by the legendary Omar Linares
and armed with aluminum bats, the Cubans
were unstoppable. But four years later,
Cuba lost the gold-medal game in Sydney
to Ben Sheets and a team of American professionals.
And in 2004 in Athens, Cuba struggled to
knock of Australia in the gold-medal game.
The great Cuban players have aged or defected.
Their bats are now made of wood. And in
recent years, Castro has refused to let
some of his top players travel with the
team to international competitions for fear
they might defect. So it's unclear who will
even be on the Cuban team -- a team that
won't have the same kind of training camp
the other 15 teams are having but likely
will arrive in Puerto Rico, under heavy
guard and shielded from the public and the
media, on the day of its first scheduled
game.
In the end, Fidel Castro got what he wanted.
His hand-picked team will get to play against
the best players in the world, whether it's
prepared for that or not. But on this score,
Bud Selig made out better than anybody did.
Without Cuba, his tournament just wouldn't
have looked right.
Dan Graziano appears regularly in The Star-Ledger
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