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Fidel Castro, Baseball, Myths, Distortions, Reality and Hope

Published Jun. 30, 2017 6:28 p.m. ET

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Like most of us, Fidel Castro was a product of his times. He closed the escape hatch of baseball players wanting to flee his country to earn a living in the United States. But it’s also true that virtually the entire world, led most certainly by the United States, isolated and turned its back on a country and its people. In a odd twist of history, baseball could have provided the bridge between our differences with Fidel Castro. It didn’t, for reasons we’ll see shortly. But with Fidel Castro’s passing, perhaps another opportunity is presenting itself as a chance to right the wrongs of the past.

Sometimes, if you turn things around, you get a better or at least a different perspective on why things happen the way they do. For instance, how would you feel if Mike Trout, Justin Verlander, Bryce Harper, and for the sake of brevity the entire All-Star team from last year, hopped on a plane and deserted MLB to play in Japan with a chance to increase their earnings by a hundredfold? And also imagine that you were the leader of the country these All-Stars were defecting from, and you had a passion for baseball. How would you feel toward Japan? Enter the world of Fidel Castro.

Fidel Castro, Baseball Pitcher

Actually, Castro’s anti-American feelings began much earlier in life, and they were also tied directly to baseball. Because depending on which account you believe (and there are many, as detailed here by the Society of American Baseball Research), Fidel Castro never got over his rejection and failure following tryouts with major league teams as a pitcher. And while it becomes difficult to sort out the exact extent of his talent as a pitcher, it’s safe to say that it was enough to warrant at least a “drive by” for American scouts.

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The extent to which Castro took these personal failures and translated them into propaganda against the United States and the entire free world is also a matter of conjecture. But what is not a matter of speculation is that he took the defections from his country personally, and as a fan of baseball.

So one might ask then, if he indeed had this passion for baseball, and if he felt remorse in seeing his country’s best players leaving Cuba for the United States, why didn’t he act to restore relations with the U.S. and the world? And maybe the answer to that question is that, after all those years that totaled more than a half century and seven American presidents, doing so would have been a rejection of everything he stood for and believed in for all of those years.

His brother, Raul Castro, like Fidel has been mysterious and hidden from the public eye. It is widely thought that it was Raul who paved the way for a contingent of major league players to visit Cuba as part of a goodwill tour that had at least the tacit approval of the U.S. Department of State, and by definition President Obama.

Baseball: A Bridge Over Troubled Water

So now with the departure of Fidel Castro, we are facing uncertainty on two fronts. We have an incoming president in Donald Trump who is not yet well-versed in foreign policy matters. And he may or may not have ideas about mending fences with Cuba. And we also have Cuba itself, which finds itself in a rather tenuous and unsettling situation in which no one can predict what the government of Cuba will look like a month, a year, or even 10 days from now.

One thing is certain, though. Baseball is standing by as a proven link between two countries that desperately need an impartial and neutral bridge if there is going to be a melting of the ice and relaxation of tension. MLB has already made its move by sponsoring and presumably paying for the trip to Cuba last spring. If the opportunity arises, maybe the commissioner can put a bug in the new president’s ear. But beyond that, it falls into the hands of both countries’ leadership to cement any further development of normalcy between the U.S. and Cuba.

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