Cubans and Americans Face Off in Ancient Baseball Rivalry
Peter C. Bjarkman*

Rotterdam's quaint Neptunus Stadium will provide an unlikely setting tonight for renewal of baseball's most heated and legendary rivalry.

We are not talking about the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox, or the Cubs and White Sox of Chicago. Nor do we speak of Mexico City's Red Devils and Tigers, heated Mexican League adversaries. We are talking here about Team Cuba and Team USA, ball clubs whose World Cup, Olympic Games or Pan American Games matches always seem to be charged with the special electricity and significance of international politics.

For millions of Cubans the game will truly mean everything. An entire island will be tuned into the early afternoon broadcast (aired shortly after noon Havana time due to the six-hour time difference) and will rise and fall with every pitched called by veteran broadcasters Eddy Martin and Héctor Rodríguez.

A USA-Cuba match is the special highlight of any international tournament for Cuban fans, who religiously support the fortunes of their beloved national team. The reason is simply because the United States represents the top of the baseball pecking order, at least in Cuban eyes.

Earlier in the week Cuban spirits were already buoyed by victory over the Yanks during a world junior tournament staged in Mexico. But tonight the big boys are playing and national pride lies squarely on the line just as it has so many times in the past.

The reaction to such games is far different for stateside fans, who pay them little heed and shrug off USA losses as insignificant in a sport where the only true measure of diamond excellence comes at the major league level.

There will be no audience for tonight's match in New York, Miami, Los Angeles, Chicago and points elsewhere around the vast North American continent. The American press is not here, there will be no broadcasts or live media updates.

The results will be picked up tomorrow only by a handful of dedicated World Cup followers who will search them out via the internet. Baseball America, the single major U.S. baseball publication maintaining a website devoted to even limited coverage of the international baseball scene, has been reporting fortunes of the USA team only in brief capsules plucked from the official IBAF tournament website.

For Americans, World Cup baseball remains barely visible on the radar screen when it comes to provincial national sports interests.

Cuba-USA games down through the years have often been billed as a yardstick for comparing competing political and social systems. It is all too easy to hype the mythical battle of reputedly tainted capitalist sport versus supposedly purer socialist athletics, where in the latter form ballplayers perform for love of the game, the genuine spirit of healthy sporting rivalry, and above all the honor and glory of the homeland.

Never was the clash of systems more touted or exploited in the press than in the spring of 1999, when the big league Baltimore Orioles and Team Cuba clashed in an historic home and home series which demonstrated only that the Cuban national team was indeed good enough to rival seasoned big leaguers.

But of course these games really don't tell us anything significant about the virtues of life under American-style capitalism or Cuban-style socialism. They are about baseball and little more. On the other hand they do seem to reveal much about competing baseball systems-the American professional approach to the game which time and again leaves Team USA thin in talent and experience, and Cuba's approach which provides all top island stars for big international matches that are the be-all and end-all of Cuban baseball.

As so many times in the past, tonight´s game seems on paper to be a complete mismatch. The Cubans now field one of their best teams in years, despite the loss of such recent stars as Omar Linares (the greatest third baseman never to play in the majors), Orestes Kindelán (the island's all-time home run king), Antonio Pacheco (Cuban career base hits leader and the lynchpin of a decade of Cuban juggernauts), and current big leaguer José Contreras (one of the most dominant pitchers in international tournament history). The Cuban roster of the late-1990s has been stripped clean. It has, however, been replenished with a potent lineup of next-generation stars.

Heading the Cuban slugging onslaught is young third baseman Yulieski Gourriel, already this tournament´s home run champion. Gourriel is the apparent heir to Linares and carries promising bloodlines as son of 1980s star Lourdes Gourriel.

At 21 Gourriel is already an experienced veteran of international play, having saved Cuba against Brazil in the 2003 quarterfinals with a rally-starting ninth-inning triple. Gourriel is supported by a top-to-bottom lineup of equally potent hitters.

Foremost is Osmani Urrutia, a five-time batting champ who recently just missed hitting .400-plus for the fifth straight year. First base is shared by current home run king Joan Carlos Pedroso and slugger Eriel Sánchez, who many on the island think is Cuba's most dangerous batsman.

Carlos Tabares has replaced Eduardo Paret (the tourney´s leading hitter) in the leadoff slot after the later was injured in the opening round Korea game. Michel Enríquez is the designated hitter and a top RBI producer. All are major league players by any conceivable measure of talent.

For all the hitting, Cuba´s strength is its pitching, easily the best on display this week in Holland. The Cubans have given up only 15 runs in eight games and half came in a single game with China (a third of them in a single sloppy inning).

Top starter Adiel Palma is a seasoned southpaw who will draw the assignment against the Americans. Palma already proved his major league arm in the recent Athens Olympics as the gold medal game starter.

National team veteran Pedro Luis Lazo is one of the top starters and career winners on the island but labors as a tough closer with the national team. Lazo was considered equal or superior to teammate José Contreras when the two were teammates at Pinar del Río. Middle reliever Dany Betancourt is a flamethrower with a big-league quality arm. And Yunesky Maya and Norberto González are promising future superstars.

Team USA seems weak by comparison. The roster-if void of major leaguers-is nonetheless loaded with AAA veterans. The AAA players include outfielder Dee Brown (Nationals), plus infielders Brook Badeaux (Devil Rays), Josh Phelps (Devil Rays), Jeff Deardorff (Devil Rays), and Mike Cervenak (Giants).

The pitchers with AAA background include right-handers Brian Bannister (Mets), Jason Phillips (Devil Rays), and Talley Haines (Cubs), plus southpaws Chris Michalak (Diamondbacks), Mark Freed (Diamondbacks), and Jason Jacome (Mexican League, and a former major leaguer).

Veteran Jacome, who will open tonight against the Cubans, is 35 years old, while Michalak is 34, and third baseman Cervenak has already turned thirty.

Thus, despite the usual chatter that the Cubans always win because they face only raw American amateurs in international play, this year's American team is actually older (and more thoroughly experienced at the pro level) than the heavily favored Cubans.

So far the Americans, for all their top minor league experience, have not been impressive. The top starters Jacome and Michalak have been battered by Japan (which game back against Jacome for a 7-6 win) and Nicaragua (which kayoed Michalak in a 14-2 romp).

Yesterday in their final pool play tune-up the Americans also struggled to eek out a 6-5 victory with a run in the ninth frame versus Chinese Taipei, a team which had earlier been upended by weak-sister Colombia. Even against the winless Czech Republic on Monday the USA victory was a slim 7-3, with American bats held largely in check by amateur European pitching.

Cuba has history as well as the present rosters squarely on its side. Uncanny experts at pulling off victory after victory in sudden death title matches, Cuba has taken almost all the head-to-head championship round clashes with their top rivals.

A single important breakthrough for USA forces came at the 2000 Sydney Olympics, when the Cubans gambled on Contreras versus Japan in the semifinals and then fell victim to a remarkable pitching effort by Milwaukee Brewers ace Ben Sheets in the gold medal match.

But outside of Sydney Cuba boasts an almost uninterrupted string of crucial wins in big games with the Americans.

The most memorable was the 1970 face-off at World Cup XVIII in Colombia. There José Antonio Huelga twice bested the Americans in a short three-game playoff. A more recent memorable game was the gold medal match of 1999 at the Winnipeg Pan American Games where Contreras and Lazo combined to shut down the then-more-potent Americans.

Tonight's game has already been robbed of some of its expected luster since it falls in a quarterfinal round rather than the more attention-grabbing finals.

Cuban fans had hoped to face the Americans in the finals, where victory might taste even sweeter. Tonight's outcome is certainly not assured, as in baseball it never is.

A single rising to the occasion by the veteran southpaw Jacome and the Cubans could very well face another scenario like the one played out in Sydney five years earlier. But an American victory would truly be an upset of gigantic proportions this time around.

One thing alone is certain on the eve of this year's big game. Cuban baseball fanatics will be glued to television sets and radios across the island and will spend a tense afternoon hanging on the outcome of nearly every pitch.

American fans will sleep through the entire affair, about as interested as if the sport were cricket not baseball and the colliding teams were perhaps India and Pakistan. That fact alone tells us much about where-all hype and propaganda aside-the sport of baseball is truly anointed as a national pastime.

* The author is a baseball historian, who´s written more than 30 books, the latest being the first international baseball encyclopedia "Diamonds around the Globe. The Encyclopedia of International Baseball".