Peer Bjarkman writes: Despite speculation—and lots of wishful thinking—that Cuban baseball players are about to flood American baseball diamonds, a drought of Cuban players is much likelier. Optimists are now speculating and baseball fans are dreaming about how a promised Cuba-U.S. diplomatic accord might launch a building boom of big league academies on the long-isolated communist island and unleash a steady flow of Cuban talent onto big league rosters. But the realities of pending diplomatic relations may ironically benefit the Cuban baseball establishment far more by actually restricting the Cuban ballplayer pipeline.
Central to the Cuba question for many Americans has been the potential impact of a proposed détente on “baseball diplomacy” and on Major League Baseball’s own embargoed business transactions with the single talent-rich corner of the baseball universe to which it has so long been denied access. For decades Cuba has been recognized as a major wellspring of player talent and home to a celebrated domestic league spawning some of the greatest individual players never witnessed in action on big league diamonds. For years top Cuban national teams remained shielded from American view while dominating international tournament play such as Olympic tournaments and the Baseball World Cup. In a decade beginning in 1987, Cuban national teams playing in international competitions recorded a remarkable 156 consecutive victories without a single setback.
These Cuban juggernaut teams and big-league caliber Cuban players remained far off the radar for North American fans partly due to the vagaries of international politics. But they also remained hidden by the fact that international versions of the sport have very little resonance on a North American scene where generations of fans have learned to think of the national pastime almost exclusively in terms of Major League Baseball.
All that changed over a recent decade and a half that has witnessed a handful of Cuban stars like El Duque Hernández, half-brother Liván Hernández, José Contreras, and most recently Yasiel Puig and José Abreu abandon their homeland to pursue the fame and riches offered by North America’s professional leagues. In the past three seasons alone, no one has had a bigger impact on professional baseball in the U.S. than Cuban players. What began as a slow trickle of Cuban refugee ballplayers in the mid-’90s has suddenly exploded into a full-fledged invasion headlined by the sensational debuts of, among others, flame-throwing bullpen ace Aroldis Chapman in Cincinnati, flashy five-tool outfielder Yasiel Puig in Los Angeles, and slugging American League rookie-of-the-year José Abreu in Chicago.
Worsening economic conditions on the Communist island have of late precipitated a heretofore unprecedented flood of Cuban ballplayer “defections.” As many as 350 former Cuban players—with perhaps two dozen of them possessing genuinely big league credentials—are now expatriates actively seeking lucrative North American professional contracts. In a celebrity-obsessed American sports world where fans and journalists alike are increasingly as impressed by lavish signing bonuses as by ballpark statistics, it has been the top-dollar, bank-busting contracts thrown at some of these previously unknown high-profile Cubans ($42 million spent by the Dodgers on Puig, $30 million handed over to Chapman by Cincinnati, $68 million to Abreu, $72 million for Boston signee Rusney Castillo, and a lavish $80 million recently invested on untested slugger Yasmany Tomás by Arizona) that have drawn the bulk of the media headlines.
