Cuban officials detail path for MLB partnership

Cuban officials detail path for MLB partnership
May 10, 2016 12:00 AM
By J. Brady McCollough / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

ALTOONA, Pa. — Heriberto Suarez Pereda arrived in the suite atop Peoples
Natural Gas Field and immediately began making notes inside his official
game program.

Wearing a Cuban baseball cap and windbreaker, he combed the rosters of
the Class AA Altoona Curve and Richmond Flying Squirrels and wrote "5"
on the Altoona page and "7" on Richmond's.

Mr. Suarez, commissioner of the Cuban baseball federation and a guest of
the Curve for Sunday's matinee, was understandably curious about the
number of players from Latin America. The top three batters in the Curve
lineup hailed from the Dominican Republic, Colombia and Venezuela, and
it wasn't lost on Mr. Suarez that — if his country's best ballplayers
were ever allowed to sign contracts with Major League Baseball teams
through legal channels — the majority of them would end up spending much
of their time bouncing around pastoral American burgs like Altoona.

Cuban baseball isn't what it once was — in facilities and talent — which
is one of the reasons that Mr. Suarez and other Cuban officials are
starting to think about what an arrangement with MLB would look like.
Mr. Suarez admitted that the best players on the island are now in the
range of this double-A level, and an infusion of American dollars,
funneled through player salaries negotiated by the Cuban baseball
federation, would help to repair the failing infrastructure of their
national game.

But a free market for Cuban baseball players, like MLB has milked in the
Dominican and Venezuela? No. That is not going to happen.

"We respect the position of Venezuela and the Dominican Republic," Mr.
Suarez said through an interpreter in an exclusive interview with the
Post-Gazette, "but our position, our model for the Cuban players, is
going to be ours. We will have our own principles for our players. We do
not have to do the same like the rest of the countries."

The Cuban government may be open to normalizing relations with the
United States, thanks to the strong push for diplomacy between the
countries by President Barack Obama, but the six-decade-old trade
embargo still looms large. In business — and, it seems, in baseball, too
— real developments are going to take time.

Sports have already symbolically shown the way forward. The Tampa Bay
Rays visited Havana for an exhibition game against the Cuban national
team in March, and dignitaries ranging from Mr. Obama to former New York
Yankees star Derek Jeter made the trip to watch. The Penn State baseball
team traveled to Cuba in November to play exhibition games against some
of Cuba's top professional teams. Last week, a goodwill gesture with no
fanfare occurred when Mr. Suarez and two other Cuban officials visited
Pittsburgh to help put the finishing touches on a July 30 event that
would pit Cuban amateur boxers against Pittsburgh's best amateurs on the
Roberto Clemente Bridge.

Mr. Suarez, on his second trip to the U.S., visited PNC Park and
Altoona's charming stadium and is hoping that a similar event in the
summer of 2017 will bring along Cuban baseball teams of several age
groups for a tournament in Pittsburgh.

From the moment Mr. Obama announced the diplomatic move in December
2014, debate swirled about the possibility of Cuban players being able
to play in the major leagues. For the past two decades, Cuban stars like
Rey Ordonez, brothers Livan and Orlando Hernandez and more recently
Yasiel Puig have been risking their lives by defecting on rafts or boats
so that they can pursue their financial worth as ballplayers. Many of
their brethren have stayed in Cuba and lived on the small government
wage, because they either believed in the principle of the Communist
regime — that money should not serve as the motivation for excellence in
one's chosen craft — or simply didn't want to leave their families forever.

Mr. Suarez and MLB commissioner Rob Manfred met in Havana in March and
made their first attempt at a discussion of a future with mutual
benefits — a future in which Cuban players can make their way to the
U.S. safely while providing MLB franchises another Latin American
infusion. While Mr. Manfred told U.S.-based reporters in March, "I think
we will have a new system for the movement of Cuban players in the
relatively near future," Mr. Suarez said Sunday that the process is only
getting started.

"The first and most important thing is that we are treated as equals,"
Mr. Suarez said, "and then that the Cuban players who are being selected
come to the United States in a safe way, represented by the Cuban
baseball federation. We cannot forget 60 years of the Blockade. We
cannot forget the things we are losing all this time. … This ship is not
moving just yet. We are sitting at the table now."

Since 2014, Cuban players have been allowed to play in Japan. The
arrangement allows for the Cuban baseball federation to take a
significant percentage of their salary, and Mr. Suarez would want a
similar agreement with MLB. He said the money the federation receives
from player salaries goes back into player development at all levels.

"The main condition would be the protection of our players," Mr. Suarez
said. "And that they always can represent Cuba, without losing their
identity."

Mr. Suarez and Marta Lidia Ruiz, the director of international relations
for Cuba's National Sports Institute who accompanied him to Pittsburgh,
want MLB to understand that baseball is an expensive sport, and the
Cuban government has been paying for kids' instruction and coaching from
the time they first pick up a bat. They give a child's development as an
athlete the same importance as his or her learning as a student or an
artist or musician.

Because the government puts so many resources into that education, "For
us, the priority is to improve the level of Cuban sports, but you cannot
interrupt the formation of our athletes," said Ms. Lidia Ruiz.

The ideal for the Cuban baseball federation is that a player would rise
through the system as they always have — playing for his municipality,
then his province, then the national team — before ever joining a MLB
franchise. In that case, MLB would often be signing Cuban players in
their early 20s, as opposed to the age minimum of 16 years old used in
the rest of Latin America.

"Our player has to be a good player," Mr. Suarez said, "but they have to
be a good student also."

Mr. Suarez enjoyed his afternoon at the ballpark, which, with a white
wooden roller coaster outside the right field wall, can feel more like
an amusement park. He ate chocolate ice cream while listening to "Take
Me Out To The Ball Game" and wore a Curve hooded sweatshirt given to him
by the organization.

Mr. Suarez couldn't help but notice that the item cost $63.

"That's a lot of money," he said.

J. Brady McCollough: bmccollough@post-gazette.com.

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