Defections gut Cuban baseball

Associated Press

HAVANA

When President Barack Obama watches the Tampa Bay Rays play Cuba’s national team today, it will come at the deepest moment of crisis in more than 50 years for the island’s famed state-run baseball league.

A flood of high-profile defections to the U.S. has gutted the country’s teams. Stadiums and fields are run down, and experts and fans say quality of play is too. The national team hasn’t won a major international tournament in nearly a decade.

“It’s going through a bad period,” said Ismael Sene, a Cuban baseball historian.

Now authorities are considering once-unimaginable changes to save the socialist country’s national game — reforms partly prompted by Obama’s detente.

Major League Baseball is in talks with both nations’ governments on a potential deal that could make it easier for Cuban ballplayers to play in the United States without having to sneak away at international tournaments or risk high-seas defections with human smugglers.

Last week the Obama administration implemented a policy to let Cubans earn salaries in the U.S. as long as they don’t pay special taxes back home. Those regulations specifically mention athletes, along with artists and performers.

Victor Mesa, a retired Cuban baseball legend who’s managing the team facing the Rays, said he has dreamed of a day when Cuban players could compete in the United States without abandoning their homeland.

“They could go work there, they would give us work permits, the money can be brought back to Cuba — that is what we want, for our baseball players to be able to play there,” Mesa said.

One key sticking point is that while Cuba now allows some players to compete in foreign leagues, they are legally on loan from the Cuban Baseball Federation, which takes a cut of their salaries. Paying money directly to the Cuban government would violate the U.S. embargo under its current form.

Yulieski Gourriel became the first big star to go overseas in the prime of his career with the island’s full blessing, in 2014. He made $1 million in Japan with the Yokohama Dena Baystars and paid 10 percent of that to the federation — a huge payoff for a country where take-home salaries for Cubans average about $25 a month.

But last season he ended up back in Cuba after the club canceled his contract.

Then last month he and younger brother Lourdes — also considered a promising prospect — slipped out of their hotel at the Caribbean Series in the Dominican Republic, joining the likes of Yasiel Puig and Yoenis Cespedes in a string of high-profile defections.

Photos posted on Twitter in early March showed Gourriel at the Miami airport.

At the time he left, Gourriel was batting around .500 for Havana’s powerhouse club Industriales and was on pace to shatter multiple hitting records. Some of that was surely skewed by a decline in local pitching, but Gourriel is widely considered to be the finest Cuban player of his generation.

“That was a symbolic blow,” said Peter C. Bjarkman, author of the forthcoming book “Cuba’s Baseball Defectors: The Inside Story.”