Rule 13 on page 2 of the Official Blogger's Handbook requires that each and every blog-head spin out someplace or other his own personal list of favorites and zanny preferences. So not to be remiss in this area I will provide mine once and for all here, for whatever these choices might reveal to the potential reader about my own narrow world and my own broad prejudices. Once this nonsense is out of the way we can return with appropriate haste to the more serious busines of discussing news and notes surrounding Latino baseball.

Favorite All-Time Ballplayer: Frederich Cepeda (Sancti Spiritus)

Favorite MLB Ballplayer: Roberto Clemente (Pittsburgh Pirates)

Favorite Team: Sancti Spiritus (Cuban League)

Favorite Stadiums: Estadio Latinoamericano (Havana, Cuba) and Estadio 5 de Septiembre (Cienfuegos, Cuba)

Favorite Non-Cuban League Stadium: Neptunus Stadium, Rotterdam (The Netherlands)

Favorite Cities: Havana (Cuba) and Split (Croatia)

Favorite Author: Ray Bradbury (Runners-Up: Frank Herbert and Edgar Rice Burroughs)

Favorite Books (Fiction): Something Wicked This Way Comes (Ray Bradbury) and the Dune novels (Frank Herbert)

Favorite Books (Non-Fiction): Seven Pillars of Wisdom (T.E. Lawrence) and Cuba: The Pursuit of Freedom (Hugh Thomas)

Best Baseball Book Read in Passed Five Years: The Pride of Havana (Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria) (although we disagree about Cuban politics, no one has taught me more about Cuban baseball)

Worst Baseball Book Read in Last Five Years: Baseball's Other All-Stars (William F. McNeil) (poorly written and full of historical inaccuracies!)

Best Hitters Ever Witnessed in Person: Osmani Urrutia and Ted Williams

Best Pitcher Ever Witnessed in Person: Maels Rodriguez during 2002 Cuban League Season (100-mph-plus fast ball with insane movement)

Best Baseball Game Ever Witnessed: Cuba 4, Puerto Rico 3, final WBC 2006 game in San Juan

Craziest Baseball Game Ever Witnessed: Cuba 15, Panama 2, semi-finals of World Cup 35 (October 2005) in Haarlem, The Netherlands

Favorite Thing About Major League Baseball: The game's pre-1960 history (especially my memories of "The Boys of Summer" fifties)

Least Favorite Things About Major League Baseball: Jon Miller and Joe Morgan, home runs (baseball would be far better without them), televised baseball

Proudest Professional Achievement: Writing A History of Cuban Baseball, 1864-2006 (McFarland, 2007)

Greatest Personal Achievement: Finding Ronnie Wilbur

Personal Wish for the Future: That major league baseball stays out of Cuba for as long as possible

A week-long stay in Havana earlier this month (May 14-22) found the Cuban baseball scene--in the immediate aftermath of one of the most exciting National Series post-seasons in recent years--to be overflowing with the usual euphoria that has reinvigorated the island's national sport since the March 2006 World Baseball Classic. A special mid-May excitement also surrounded the official release of the 35-man player roster that comprises Cuba's national team for this summer's series of top-flight international competitions. The 35 invitees will train in Havana and Panama throughout June and early July for the mid-July Pan American Games tournament in Rio de Janeiro, the early August Netherlands-based World Port Invitational Tournament in Rotterdam, and the eventual World Cup XXXVII to be held in mid-November in Chinese Taipei. An additional warm-up tournament designed as a preliminary to the Pan Am Games (one involving Panama, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela and Cuba) will also be staged in Panama City during early July.

Twenty players only will be selected from the original 35 trainees for the limited Pan American Games squad that will visit Rio (a severe roster restriction that somewhat diminishes this particular tournament); Cuba will be defending a Pan American gold medal in Brazil that it has won in each of the last nine editions of this event (since 1971). In November the crack Cuban club will also be attempting to stretch its unbroken string of World Cup titles to nine (Cuba did not attend the 1982 competitions in South Korea, and has not lost on the field since 1951 in Mexico City). Cuba's Rotterdam and Taipei rosters will also be selected from the 35 ballplayers currently in training for the Rio matches.

Cuba's national team roster for 2007 (as announced on May 16) is as follows (with National Series teams indicated in parentheses): Catchers Ariel Pestano (Villa Clara), Eriel Sanchez (Sancti Spiritus), Yovani Peraza (Pinar del Rio) and Osvaldo Arias (Cienfuegos). Infielders Alexander Mayeta (Industriales), Jose Julio (Santiago), Hector Olivera (Santiago), Alexei Ramirez (Pinar del Rio), Luis Miguel Navas (Santiago), Eduardo Paret (Villa Clara), Rudy Reyes (Industriales), and Yulieski Gourriel (Sancti Spiritus). Outfielders Osmani Urrutia (Las Tunas), Georvis Duvergel (Guantanamo), Frederich Cepeda (Sancti Spiritus), Yoandri Urgelles (Industriales), Yohennis Cespedes (Granma), Alfredo Despaigne (Granma), and Alexei Bell (Santiago). Pitchers Pedro Luis Lazo (Pinar del Rio), Yunieski Maya (Pinar del Rio), Vladimir Banos (Pinar del Rio), Adiel Palma (Cienfuegos), Norberto Gonzalez (Cienfuegos), Jonder Martinez (Habana), Elier Sanchez (Camaguey), Vicyohandri Odelin (Camaguey), Norge Vera (Santiago), Ciro Silvino Licea (Granma), Jose Angel Garcia (Habana), Aroldis Chapman (Holguin), Yolexis Ulacia (Villa Clara), Felix Rivera (Santiago), Alberto Bicet (Santiago) and Arley Sanchez (Habana). Manager Rey Vicente Anglana (Industriales).

I was privileged to watch the first two closed practices of the new national team contingent held in Estadio Latinoamericano (May 19-20) and was quickly convinced that the blend of WBC veterans (Gourriel, Cepeda, Lazo, Paret, Pestano, Palma, etc.) and emerging young talent (especially promising outfielders Bell, Cespedes and Urgelles) will make this perhaps an even stronger outfit than the one that surprised with a WBC silver medal in San Diego fifteen months back. The most noteworthy features of this Cuban roster are perhaps the return of Rey Anglada as manager (despite a disappointing loss in the National Series finales at the helm of heavily favored Industriales), the move of league home run champion Alexei Ramirez to second base to clear some space in an over-crowded outfield, and the re-emergence of veteran Norge Vera as anchor of the exceptionally strong and experienced pitching staff. Rumors circulating in Havana last week suggested that Santiago skipper Antonio Pacheco had been the top choice as team manager but that minor health problems had keep Pacheco (who collapsed after one recent playoff game) stuck on the sidelines.

Author working the Caribbean Series at picturesque Roberto Clemente Walker Stadium in Carolina, Puerto Rico (February 2007)

Author with Cuban legend Bert Campaneris at 1998 Cuban Old-Timers Game in Miami's Pro Player Stadium (September 1998)

Pete Bjarkman in Havana's Latin American Stadium with Cuban League Baseball Commissioner Carlitos Rodriguez Acosta (May 2007)

Bjarkman presenting a copy of A HISTORY OF CUBAN BASEBALL, 1864-2006 to Alfredo Santana, representative of the Matanzas (Cuba) Pena Deportiva (May 2007)

Author (second from right) visits with Pena Deportiva (Cuban version of Society for American Baseball Research) in Matanzas (May 2007)

Now it is time to put aside the objective reporter's stance and get a bit opinionated and even somewhat controversial. No, I am not about to advocate the advantages of a socialist baseball system that functions without owners, corporate franchises, player agents or free agency, like the one found in Fidel Castro's Cuba. That argument (or at least my views on some of the plusses of the Cuban baseball system) will take up space on this page in the near future. My rant here is against those who argue that honoring Roberto Clemente's impact on MLB history with a number retirement such as that afforded Jackie Robinson would either be out of line with Clemente's overall contributions to the game, or perhaps might even in some way diminish Robinson's historical achievement. I find both lines of thinking bogus and have already argued Clemente's claim on immortality in an article about to be published in the 2007 summer edition of SABR's (Society for American Baseball Research) journal The National Pastime. Let me only briefly summarize the gist of my own position here.

Past weeks have been filled with formal MLB-orchestrated celebrations of Jackie Robinson's April 1947 crossing of organized baseball's abhorrent "color line" in Brooklyn; these celebrations have found numerous players and even whole teams donning the "42" jersey which MLB moguls decided to premanently retire in 1997 (the 50th anniversary date) in appropriate honor of Jackie's courageous and pioneering 1947 performance. One subtle irony of the entire affair, of course, was that a great majority of modern-era black big leaguers who have benefitted so drastically from Robinson and Rickey's noble experiment likely didn't know what JR's number was (or much about the man himself) before "42" was resurrected and hung on stadium walls all around the majors. Another irony, of course, is that last month's onfield celebrations of JR's door-opening achievement were played out against a backdrop of numerous stories in the print and electronic about the diminishing presence of black athletes (read here African-Americans) on the big league scene. In fact, it seemed quite apparent at the time that one prime objective of the recent media campaign attached to Jackie's memory was indeed an effort to combat the lost prestige of the diamond sport among youth in today's African-American communities (if not in the larger North American community itself).

Let me underscore here in bold print that I do not wsh to deny or denigrate Jackie Robinson's achievement (or its historical significance) here for an instant. The retirment of JR's "42" is in all ways justified. My contention is only that Clemente played every bit the same roll for Latino ballplayers and fans (and thus for the cultural diversity and racial justice of the sport and the larger society) as did Robinson for African Americans. In one sense at least Clemente's legacy is more deep-seated with the Latino community than Robinson's among our black communities. If many of today's black players have indeed forgotten JR's legacy and impact, this can hardly been said of Latino aficionados and Clemente. For several decades Latino stars have elected to wear Clemente's number in honor of their heritage (Jose Guillen, Sammy Sosa, Ruben Sierra, and Esteban Loiaza provide a handful of examples) whereas one is hard pressed to think of a single African-American star who has opted to wear "42" for its historic significance. And while baseball has apparently by all reports faded in the nation's African American and inner-city neighborhoods, this is certainly no so of the game's hold on Latino communities. In fact the claim that there are few blacks now entering the game is quite bogus in itself; the truth is that there are as many black stars now as ever before. It is only that they are in the great majority Afro-Latinos and not Afro-Americans. As huge as the Afro-American impact was on baseball in the 1950s (Aaron, Mays, Newcombe, Doby, Frank Robinson etc.), it was no larger or more significant than the Latino impact on the game in the 1990s and 2000s (Big Papi, Pedro Martinez, Roberto Alomar, Vlad Guerrero, Ivan Rodriguez, Manny Ramirez etc.). American blacks saved MLB in the fifties and Latinos have been doing so in the past two decades. It is not unreasonable to suggest that Clemente's inspiration to young Latino athletes since the mid-fifties has been the game's sole salvation in the the late-twentieth century. Without Latino and other international stars MLB might well today be on life-support. MLB has paid much lip service of late to recognizing its future as an international game. Perhaps nothing would clinch that point any better than honoring the number "21" of the sport's first true international star.

Afro-Cuban Tommie de la Cruz pitched for the Cincinnati Reds in 1944, three series before Jackie Robinosn's debut in Brooklyn.

I have devoted space in the upcoming SABR TNP article to laying out Clemente's Cooperstown credentials vis-a-vis the dossier of JR, and I will thus save those details for readers of the article itself when it appears. Clemente's claim on Cooperstoen was made as both a pioneer (like Robinson) and as an onfield non-pareil (where he far outstripped JR). Some have argued that Clemente does not deserve the same treatment as Robinson because he was not, after all, the game's (MLB's) first Latino. But JR was not the sport's first black pioneer either; a handful of Latinos (Afro-Latinos like Cubans Roberto Estalella and Tomas de la Cruz or Venezuela's Alex Carrasquel) got there a number of years earlier; but with hardly a notice since they could be easily and conveniently dismissed as mere "foreigners" and thus not unwanted true blacks. Robinson's immortality has not ever rested on an historical quirk of primacy, but rather on the actual psychological impact of his debute upon the edntire North American nation. The same can and should be claimed for Clemente, who launched with his inspiration a Latino invasion and heritage in major league baseball which is likely to far outstrip (if it has not already) the African-American influences upon what has long been the Pan American and not just the North American national pastime.

On the heels of a successful National Series #46, which wrapped up in late April with a thrilling title clash between perennial favorites Industriales and Santiago, early May ushered in a week of nothing but bad news for Cuban League baseball circles. First came the announcement of the passing of Owen Blandino (pictured here), one of the earliest heroes of post-revolution league and national team triumphs. This was followed by an official declaration of a one-year ban for star national team third baseman Michel Enriquez. And then there was the lackluster silver-medal performance of Team Cuba during the second edition of the ALBA friendship games staged in Caracas, Venezuela.

Blandino, a star third baseman for Azucareros, Las Villas and finally Sancti Spiritus during the first two decades of Cuban League action, succumbed in his hometown of Sancti Spiritus on May 3rd. Known as the "Gallo de Cabaiguan" (his native village), Blandino capped his career in the lineup of Sancti Spiritus's only National Series championship team in 1979. A decade earlier he was a star performer (tournament leader in BA, runs and hits) during one of Cuba's greatest international triumphs over Team USA at the Santo Domingo Amateur World Series of 1969. In 18 years of league action Blandino compiled only an unspectacular career average of .258, but his offensive performance at the 1969 World Cup matches (20 hits in 40 AB) was one of the truly great clutch performances of Team Cuba's legendary international tournament heritage.

Two days after Blandino's passing the office of Cuban baseball commissioner announced (after a long process of deliberation that national team third sacker and 2006 batting champion Michel Enriquez (left) would serve a one year suspension as the result of an ugly dispute in mid-March with veteran league umpire Jose Perez Julien. Enriquez (who played in the WBC and Athens Olympics and ranks behind only Osmani Urrutia and Omar Linares as third in Cuban League lifetime BA) was apparently suspended from a home game in Isla de la Juventud on March 13 and latter expelled for the remainder of the National Series season. (At the time he was again on the heels of Urrutia in a tight batting race.) While the Cuban press was largely mum on what actually happened between the ballplayer and umpire after the former's on-field ejection on the 13th, there were reports that Julien had been sent to Havana for treatment of a broken arm (apparently received in a later off-field scuffle). Enriquez, known for his usual soft-spoken demeanor and always hot bat, hit at a .447 pace in National Series #45 to interrupt Urrutia's previous string of five consecutive batting titles.

The week of embarrassment concluded with Team Cuba's silver medal finish in the second ALBA games in Caracas, where a young "backup" national squad compiled an identical 7-1 record to that of gold medal-winning Panama, yet lost a 3-1 decision in the lidlifter to the champions managed by former Cuban national team skipper Alfonso Urquiola (Cuban manager in the 1998 Italy World Cup). The Cubans won seven straight after slipping against Panama, but they were hardpressed to edge Colombia, Brasil and Venezuela (a 3-2 10-inning game which clinched the silver medal). While this Cuban roster did not carry its biggest stars (Urrutia, Gourriel, Cepeda, or home run champ Alexei Ramirez) it did nonetheless featured several veterans of international play (Leslie Anderson, Juan Carlos Moreno, Joan Carlos Pedroso, and veteran hurlers Norge Vera and Ciro Silvino Licea). The loss to Panama in Venezuela was just one more mild disappointment in a somewhat unsettling opening to a chaotic month of May.

I will be back on the road to Cuba between May 12 and May 22, my first visit to the island since early March (for the final weeks of National Series #46). Since wireless connections are always irregular in Havana, and since I will be making at least one research "side journey" to Matanzas, posting from Cuba itself may or may not happen. But I will report on the trip (baseball issues) and the always changing conditions around the island (social as well as baseball-related) shortly after my return. My post-trip report will include an assessment of Cuba's prospects for unpcoming international tournaments (Pan American Games in Rio in July, World Port Tournament in Rotterdam in August, and World Cup XXXVII in Chinese Taipei in November).

Carlos Yanes has pitched 24 seasons in the Cuban League and all of them wearing the uniform of the Isla de la Juventud ballclub. The length of Yanes' service is remarkable enough by big league standards, but the attachment to a single club is itself only business as usual for the socialist version of baseball played on the island of Cuba.

Bill Carle's fascinating article on "One-Team PLayers" appearing in the latest issue of SABR's Baseball Research Journal knocks a good deal of wind out of the sails of at least one popular myth attached to the modern free-agent era. Carle deftly deflates the widely-held notion that today's turnstile rosters have made single-team "lifers" like Bagwell, Biggio and Bernie Williams almost as rare as a precious moment of dead-air silence in a Joe Morgan-Jon Miller Sunday night telecast. Examining the list of 63 ballplayers whose careers spanned a minimum of 15 years in "The Show" and whose paychecks were all earned with a single ballblub, Carle reveals two rather surprising facts. 1- The inventory of such players breaks down quite evenly by decades over the past century-plus: 2 debuted in the 1900s, 2 in the 1910s, 10 in the 1920s, 6 in the 1930s, 4 in the 1940s, 9 in the 1950s, 11 in the 1960s, 10 in the 1970s, 6 in the 1980s, and 2 in the 1990s (for those who are counting, Bid McPhee was the only 19th century member of the exclusive club). And 2- while Biggio and Bagwell are indeed rather rare cases among today's much-traveled big leaguers, they are hardly any more rare than they would have been in almost any other epoch.  (For you trivia buffs, Brooks Robinson and Yaz have served the longest among one-team "lifers" by each logging 23 summers in the same uniform.)

Of course the conclusion that "lifers" with one team have not been radically expunged by the modern free agent movement does not itself prove much either way about the stability of franchise rosters after the death of the reserve clause. Sure enough there has been an explosion of player mobility during the AMM (After Marvin Miller) era; casual fans do indeed need a scorecard to keep the hometown roster straight from season to season, and long-term attachments to hometown heroes just don't seem to be what they once were.

All of which brings us round to an observation about the quaintness of that strange league existing at the other end of the baseball universe--the one still surviving in virtual isolation behind the Sugar Cane Curtain and based on an utterly foreign notion of what constituents normal business practices. We speak of course of the 46-year-old Cuban League which still marches proudly from season to season to the beat of an entirely different drummer. Biggio and Bagwell may be noteworthy in American sporting circles for their team loyalty under an MLB operation that places supreme value on an athlete's free-market privileges. For the Cuban ballplayer, however, such immobility is not just commonplace, but rather it is the only fathomed reality.

Players don't change teams in Cuba. They perform on the club representing the province of their birth, they don the same uniform from rookie breakout till retirement breakdown. There is no free agency in Cuban baseball--no trades, no holdouts, no agents, no salary incentives (all players earn identical pay checks), no club owners, no rich and poor franchises, indeed no franchises. There is no constant chatter among press or fans about the financial side of the sport; there is no financial side of the sport. All 16 Cuban League clubs (one in each province, one in the special municipality which is the Island of Youth, and two in the city of Havana) are operated by the Cuban sports ministry (INDER). Players are owned by the league, not by distinct teams, and the entire league season is little more than an elaborate training grounds and tryout process. National Series play is aimed at selection of the 35-man roster for a national team that will represent the nation in late summer or early fall international tournaments. Until a half-dozen years back there was no admission charge for league games. In Fidel's Cuba socialist sport has long been a "right of the people" in more than name only. Today's Cuban fans pay a three peso admission fee (15 cents U.S.) while foreigners are charged three Cuban dollars (about five bucks U.S.). TV broadcasts have no commercial sponsorship. The only slogans on outfield fences trumpet politic rhetoric. For better or worse, there is no Money Ball in Cuba.

Since island players stay put, the Cuban League is full of Yaz, Ripken, Stargell and Concepcion prototypes--players who wear a single uniform for two decades and more. At the end of the 2002 season three Cuban stars of the 1980s-1990s drew the the curtain on two decade careers spent thrilling fans in a single hometown ballpark. Antonio Pacheco (left photo, 22 seasons with Santiago), Orestes Kindelan (21 years as Pacheco's teammate), and Omar Linares (20 years in Pinar del Rio) bowed out as revered icons of the communist national pastime. While it is about as rare for a Cuban Leaguer to last beyond 20 campaigns at the top level as it is for a big league to hang on that long, no Cuban fan ever has to worry or puzzle over stars like Linares or Pacheco abandoning the home club for greener pastures elsewhere. There are a few, of course, who flee the league and country altogether, but--Contreras and El Duque aside--this is still a rare occurrence among the top echelon of Cuban ballplayers.

So while MLB features no one recording a 22-plus-year-career with a single club among all players who debuted after 1962 (Stargell, Brett and Ripken come closest at 21 years), the Cuban League can boast 10 (8 position players and a pair of pitchers): Antonio Munoz (24), Carlos Yanes (24, pitcher), Faustino Corrales (23, pitcher), Fernando Sanchez (23), Antonio Pacheco (22), Victor Bejerano (22), Agustin Lescaille (22), Agustin Marquetti (22) and Javier Mendez (22). A dozen more have reached 20 campaigns and another dozen are on the verge of doing so (and this is with half as many teams).

This is not all quite as simple as it seems, and a number of caveats and explanations are in order. If one looks carefully at the career summaries of select players in A History of Cuban Baseball, 1864-2006 (Chapter 11) it will appear that some of these reputedly immobile players did in fact shift teams. Linares for example played for Pinar del Rio, Vegueros and Occidentales; Marquetti wore the uniforms of Habana, Constructores, Metropolitanos and Industriales; Kindelan was with Santiago de Cuba, Serranos and Orientales. What gives here? There is, however, an easy enough explanation.

Players don't shift towns in Cuba, but the structure of the league and the division of the seasons has often been in a state of flux. The current 90-game national Series (since 1997) and 16-team, 4-division organization (since 1992) are recent developments. The National Series fluctuated greatly before the 1990s in both its number of teams and its divisional groupings. There has also from time to time been a second season (earlier called the Selective Series and now the Super League) in which National Series clubs are collapsed into fewer teams representing large zones and sporting different names. It is these facts that explain a player's multiple affiliations. Players have always remained afixed to their home towns or provinces. The single exception has been the team representing the Isle of Youth (Isla de la Juventud) which drawns talent from all quarters of Cuba  to compensate for a population deficiency.

And there is one further caveat. Players (like Yasser Gomez or Yoandry Urgelles) who show promise after debuting with Havana Metropolitanos are occasionally shifted to Havana Industriales, the wildly popular capital city club which boasts the country's biggest following. Even in socialist Cuba baseball officials are not totally oblivious to television ratings being boosted by the fan-favored Industriales Lions.

My intention here has been to point out a defining difference in the structure of Cuban League play--one which may not sit well with supporters of free enterprise, but one which has also long underpinned the exceptional loyalties Cuban fans attach to what are their truly "hometown" ballclubs. I don't justfy here a system which defenders and beneficiaries of capitalism will naturally find to be something of an anathema. (Cuba official of course argue that their system is superior, since CL athletes are motivated by love of sport and not lucre while U.S. professionals are bought or traded like horse flesh.) The debate over the merits of capitalist versus socialst baseball is too big to tackle here and we should perhaps return to it in other blogs. This report features only the impact of the Cuban system (for good or bad) on one-team "lifers" as a disappearing diamond phenomenon.

On the homefront, SABR scholars devote articles in research journals to the rarity of ballplayers who don a single uniform for more than a mere cup of coffee. In Havana the official Industriales team website recently devoted considerable "ink" to the anachronistic practice of some players shifting from one Havana club to another. Such diversity of perspective is indeed one of the charms of distinct and separate baseball universes. Some of us hope that such culture clashes will not disappear altogether with whatever baseball developments might soon loom on the horizon for the post-Castro Cuba.

Cuban Leaguer Angel Scull never played a single game in the majors, but his 1954 Topps bubblegum card (issued somewhat prematurely before a spring training injury ended Scull's career) may be the most artistic Cuban baseball card ever published.

Tommie de la Cruz was an Afro-Cuban journeyman pitcher who reached the "all-white" majors three full seasons (1944, Cincinnati) before Afro-American Jackie Robinson.

Agustin Marquetti was the first great slugger of the modern era (post-revolution) and was far better known for the towering blasts he often stroked than for the actual numbers of home runs amassed.

"El Gigante de Escambray" was a slugging sensation of the 1970s who lasted a record 24 seasons of National Series playand slugged 370 career roundtrippers.

Omar "El Nino" Linares was unquestionably Cuba's best performer of the post-revolution era and has his supporters (alongside Martin Dihigo) as the biggest Cuban talent of any era (professional or amateur).

The colorful legends surrounding the unpredictable onfield behaviors of Victor "El Loco" Mesa as both an outfielder (1980s-1990s) and manager (2000s) are unpassed in an epoch of Cuban baseball history.

Martin Dihigo (DEE-Go) of blackball fame remains the popular choice as Cuba's greatest ballplayer ever, twice leading a circuit (Cuba and Mexico) in batting average and pitching ERA in the same season.

Cuban "Steve" Bellan became the first Latino big leaguer when he appeared with the Troy Haymakers of the National Association (1871).

Big league journeyman catcher Miguel Angel Gonzalez (1920s and 1930s) was the first Cuban to manage a big league team (Cardinals as an interim) and is most renowned for waving Enos Slaughter home from third with World Series winning run (1946) and for coining the phrase "good field, no hit" (while scouting Moe Berg).

The myth of Fidel Castro as one-time pitching prospect (based on a 1959 2-inning exhibition outing) is explored and exploded in Bjarkman's A HISTORY OF CUBAN BASEBALL, 1864-2006 (Chapter 9).

Recent Cooperstown inductee Cristobal Torriente was one of Cuba's greatest Negro league performers and once outslugged Babe Ruth in a legendary Havana exhibition contest (1920).

Adolfo Luque was the first Cuban and first Latino to pitch in the World Series, to win 100 games in the majors, and to lead a big league circuit in wins and ERA (1923).

Author directing Cuba-USA post-game press conference in Rotterdam with Cuban manager Higinio Velez (left) and Team USA manager Davy Johnson (September 2005).

Bjarkman's favorite place to work or see a ball game is Havana's historic Latin American Stadium.

Author (far right) enjoying the view from the Cubavision TV booth at 2005 World Cup action in Rotterdam's Neptunuus Stadium. Cuban media (left to right include TV voice Hector Rodriguez, the legendary and now deceased Eddy Martin, and Granma beat writer Sigfredo Barros (September 2005).

Author (center) with friends in the Cuban press corps covering Holland's World Cup XXXVI (September 2005).

Author Bjarkman chats with nonagenarian Conrado Marrero in Havana during a February 2001 visit. In a previous interview, the pixie-like former Washington Senator journeyman had assured this author that his actual birthdate was May 1, 1911, and not the May 1, 1915 date carried on old Topps bubblegum cards or listed in several authoritive baseball encyclopdias.

For Latino big leaguers to boast inaccurate birth years is hardly a rare phenomena. It is a practice indeed as old and venerated as the Latino big league presence itself. The practice has re-emerged with a vengeance in recent years, in connect with eager player agents who market defectors from the Cuban League and seek big-bucks contracts by establishing that their particular Cuban prospect is a good deal younger than Cuban League records might otherwise indicate. (Another ploy is to claim that just about every defector is, or was, a member of the Cuban national team, a distortion we will take up in some later report.) Mets and Yankees media guides for a number of years listed Rey Ordonez and El Duque Hernandez, respectively, as being several years "shorter in the tooth" than they actually were. The Yankees voided a contract with Cuban Andy Morales a few years back (after they decided he was not skilled enough to make the big time) by suddenly and conveniently discovering his fudged age given at the time of signing. In the early 2000s when the Texas Rangers signed a pair of journeyman Cuban Leaguers who had showed up on American shores, a (here to remain unnamed) Rangers PR director called me to verify the Cuban media guide age listings for both. I was surprised to find that when the signings were announced at a press conference a few days later the ballplayers turned out (according to the Rangers) to be four years younger than Cuban League records I had provided seemed to indicate. MLB clubs, especially in the early 2000s when Cuban defectors were hot items and such signings and made for good news stories, apparently didn't want to field too many questions about why they were signing 28 or 29 year-old journeymen to hefty minor league contracts.

But the phenomena of Cuban ballplayers manipulating their true ages took on a new and slightly bizarre twist a week ago when news leaked out that Cuba's cherished and venerable icon Conrado Marrero--a 96-year-old former Washington Senator still alive and well in Havana--had for some time been tweaking the record books by claiming to be older than he actually was. Marrero's image, after all, has long been based on his advanced age and not his vibrant youth. He broke into the big leagues in 1950 as a 39-year-old rookie. He was still pitching in the Cuban League in his mid-forties. And in the past decade he has become something of a tourist attraction in his mid-nineties for American ballfans visiting Havana.

The story begins a couple of weeks back when the Cuban press staged an "early" birthday bash for Marrero at Latin American Stadium (photo to the left) on the occasion of birthday number 96, celebrated on April 25. The Cuban press still now uses the April 25, 1911 birthdate which Marrero himself adheres to, scrapping the various 1915 dates once favored by editors of Total Baseball or the Big Mac encyclopedias. I had used this date, as well, in my appendices on Cuban big leaguers in A History of Cuban Baseball, 1864-2006. In my full chapter on Marrero's career found earlier in the same book (p.65-66), however, I had stated that Marrero was apparently born on May 1, 1911, a date he had admitted to in an interview with me back in January 1999. Although my own book seemed to be somewhat inconsistent on the matter of Marrero's birth, I knew at least that I was much more accurate than Jorge Figueredo's Who's Who in Cuban Baseball, 1878-1961, which still insists on the May 1, 1915 date (p.236) promoted on Marrero's 1953 Topps gum card.

Controversy over the matter (of a mild sort of course, since this is the kind of mole-hill climbing that only diehard SABR-ities could love or even tolerate) arose when I received the same week a SABR Biography Committee newsletter from birth-records guru Bill Carle in which Carle failed to list Marrero among the surviving nonagenarians celebrating birthdays in May. I email Bill immediately about the matter and received a response that he listed Marrero in his own records as born on August 11, 1911. Now the issue seemed thoroughly confusing.

Fortunately SABR member and regular Cuba traveler Kit Krieger of Vancouver, Canada, was able to come to the rescue. Krieger befriended Marrero in the late 1990s, visits him regularly in Havana, and remains in email touch with Marrero's grandson (who provided the birthday bash photo shown above). Krieger explains it this way. In his own most recent interview with the former big leaguer in March 2006 he pressed the issue of Connie's actual age. Marrero restated an April 25, 1911 date (the one the Cuban press uses), which he now finds preferrable to the May 1, 1911 he had given me several years earlier.

Krieger goes on to explain the subsequent exchange as follows: "His grandson interrupted him and told him that this was incorrect and asserted that Marrero's actual birthdate was August 11, 1911. My Cuban translator listened to a rather heated exchange and then explained to me that Marrero was, in fact, born on August 11. However, his father did not register his birth until the following April and he has used the registration date along with the actual birth year. Marrero was not very happy with the revelation that he is, in fact, 3 1/2 months younger than advertised, but eventually conceded that this was the case."

There we have it. Krieger had already passed the new August 11, 1911 date on to Bill Carle and the SABR committee. I remained in the dark by trusting to my own Spanish-language interview with Marrero who seems, like Satchel Paige, not only to be ageless but also to be enamored with throwing curves and sliders at inquisitive interviewers. The Cuban press and Figueredo's book are in serious need of some updating. And Marrero (despite the smoke screen) is assuredly all of the following (whenever in 1911 he may actually have been born): the oldest living Washington Senator, the sixth oldest living major leaguer, and the oldest living Cuban League icon and former Cuban big leaguer. These are all facts, even if Marrero's true age seems to have more twists and turns to it that even his famed dancing slider pitch once possessed.

A final note seems in order here. Marrero is most famed in Cuba not for his big league cup of coffee between 1950 and 1954, but for his legendary career in the 1930s and 1940s as one of the country's most invincible and colorful pre-revolution amateur league moundsmen. The peak of his career came with a pair or legendary duels with Venezuelan ace Daniel Canonico in Havana during the 1941 and 1942 Amateur World Series matches. The full Marrero legend unfolds in Chapter 4 ("The Baseball Half-Century of Conrado Marrero") of A History of Cuban Baseball, 1864-2006.

Slugging Sancti Spiritus infielder Yulieski Gourriel was picked by BASEBALL AMERICA as the top non-major-league-signed prospect playing in the inaugurual 2006 World Baseball Classic.

Author (far right) with a "fellow traveller" clowning in the dugout with Pinar del Rio ballplayers at Captain San Luis Stadium (February 2001).

Author with City of Havana "official" model builder Lazaro Garcia-Driggs at the latter's remarkable Sugar Cane Mill model at the Havana Club Rum Museum. Bjarkman's MODEL RAILROADING article on this unique operating model tain layout can me accessed at www.bjarkman.com (May 2006).

Author flanked by statues of Martin Dihigo and Adolfo Luque in his favorite ballpark, Havana's historic Estadio Latinoamericano (May 2006).

Bjarkman, Ismael Sene (center) and Mark Rucker (right) catching some local youth baseball action at the historic Regla ballpark on Havana's outskirts (December 1999).

Bjarkman and Mark Rucker (left) supply a copy of their book SMOKE to an intrigued INDER sports ministry official at the rural Guanabacoa ball park (December 1999).

Bjarkman visits with his favorite Cuban League all-star, Sancti Spiritus left fielder Freddie Cepeda (February 2007).

Bjarkman playing tourist at the historically significant "Bay of Pigs" site near Cienfuegos in January 1999.

Bjarkman (right) and Cuba's number baseball fan Ismael Sene on a road trip to the ancient nineteenth-century ball field still standing in the Havana province town of Guines (February 2007).

The aut.hor debating "pelota" in Havana's Central Park with members of the renowned "Esquina Caliente" (Hot Corner) patrons of the Pena Deportiva (December 1997).

Bjarkman poses with Industriales and national team pitching ace Yadel Marti in Estadio Latinoamericano (February 2007).

Author Pete Bjarkman "home-away-from-home" on Havana's Central Park.

Author Pete Bjarkman's "unofficial office" in Havana, the Taverna de la Murralla brewpub located in the picturesque Plaza de Espana (Plaza Vieja).

Ace of the Pinar del Rio staff and former teammate of Jose Contreras, Pedro Lazo is closing in on the all-time Cuban League record (of 234) for career victories. Lazo is a closer on the national team and saved Cuba's biggest win ever vs. the Dominicans in the WBC semifinals.

Odelin, a hard-throwing righty with a difficult first name (even in Cuba) made his mark in the Sydney Olympics and closed out the crucial victory of Puerto Rico that put Cuba into the WBC semifinals.

Maels smashed all Cuban League strikeouts records and was the first Cuban Leaguer clocked at 100 mph before a back injury in 2002 and subsequent defection in 2003 ended his career on the island.

Veteran national team third sacker Michel Enriquez ended Urrutia's string of five-straight batting titles when he hit .447 in National Series XLV. The Isla de la Juventud standout trails only Urrutia and Linares in the career BA department.

Frank Montieth (Mon-tea-yea) is one of the island's most promising young hurlers and earned MVP honors with a brilliant string of outings in the August 2006 Havana-based PreOlympic Tournament.

Fleet-footed Industriales flychaser Yasser Gomez is consistently one of the league's top batsman and arguably its best defensive outfielder. Gomez made perhaps the greatest circus catch this author has ever seen at the Sydney Olympics versus Team USA.

Long considered by this author as the top pitching prospect in Cuba, Circo Silvino Licea enjoyed a career outing for Granma in 2006-2007, winning the league ERA title (1.15) and missing by 1/3 of an inning the league leadership in frames hurled (with 132.2).

Retired in 2003, German Mesa is consensus choice on the island as Cuba's greatest shortstop ever and widely compared with Ozzie Smith as a gloveman by those outside Cuba who saw him perform.

A huge slugging first baseman built in the mold of Agustin Marquetti and Antonio Munoz, Alexander Mayeta has emerged as the heart of the national team batting order.

Veteran Norge Vera authored a stellar performance to tip the scales in Game Five of this year's Cuban National Series final playoff series.

Santiago de Cuba's red-clad Avispas (Wasps) rode a late-season offensive outburst to earn their seventh overall National Series championship and second league crown in the past three seasons as Cuba's National Series #46 wound down in the final days of April. Behind manager and former national team star Antonio Pacheco, Santiago survived a dramatic seven-game semifinal series versus Villa Clara with impressive 16-3 and 18-8 knockout victories in the final two games, then opened the best-of-seven title round by clubbing defending champion Havana Industriales 19-6 on home turf. Industriales and Santiago have now alternated as champions for the past five seasons.

This year's championship match-up also had some historic overtones, with final round games in both Santiago's Guillermon Moncada Stadium and Havana's Latin American Stadium being streamed live on the internet to the U.S. and the rest of the wider world via Cuba's Radio COCO website. If the novel internet access (which came with a technical assist for the Havana-based Japanese Embassy) rekindled Cuban league interest stateside, emotions ran especially high in the island's two largest cities as fan support for the National Series post-season reached a level not previously seen during the past decade.

Despite its one-sided knockout of Industriales (via the Olympic 10-run rule which stops lopsided games at the end of seven frames) in the title-round opener, Santiago's championship was in the end won mainly with clutch pitching. The series turned on a stellar game-five hurling performance by veteran national team ace Norge Vera (12-5). Vera broke the back of a two-game Industriales rally in Latin American Stadium, logging 5.2 strong innings of a crucial 6-4 tie-breaking victory on enemy soil. Santiago closed out the series back home in Guillermon Moncada in game six with an 8-2 romp also keyed by Alberto Bicet's (10-1) strong 7.2-inning scoreless relief stint.

The Santiago-Industriales post-season showdown capped a Cuban League campaign that also featured a pair of noteworthy individual performances by Las Tunas outfielder Osmani Urrutia (below) and veteran Granma right-hander Ciro Silvino Licea (pictured right). National team right-fielder Urrutia continued to establish his substantial credentials as one of the best hitters in any league by posting a National Series record sixth batting title in seven years. During his 2001-2005 string of five consecutive hitting crowns Urrutia amassed a composite .422 average and is now Cuba's career BA leader with a .370 lifetime mark. Urrutia's run to another batting crown (.370, matching his career mark) was aided, however, by the surprise suspension of last year's leader Michel Enriquez (.368 at mid-season) after an altercation with a veteran umpire put the starting national team third baseman on the sidelines for the season's final full month. Licea, for his part, nearly pulled off the rarest of feats by leading the league in both ERA (1.15) and innings pitched (132.2) simultaneously. (Has such a thing ever happened in the big leagues?) Licea missed the rare double when he missed out on the top spot in innings logged by a mere 2/3 of a frame.

Readers wanting seasons' recaps for every Cuban League "amateur" season and post-season stretching back to inaugural National Series I (1962)--along with all the post-1962 shorter Selective Series and Super League campaigns and all the professional pre-1961 seasons as well--can find them all, and much, much more in my new book, A History of Cuban Baseball, 1864-2006, which has stood at the top of the McFarland Publishers best-sellers list for the past three months. Those seeking the book should visit either amazon.com or the McFarland Publishers website.

Lefty swinger Yoandry Urgelles emerged in 2006-2007 as a triple-threat all-star with Havana Industriales.

One of Cuba's best hurlers of the past decade, Norge Vera trails only the departed Orlando Hernandez in Cuban League career won-lost percentage.

Freddie Cepeda (Sancti Spiritus outfielder) is the author's firm choice for Cuba's best all-around player of the early 2000s.

Cuba's carrer BA leader at .370 (15 seasons), Osmani Urrutia hit .400-plus for five straight seasons in the early 2000s and has one six of the last seven Cuban League batting crowns.

Retired in 2002, Omar Linares was Cuba's lifetimes batting leader (.368) before the surge of Urrutia, and was long considered the world's best third baseman not playing in the major leagues.

Greetings and salutations to a host of potential MLB.com readers. For openers, a few words of introduction and explanation are perhaps in order here. You might well want to know whose words you are reading, if only so that you might make an informed judgment about whether this author's thoughts, opinions, and hopefully informative updates on Latino ballplayers and on Caribbean and Cuban League baseball might, after all, have any special interest or relevance for you.

In brief, I am the author of several books on Latin American and Cuban baseball history, mostly recently McFarland's A History of Cuban Baseball, 1864-2006 (2007), which reviewers at Library Journal labelled "the definitive work on Cuban baseball" (in their February 1, 2007, "Baseball Preview" article). My earlier coffee table pictorial volume entitled Smoke: The Romance and Lore of Cuban Baseball (co-authored with photo archivist Mark Rucker in 1999) was a finalist for the prestigious Spitball-CASEY Award. And two additional tomes on international baseball have earned Society for American Baseball Research awards--Diamonds around the Globe: The Encyclopedia of International Baseball (The Sporting News-SABR Baseball Research Award, 2004) and Baseball with a Latin Beat: A History of the Latin American Game (Macmillan-SABR Baseball Research Award, 1994). I am currently at work on Who's Who in Cuban Baseball, 1962-2007 (to be published by McFarland in mid-2008) and Latino Baseball Legends: A Biographical Encyclopedia (forthcoming from Greenwood Press in November 2007).

I am based in Lafayette, Indiana, but spend a good part of my year traveling in Havana, Cuba (where I make 4-5 research trips yearly) and in Zagreb, Croatia (where my wife, a Purdue University professor of linguistics, directs a research project on sign languages of the deaf). My own research interest and personal baseball passion for more than a decade now has been Cuba's "socialist" version of the Pan-American "national" pastime, which I have had the rare opportunity to watch up-close and personal since 1996. I have witnessed the vaunted Cuban national team from the press box in more than a dozen international tournaments (including the WBC), covered the professional winter league Caribbean Series in Mexico and Puerto Rico, and attended numerous Baseball World Cup and Pan American Games competitions, as well as Olympic baseball tournaments (Atlanta 1996 and the Havana Pre-Olympic Tournament of 2006). I also write a regular report/column on Cuban League action and international tournaments for the Spanish-language monthly Beisbol Mundial and the annual Cuban League updates for Baseball America.

That is likely more than enough background. Anyone wishing more, or wanting to access photos and reports regarding my Cuban League baseball travels, is invited to visit my personal website at www.bjarkman.com.

This blog will henceforth eschew further biography (my own at least) and concentrate on reports and perspectives related to the Cuban and Latin American (Caribbean) baseball scenes, perspectives offered by someone who has spent many months during the past decade traveling the by-ways and back roads of the Caribbean baseball universe. My views are usually opinionated and sometimes tinged with noticeable political overtones (fair warning has now been given here) and I do not shy away from controversy. I will write in English in order to serve the bulk of my potential readers, but I certainly welcome all Spanish-language inquiries and comments.

Some topics on the immediate horizon for this blog include at least all of the following subjects:

1- The true birth date of Cuba's oldest living big leaguer (Connie Marrero, not Orlando Hernandez)

2- The sad passing in early May of a pioneering 1960s-era Cuban League icon (Owen Blandino)

3- Opinions and musings on MLB's proper projected role in a post-Castro Cuba

4- Controversies attached to MLB's retirement of Clemente's number "21"

5- Revisiting the issue of Cuban "blacks" in the majors before Jackie Robinson

6- Revisiting the oft-rumored pitching career of touted prospect Fidel Castro

And that is just a sample of what stands in the on-deck circle. I will also be reporting regularly on my periodic "road trips" to Havana and the Cuban League "front lines" with my next journey scheduled for late May (when the Cuban national team will be in preparations for upcoming challenges to their long-standing superiority at the July Pan American Games in Rio de Janeiro and the November Baseball World Cup in Taipei).