Washington Nationals pitcher Livan Hernandez, a former cuban wants Cuba to lose.
- From: periodistalibre@xxxxxxx
- Date: 5 Mar 2006 22:54:01 -0800
Cuban defectors left without team in Classic
Players who fled communist nation denied chance to field club in
tourney
Washington Nationals starting pitcher Livan Hernandez is among dozens
of Cuban players essentially left stateless by the World Baseball
Classic.
Updated: 5:23 p.m. ET March 4, 2006 --
VIERA, Fla. -Washington Nationals pitcher Livan Hernandez is the
proverbial man without a country.
This winter, as Major League Baseball put together its first
international tournament, Hernandez scrambled to find a team. Unable to
pitch for Cuba, from which he fled in 1995, he and other defectors
petitioned unsuccessfully to field a team in exile. He then offered to
lend his notorious curveball to Puerto Rico, where he has a home, but
again was denied.
Now, as dozens of major leaguers, including six of his Washington
teammates, left spring training this week to participate in the World
Baseball Classic, Hernandez said he is resigned to staying in Viera
with the Nats. He plans to watch the tournament on television, and
while he might pull for the Cuban players, he will be rooting for Cuba
to lose.
"It's difficult, because I want to defend my flag but I don't want to
(support) Fidel," said Hernandez, referring to Cuban President Fidel
Castro. For the defectors, he said, "It's difficult to watch, because
everyone wants to play in that kind of tournament."
Hernandez is among dozens of Cuban players essentially left stateless
by the WBC, the tournament that major league officials hope one day
will evolve into the baseball version of soccer's epic World Cup. The
ambitious 16-nation tournament began Friday in Tokyo, with first-round
play also to take place beginning Tuesday in Phoenix, Orlando and San
Juan, Puerto Rico, where Cuba's powerhouse national team will play its
opening games.
"Everyone wants to play," said Arizona Diamondbacks pitcher Orlando
"El Duque" Hernandez, Livan's older half-brother, who since defecting
eight years ago has won four World Series titles. "But if you don't
have a country, you can't play."
The defectors' plight is a function of the WBC's fuzzy eligibility
requirements and the anachronistic politics that mark U.S.-Cuba
relations. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the two countries,
which share baseball as their national pastime, increasingly have
turned to ballplayers in their efforts to establish preeminence in the
hemisphere.
One American sports agent, Juan Ignacio Hernandez Nodar, is serving a
15-year prison sentence in Cuba for illegally recruiting ballplayers on
the island. Since Jose Contreras, the dominating 250-pound right-hander
for the defending World Series champion Chicago White Sox, signed a
record $32 million contract with the New York Yankees after defecting
in Mexico in 2002, the business has gotten increasingly cut-throat,
according to agents and scouts. With Castro restricting the national
team's travel to limit opportunities to defect, smugglers have taken
over, extracting the players from Cuba by boat and then selling them to
agents and teams after delivering them to a third country.
Joe Kehoskie, a Syracuse-based agent who has managed more than a dozen
Cubans, said in 2004 he was contacted by smugglers who invited him to
Miami to consider some recently arrived prospects. He arrived to find
the Cubans sequestered in a house. "Three minutes into the meeting,
they're asking me for $200,000 for the right to represent the players,"
he said. "It wasn't like, 'Hello, how are you?' It's insanity. It was
like a ransom situation. The players were all sitting around on couches
and basically they were kept hostage until somebody paid for them."
WBC organizers hope the tournament, like an exhibition series between
Cuba and the Baltimore Orioles in 1999, will alleviate some of the
tension.
For participants who aren't Cuban, the tournament's eligibility rules
are exceedingly charitable. Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez, whose
parents are Dominican but who was born in New York, wavered over which
country he would play for before opting for the Americans. St. Louis
pitcher Mark Mulder plans to pitch for the Netherlands. He was born in
South Holland, Ill, which was settled by immigrants from South Holland,
Netherlands.
Catcher Mike Piazza, the future Hall of Famer and a native of
Norristown, Pa., will be playing for Italy, even though he and his
parents were born in the United States. Piazza said the Italian
government plans to issue him a passport before the tournament.
"Let's be honest, they're definitely bending the rules for us," Piazza
said good-naturedly. "But I think it's a good thing, because we're
trying to make baseball a global sport."
Paul Archey, who heads the WBC as baseball's senior vice president of
international business operations, said organizers wanted to let each
national federation set its own eligibility standards. For Italy, he
joked, that meant anyone "eating pizza any week out of the year" could
qualify.
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