by Amaury Pi Gonzalez

All the 30 Major League teams are in full work-out mode during this 2015 Spring Training and within days of the first exhibition games will take place in Arizona and Florida. We remember the glorious history of Spring Training baseball. In 1942 the Brooklyn Dodgers held their training in Havana, Cuba, and with frequency the Cincinnati Reds during the 1940’s and 1950’s legendary players like Jackie Robinson visited Cuba during this time of the year.

The Detroit Tigers played a series of games against a Cuban national team; with the Detroit Tigers there was the great Ty Cobb. Babe Ruth played a series of games in Cuba as he was added to a New York Giants team under manager John McGraw, during the exhibition. Great Cuban black players like Cristóbal Torriente and Jesús Méndez played against McGraw’s stars and after one game John McGraw said: “I wish I could paint Méndez and Torriente white, I would take them with me to the Major Leagues”, while Babe Ruth said while in Cuba: “with Torriente and Méndez on my team, we will win the pennant in September”.

Cuba had teams in the US professional leagues, like the New York Cubans and the Cuban Stars, teams of the US Negro Leagues. Later regular teams in the International League like the Havana Cubans, and Cuban Sugar Kings. In 1959 the Cuban Sugar Kings(an affiliate of the Cincinnati Reds)won the title in the International League.

Today, the possibility is there for Major League teams to return to Cuba and have their Spring Training there, according to Tony Clark, President of the Major League Players Association the US and Cuba are in negotiations to allow MLB teams to travel to Cuba in the future for Spring Training, once diplomatic relations are re-established between the two nations.

These two countries have traditions in baseball unlike any other. Three years after the first baseball game was played in Cuba(December 27,1874)between the Habana and Matanzas teams at Palmar del Junco Stadium, an international event was organized with a US team, who visited the Port of Matanzas on a ship, and on the 29th of December Cuba’s professional league was inaugurated in a game between Habana and Almendares.

These two teams had the greatest rivalry in Cuba and where instrumental in the developing of baseball in the country. Later on the Cuban Winter League had two more teams, Cienfuegos and Marianao, they would play every weekend. This reporter as a kid saw players in Cuba(play in that league)like Orestes(Minnie Miñoso), Brooks Robinson, Jim Bunning, Camilo Pascual,Bob Shaw, Cookie Rojas,and many others that also played here in the US big leagues.

Prior to the eradication of professionalism by the Cuban government in 1961, there was a great connection and brotherhood between Cuban and American players. Not only Cuban players wore the uniforms of many Major League teams, but also many American players would travel to Cuba to play in the Cuban Professional Winter League, considered then, as the best baseball professional league outside the Major Leagues.

Oakland-born Bill Werle(1920-2010)who was a pitcher for the Pirates,Cardinals and Red Sox, once told me: “I used to play in Cuba in the winter league, it was the best league after the majors, and everybody wanted to go and play there, because they also played the best”.

Amaury Pi Gonzalez is the Spanish radio voice for the Oakland A’s and is the Spanish TV voice for the L.A. Angels on Time/Warner Communications and does That’s Amaury’s News and Commentary on http://www.sportsradioservice.com