Bullets rain down on players as organized baseball tries to hang on in Cuba
Plus Fernando Tatis Jr. is the new face of MLB's PED problem.
TOP OF THE FIRST
A steroids suspension is not a good look for the face of the game
Baseball hasn’t seen anything quite like Fernando Tatis Jr.
MLB started testing and suspending players for PEDs in 2005. And in that time, we’ve had star players who got busted. We’ve had young players who were busted.
We’ve never had a player who was in his age 23 season and who was already an established star test positive for PEDs. This is a guy MLB was promoting as one of the faces of the sport.
The closest thing before Ryan Braun, who tested positive after his MVP season in 2011 and pinned the blame on the guy who collected the sample. Braun was later entangled in the Biogenesis scandal, had to own up to the whole thing, and was suspended for the final 65 games of the 2013 season.
Ryan Braun stats
As is typical after a player is revealed to have used PEDs, Braun’numbers were never as good again. He had only one more outstanding season. You could argue that some of that was age.
The Padres of course are really angry. They expected to have Tatis for the stretch drive and the postseason this year.
But — as they used to say on those late-night TV commercials for steak knives — wait: There’s more.
Before the 2021 season, the Padres signed Tatis to a 14-year $340 million contract.
And now they have to be wondering just how good was the player they signed.
Padres GM A.J. Preller has complained how he no longer trusts Tatis,, who fractured a wrist in an offseason motorcycle accident. Tatis hadn’t played in an MLB game this season but was starting rehab in Double-A.
Preller really hasn’t publically addressed the larger issue for the team: Was Tatis prowess a product of pharmaceuticals?
Did the Padres commit hundreds of millions of dollars on an infielder who, going forward, is more likely to remind fans more of Ray Oyler than Barry Larkin, Derek Jeter, or Robin Yount?
Fernando Tatis Jr. stats
HEART OF THE ORDER
‘The Happiest Team on Earth’
The Havana Sugar Kings make a run for the Junior World Series title and try to survive in Castro’s Cuba
The score between the Rochester Red Wings and Havana Sugar Kings is tied 3-3 in the ninth inning.
And it has been since June 26, 1960.
It was the second game of a doubleheader, the end of a long homestand for the Sugar Kings. The two teams would complete the game the next time the Wings came back to Gran Stadium.
The Red Wings never returned. Neither did the Sugar Kings.
The doubleheader that June night had been delayed by an hour-and-a-half. An explosion rocked Havana and the power in the stadium went out. The tensions between the United States and Cuba were running high. And the crowd, many of whom were enthusiastic supporters of dictator Fidel Castro, grew impatient.
George Beahon covered the game for the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle.
"It was a warlike atmosphere," Beahon told his old newspaper in 2014. "The Cubans weren't even trying to hide their antagonism."
The International League was losing patience with the revolutionaries who took over the island nation on Jan. 1, 1959.
“If the bullet had been two inches to left, it would have gone right through my head and all the team would have to chip in five bucks apiece for flowers.”
Bullets over Gran Stadium
This was the second time in two seasons the Red Wings found themselves in harrowing circumstances in Havana, the first coming shortly after midnight on July 26, 1959.
July 26 was a big day for Castro and his regime. Six years earlier, he had led an attack on an army barracks. It was a tactical failure, but it turned out to be a strategic success.
Castro’s group became known as the July 26th Movement, to distinguish it from all the other revolutionary movements in the country. Since the 19th century, Cuba had seen a number of attempts to overthrow whoever was in power with varying degrees of success. Castro’s group overthrew Fulgencio Batista, who had overthrown the government in 1933 and again in 1952.
Castro was a baseball fan, though whether he was a casual or ardent one is the subject of some debate. As part of the run-up to the big holiday, Castro led a team of bearded revolutionaries against the military police in a two-inning exhibition on July 24th before the Sugar Kings games against the Red Wings. Castro showed his drawing power as 26,000 jammed into the park.
The Wings-Kings game on July 25 went into extra innings. At midnight, the Cuban anthem was played. The crowd rose to sing. Some began to celebrate by firing guns into the air.
Beahon wrote that the umpires talked about calling the game, with the Red Wings head 4-3 going into the bottom of the 10th.
“The arbiters decided not to risk the wrath of perhaps 5,000 fans whose team (Sugar Kings) was losing,’’ he wrote.
The game continued. The Sugars Kings tied it. The sporadic fire continued. About a half-hour later, just before the 12th inning, a barrage hit the field.
“One soldier, sitting next to Red Wings General Manager George Sisler Jr., in a front-row box seat, emptied a .45 automatic into the turf near the dugout,’’ Beahon wrote.
Red Wing infielder Frank Verdi was in the third-base coaching box. He was hit in the head. He was wearing a plastic liner under his cap, and that saved him.
“If the bullet had been two inches to left, it would have gone right through my head and all the team would have to chip in five bucks apiece for flowers,” Verdi wrote the next day in a first-person piece for United Press International
Sugar Kings shortstop Leo Cardenas took a bullet above the right shoulder blade. It broke the skin but was — as they used to say in the Westerns that played on TV in that era — only a flesh wound.
Players from both teams abandoned the field.
Day after
The International League left it up to the Rochester team as to whether they wanted to play the next day. The president of the team said they wouldn’t play.
Castro consoled himself by “accepting the post’ of premier before an estimated 1 million people. That pretty much had everybody’s attention in Cuba, not some minor-league baseball game being canceled. Still, it was not a good look for the island nation.
“This will set the tourist trade back another six months when the newspapers in the States get hold of this,’’ a Havana hotelier told Beahon.
The Sugar Kings owner Bobby Maduro was fuming, accusing the Red Wings of “running out” and not wanting to play a doubleheader because they weren’t playing well.
Paul Miller, the Sugar Kings general manager, said he was considering asking the league to count both games as forfeits.
Maduro accused his longtime friend Sisler of exaggerating the danger.
“All these years, nothing ever happened to any team in Cuba,’’ Maduro told Beahon. “How can Sisler or anyone else so misconstrue . .. (what) we’re having here; it is like the Fourth of July in the States, and you can’t control things like this.”
The unhappiest club owner on Earth?
By this time, Maduro was in a bad spot.
Maduro tried to take a position that he was not a man of politics but a man of sport, Lou Hernadez wrote in “Bobby Maduro and the Cuban Sugar Kings.” However, the space between politics and sport in Cuba was shrinking by the day.
Maduro was an entrepreneur in a country where the government was hostile to private enterprises. His baseball business allies were growing more suspicious of his country. His country was growing more suspicious of his baseball business allies’ country.
The Sugar Kings’ roots were the Havana Cubans, which were started in 1946 by Washington Senators owner Clark Griffith and some partners. Maduro, who had founded a successful insurance business, became involved. He may have been a partner in the beginning, although apparently he was not mentioned in news coverage, according to the Society for Advance Baseball Research. He may not have been an investor in the team until as late as 1951.
The Havana Cubans were started as a showcase for players from the island. The idea came from either Griffith or longtime scout Joe Cambria, who had been signing players from Cuba since the mid-1930s.
Maduro, his friend Miguelito Suárez, and promoter Emilio de Armas formed a corporation to build Gran Stadium de la Habana in El Cerro in time for the 1947 season. The stadium, which opened with a capacity of 31,000, became the home of the Cubans as well as winter league teams. Now called, Estadio Latinoamericano, it remains the center of Cuban baseball.
The Cubans played in the Florida International League, which began in Class C (the second-lowest minor-league level) and later became Class B.
Maduro eventually became the majority owner. He bought the Class AAA International League franchise in Springfield, Massachusetts at the end of the 1953 season, moved the club to Havana, renamed the team the Sugar Kings, and restocked the roster, largely with Cubans and other Latin American players.
MLB dreams
Maduro billed his club as “The Happiest Team on Earth” and dreamed of making Havana a major-league city.
The team drew well in its first season, with a total of 295,453 attending home games, almost 4,000 per game. The next season when the Sugar Kings made the playoffs, the total attendance increased to 313,232, not bad in an era when minor league baseball total attendance dropped by about 70 percent in a five-year period.
But the Sugar Kings suffered through three bad seasons on the field and attendance dropped to below 1,000 per game.
The Sugar Kings drew a respectable 178,340 in 1958. But the team was losing money. Maduro’s radio rights deal, which had been $60,000 a season, had been cut to $10,000. He had no TV deal.
At the International League winter meeting, owners discussed moving the Havana franchise.
As the 1959 season opened, Maduro hoped that regime change would stabilize Cuba.
Early in the 1959 season, he met with Castro -- in New York -- to discuss the team’s future. Maduro was in Rochester with the team, and Castro was speaking before the American Society of Newspaper Editors.
Maduro said he asked Castro to help ... ah ... persuade big sugar, tobacco, and alcohol companies to advertise. Castro assured him that he would help keep the Sugar Kings alive.
Shortly thereafter the sugar industry donated $20,000 to the club. The chief of the army bought $10,000 worth of tickets. Another $10,000 came from the tourism commission.
The Sugar Kings did not play well or draw well. On July 11, they were tied for last place. They began to play better on their July homestand.
Big league hopes dashed
Maduro still had big-league dreams. There was a lot of that going around in 1959.
The Dodgers had left Brooklyn and the Giants had left New York for the West Coast after the 1957 season. New York City mayor Robert F. Wagner did what any good elected official would do. He appointed a committee.
The committee was charged with bringing the National League back to New York. It went nowhere. Perhaps if the mayor had called it a task force or a blue-ribbon panel ...
William Shea, a prominent New York lawyer, had a different idea -- a new league, the Continental League.
Branch Rickey was hired as president of the league. On July 27, 1959, the Continental League announced it would field teams in Denver, Houston, Minneapolis–St. Paul, New York City, and Toronto and begin play in 1961. Havana was not on that list or the next list of three more possible cities or the one after that.
In the end, the Continental League never launched because the existing major leagues decided to expand. But Havana would not make any of their lists either.
A push to the playoffs
Despite the final night ending of the homestand ending in gunfire, The Sugar Kings had managed to push themselves back into the International League race.
The Sugar Kings had a strong pitching staff (second-best ERA in the league) featuring future Orioles star Mike Cuellar and an outstanding defense (best fielding percentage) to offset a weak offense (second to last in batting average and in runs scored). The Sugar Kings finished third and qualified for the Governors’ Cup playoffs. Manager Preston Gomez’s Sugar Kings bested the Columbus Jets 4 games to 2 in the first round, then edged the Richmond Virginians in six games in the final. The clincher was a 1-0 victory in front of 13,032 at Gran Stadium.
The victory sent the Sugar Kings into the Junior World Series against the American Association champion. This was for bragging rights in the Class AAA baseball world, even though it did not include one of the three AAA leagues, the Pacific Coast League.
The Sugar Kings faced the Minneapolis Millers, managed by Gene Mauch and featuring Carl Yazstremski, a 20-year-old outfielder who batted .339.
The Junior World Series schedule called for the first three games to be played at Metropolitan Stadium in Bloomington, Minn.
The series turned out to be a thriller, both on the field and off.
“It was the only Junior Series in which the submachine guns outnumbered the bats.” Stew Thornley, author of “On to Nicollet: The Glory and Fame of the Minneapolis Millers,” wrote in a blog post.
The first game was played on Sept. 27, a cold Sunday. Only 2,486 fans, many of whom were Cubans living in Minnesota. Havana won 5-2.
The next day was even colder, and only 1,062 saw the game. The Miller came back twice and won 6-5 on a walk-off homer in the ninth by Ed Sadowski to even the series.
Game 3 was snowed out, and the powers that be decided to move the rest of the series to Havana. It proved to be a memorable decision.
A blaze of glory
The weather in Cuba was warmer and the atmosphere was at times heated.
When the teams arrived in Havana, there was a parade attended by thousands.
The first game in Cuba drew more than 24,000 fans. There were other spectators as well. Castro, who would attend every game, came for a pregame ceremony.
“Nearly 3,000 soldiers were at the stadium during the game, many lining the field and others stationing themselves in the dugouts, their rifles and bayonets clearly evident.’’ Thornley wrote.
Millers players heard shots outside the stadium, Thornley wrote.
Gene Mauch told Thornley that once when Miller centerfielder Tom Umphlett came back to the dugout, a soldier made a gesture like a throat being cut.
“Our players were truly fearful of what might happen if we won,” said Mauch. “But we still tried our hardest, figuring we’d take our chances if we did win.”
Sadowski doubled in a run in the second, and Yastrzemski homered in the sixth to give the Millers a 2-0 lead. But the Sugar Kings came back and tied it in the eighth.
Ray Shearer singled to drive in the winner for the Sugar Kings in the 10th.
The Millers found it was tough away from the park as well. “We had been warned not to leave the hotel between games,” Yastrzemski wrote his biography “Yaz.” “It was like a revolution in the streets, even though it wasn’t violent. But with the guns and the noise, it was just scary.”
The Kings won Game 4, 4-3 in 12 innings in front of 14,155 to lead the series three games to one.
The Millers won the next two contests to force a seventh game. The country’s best-known fan turned up the heat for the deciding game.
Thornley wrote: “After entering the stadium prior to Game Seven, he made his way around the warning track to get to his box seat. According to the Millers’ Lefty Locklin, as Castro passed the Minneapolis bullpen, he paused, looked at the players, patted a large revolver on his hip, and said, ‘Tonight, we win.’ ”
The Millers took a 2-0 lead into the eighth inning.
Danny Morejon, a light-hitting outfielder who had been the Sugar Kings’ hero in the series, hit a ground-rule double that sparked a rally to tie the game 2-2,
In the bottom of the ninth, Morejon came through again, singling to center. Raul Sanchez slid home ahead of the throw to give the Sugar Kings the title.
The circle tightens
Maduro attended baseball’s Winter Meetings that December in St. Petersburg, Florida, mostly on the dime of the Cincinnati Reds, who had a working agreement with the Sugar Kings. He was only allowed to take $80 out of Cuba, The Sporting News reported.
The meeting occurred shortly after Che Guevera had been named president of the national bank. This prompted a run on deposits (which no doubt could have been stemmed if someone had thought to give away a few of those really cool T-shirts with Che’s picture for new depositors). So Cuba wanted no money taken out of the country.
At the International League winter meetings in January, the owners adopted a rule that allowed the league president to move the Sugar Kings if there was any repeat of the incident with the Red Wings. Maduro was not happy.
Meanwhile, Castro’s rhetoric grew more anti-American.
In late March, a spring training series between the Cincinnati Reds and the Baltimore Orioles as scheduled for Havana but was moved to Miami at the last minute.
Four days before the Sugar Kings’ 1960 home opener, Rochester sportswriter Beahon reported that the International League had decided to move the Sugar Kings after the first homestand. The report was picked up by the wires services and went nationwide. International League President Frank Shaughnessy and Maduro issued strong denials.
Beahon filed a story that ran on the front page the next day, Easter Sunday, from Havana about the atmosphere in Cuba. He described the country as split “down the middle over the controversial Castro.”
Unemployment was officially almost 25%, private businesses were leery of the regime, and peasant farmers were unhappy that land reform didn’t mean they owned the land but now worked it for the government instead of a landowner, Beahon wrote. Families often ate together without talking, he reported.
Unable to take money out of the country, the Sugar Kings had prepared to defend their Junior World Series title without having played a single spring training game. The Red Wings swept the three-game series, the first time they had ever done that in Havana.
The Sugar Kings shook off the rust and went 5-8 on the homestand, which came off without incident. The season continued in a normal fashion until the last week in June.
Last Tango in Havana
The Red Wings were back in town for a weekend series in late June for what turned out to be the Sugar Kings’ final weekend at home. The munitions dump exploded on Sunday night, cutting off power to Gran Stadium and delaying the start of a doubleheader for an hour and a half. It rocked the stadium. No one was injured at the game, but the Sugar Kings had sustained a mortal blow.
Maduro was not in Cuba for the explosion; he was in New York for a meeting with the other owners.
The previous day the United States charged Cuba with provocative acts, including taking $300 million in American property and firing on a U.S. submarine the month before.
On June 27, Maduro asked the other owners for a $20,000 loan. In Washington, a House panel unanimously approved giving President Dwight Eisenhower the power to cut sugar imports from Cuba. The measure looked like it would sail through Congress. And it did.
By early July, Ike had the power. Cuba struck back, nationalizing all property owned by Americans.
On July 6, International League President Frank Shaughnessy told reporters the Sugars Kings would be moving, He wouldn’t say where the team would be relocated.
Maduro tried to resist. He belittled the league’s safety concerns. He wondered why if the U.S. and the Soviet Union could compete in the Olympics a U.S. team couldn’t play baseball in Cuba.
On July 13, the International League voted to move the team to Jersey City and give them perhaps the worst name in baseball history, the Jersey City Jerseys.
What’s more, at first the Jersey City Jerseys had the worst jerseys in baseball. They simply sewed silk patches saying “Jersey City” over the “Sugar Kings” lettering.
Maduro’s legacy
Maduro stayed in Cuba, even after his wife and children left. Any profits from the Jersey City team that season were to go to him
The franchise did not prosper in Jersey City. The lure of the Yankees and their televised games hurt at the gate. And minor-league baseball was reaching its nadir.
The club moved to Jacksonville for 1962 and then to northern Virginia, where they are the present-day Norfolk Tides. (Frank Verdi, the player who took that bullet in the cap in Havana, was the Tides’ manager for several seasons in the 1970s.)
Castro eventually took everything from Maduro. He went into exile and worked in MLB for many years. In the late 70s, Maduro founded the Inter-American League, a league of independent teams under the umbrella of Minor League Baseball. The league had teams in Miami, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Venezuela. The circuit did not make it through its first season.
Maduro died in 1986 in Miami. He was 70,
The minor league baseball stadium in Miami was named after him in 1987. It has been torn down.
Maduro’s legacy is Cuban baseball. Besides building the main stadium and bringing top minor league baseball to Cuba, he operated a successful winter league team and started a popular youth baseball program.
He is credited for laying the foundation of the culture that made the island a hotbed for baseball talent.