Have Glove, Will Travel_ Adventures of a Baseball Vagabond - Bill Lee [92]
My friend Randy White and I visited Cuba in March 2001 with a group of baseball players from our Florida senior league. Our mission: to find the surviving members of the Gigi Stars and present them with enough baseball equipment to start three new Little League teams. The cargo we brought to Cuba included six cartons of baseball caps, eight catcher’s mitts, twenty-four aluminum bats, thirty batting helmets, seventyfive pairs of spikes, one hundred fielder’s gloves, one hundred batting gloves, and three hundred official Little League baseballs.
The curator of the Hemingway home told Randy that only four of the Stars were still alive. Three of them owned houses in San Francisco de Paulo; one resided in the fishing village of Cojimar, just twenty miles northeast of there. We asked for the names and addresses of the men. Nothing is ever that easy in Cuba. Before the curator agreed to give us any contact information, he insisted we get permission to implement our plan from the local government representative. That official behaved as if our largesse were part of some nefarious American plot. He spent nearly two days interrogating Randy through an interpreter before finally allowing us to proceed.
We met the four Gigi Stars with their extended families in a sun-filled plaza in the middle of San Francisco de Paulo on a Saturday afternoon. The men’s grandchildren and great-grandchildren chased each other in a game of hide-and-seek on the ball field next to the plaza while we chased shots of rum with tankards of Cuban beer.
The park the Gigi Stars once played on had fallen into disrepair. Cows loitered in the outfield. Rodent trails slashed through the overgrown grass. Erosion had devoured much of the infield soil, leaving the surface as grooved and rigid as concrete. Locals had removed the mound, and the winds had obliterated the base paths. Yet you could still trace the outline of a baseball diamond. Despite human neglect and the battering of the elements, the diamond had endured.
One of the old gentlemen lifted a first baseman’s mitt from its package. He tossed it to me, took one for himself, and grabbed a ball. We started playing catch, and his three compadres soon joined us. Gregory Hemingway’s former teammates had reached their seventies, slack-bellied men with rubbery biceps. Fat had narrowed their eyes to slits. But in that plaza, playing the game they loved, those men became boys again, loose-limbed and graceful. Papa Hemingway had coached them well. They caught the ball smoothly with both hands, lined up their bodies behind every throw, and more than once stung my palm with hard tosses.
When we ended our party late that evening, the Gigis thanked us and promised to use the equipment to revive Papa’s legacy. They vowed to restore that old ball field so the joyful noise of bat on ball rising above the laughter of children would be heard throughout the village once more.
The day after our picnic, our senior league team played in Vinales against a club from Pinar del Río. Jon Warden started for us. For three innings, Pinar could not score against him. However, Jon weighed nearly 300 pounds, and the tropical heat soon cooled his fastball. Randy White brought me in from the bullpen in the middle of the fourth with our side down 3–2.
My pitching kept us in the game. Kept Pinar in the game as well. I had thrown a lot of innings during this visit, and the workload had beaten up my arm. My pitches lacked zip. Our defense bailed me out several times, making spectacular catches on hard-hit balls.
I helped with the bat. In the seventh, my two-run homer down the right field line knotted the game 7–7. Pinar took a one-run lead in its half of the inning. I rapped another base hit with one man out in the top of the ninth and scooted to third base with the potential tying run when Randy singled.
To that point, the American teams I had accompanied to this