the game in cuba, 1882

Here’s an item from the New York Clipper (March 25, 1882) that reveals a couple of interesting aspects of nineteenth-century Cuban baseball.  One is the complicated championship structure.  Figueredo has merely Fe and Habana in the Cuban League, starting on January 22 (the same date as the “championship” below), ending on March 12, with Fe winning three of four games (but the season ending in a dispute, with no official champion).  This article seems to indicate that a tournament of some sort was played, involving eight teams (including Almendares), with second, third, and fourth prizes awarded.  I can’t quite figure how it worked—well, I haven’t tried.  Be my guest.

The other thing you might notice is that Cuban baseball at this time played ten men a side, the tenth man being an extra infielder, the “right-short” (abbreviated “r.s.” in the box scores).  Roberto González Echevarría says that this early practice “left its mark in Cuban baseball jargon”:

As kids we referred to sandlot games where sides were chosen on the spot as a pitén, as in echar un pitén, to play a casual, pickup game.  The expression, I know now, comes from a “picked ten,” a selected team of ten players. (Pride of Havana, p. 104)

Like González Echevarría, I’ve never read how the ten-man game was introduced into Cuba.  But it is suggestive that Esteban Bellán (mentioned here as “our old friend”) returned from his brief National Association career to Cuba in time to play in the first official game in Cuban history, on December 27, 1874; earlier that year, in March, Henry Chadwick (probably the author of this piece) had backed a scheme for a tenth man (and tenth inning) in North American baseball, which was defeated at the National Association meeting.

I haven’t investigated any of this from the Cuban side yet (or looked further into Chadwick’s ten-man, ten-inning proposal).  A couple more projects for the to-do list.

Comments

[Kevin]

http://www.baseballdecuba.com

Has more recent data If you speak Spanish, and are lucky enough to find them active, then you have for more historical data:

http://www.inder.cu/beta/competitions/baseball/Campeonato_Nacional/Serie_Nacional/2007/

(change year at end for different season)

http://www.beisbolcubano.cu/

[Gary Ashwill]

Not for historical stats, at least to my knowledge. If anyone knows differently, drop a line.

[Phil Grabar]

Are their any easily obtained sources of Cuban league stats from the Castro era? Thanks -

Phil

[César González Gómez]

Hello:

I have visited your blog several times and its a very interesting place to read original research.

On how the "prizes" worked in Cuban baseball, what I know, is that it was like the Organized Baseball know with several levels of quality.
In the first team of Habana Almendares and Fe played the best players available in the organization, while the lower quality players were distributed in the second, third or fourth team according on their quality with an opportunity to climb the ladder to the first team.
There were also clubs of lower quality in those leagues.