The fact that the choice of reinforcements for the second stage of the National Series has caused a certain amount of expectation in the fans is the only sign that the Cuban baseball tournament still takes the interest of someone. Questionable or not, the concentration of the ¨talent¨ points to a kind of cooperativization as apparent escape route for a baseball mired in a crisis of widespread disinterest that just manages to reach the purists of yesteryear.
It is clear that the reinforcements are not, not even remotely, a divine creation, but there is neither much more to choose in the current circumstances. The only objectionable thing of the method is seeing Santiago players defending the colors of Havana, or athletes of Villa Clara playing for Pinar del Río is to attend the burial of necessary confrontations in our baseball. Anyway, I assume quietly that any alternative happening to the current structure will hardly exceed it, because all, at this point, are nothing but the adhesive tape that expands the useful life of a spike, and we all know that when you appeal to patches of this nature, your footwear has its days numbered.
However, it is impossible to understand the fall of our baseball as a phenomenon marginalized to the Cuban context of the National Series. Although the term crisis has pejoratively joined the sports lingo to defame everything that does not like, in theory, there is a crisis that implies scarcity and another one that alludes to the excessive concentration of capital in a single place (or so I think). In that sense, the dynamics of a baseball planet than spins around the MLB have become the rest of the championships (including ours) and foreign leagues (which are not so many) in simple means to get to the Major Leagues, dismantling in the play to an already devalued IBAF calendar, which has gave us so much joy in the past.
Now, returning to the Cuban case, it is worth noting that we, beloved children of philosophical amateurism, are who suffer in greater extent that our former focus of revolutionary baseball of towering carats -backed by almost a surrealist patriotism, is today not even the shadow of what once was. Whether or not understanding with MLB, there is no structure to stop the solvent number one of the National Series, which is the aspiration of the athlete of being tested at the highest level of the discipline. That is, right now, a subject included in a reasonably extra-sporting agenda.
The other part of the issue, monitoring our legendary Cuban national team, suggests that we must adapt to a way of understanding team sports in which the squad only counts with all its members, including national and legionnaires, for top quality competitions. This, far from subtracting, would only enhance the WBC and make it a much higher level event, which for baseball, given the particularities of the MLB schedule , should be much more important than returning to the Olympics.
Regarding the glorious forays into multiple events, suffice to say that a glance at the current sport shows that the trend is that the international federations of team disciplines to encourage their championships above the regional or continental multi-sport competitions. That said, the only baseball ecstasy that would remain would be the playoffs, the Caribbean Series and the WBC. Supposedly, this year is the turn of the famous Premier 12 tournament which has ambiguously announced trumpeted as one of the new achievements of the joint management between IBAF and MLB. Let us pray, then, that it does not become into the former world cups or Intercontinental Cups.
Applying to the new game rules would imply also reconverting the sacrosanct National Series in a winter league, as their counterparts in the Caribbean, leaving the expeditious way so that our athletes can be inserted in foreign championships without affecting their participation in it. That must be done if we want to insert ourselves naturally into the unique baseball geopolitical. In this interplay of unknown contexts, the hours of Cuban baseball would decrease, which would also oblige providing a dose of MLB vitamin, so we not to forget that high level baseball exists. We have to see and take note of what is done in Venezuela and the Dominican Republic for their domestic tournaments, lasting three or four months, to maintain the preference of the fans despite the ephemeral nature of their calendars.
For decades, the National Series was the culmination of an identity myth which expiration date would not have been noticed by even the most exalted seers of the high American cultures. Now, unfortunately, it is not possible to maintain interest in a contest where most of the characters are the second-line players of a few years ago. We will not be the first in history who have had to adapt in order to survive. Much worse would be to assume the risk that you or I can be the reinforcements in a suspiciously near future.
