Game theory | Baseball in Cuba

A looming brawn drain

How will Major League Baseball incorporate future Cuban players?

By D.R. | NEW YORK

BASEBALL claims to be the national sport of the United States, but by any measure American football overtook it long ago. By contrast, it still reigns supreme in Cuba, the game’s second home, which announced on December 17th that it will resume diplomatic relations with America after a 50-year standoff. The sport evolved in parallel on both sides of the Straits of Florida in the late 1800s, and eventually became a symbol of Cuba’s struggle for independence from Spain. “Baseball is more Cuba’s national pastime than it is America’s,” Roberto González Echevarría, the author of a history of Cuban baseball, told me when I was writing a story for the New York Times in 2009. “It was considered modern, democratic and American, while the Spaniards had bullfighting, which was retrograde and barbaric. It’s as if the American founding fathers had been wielding Louisville Sluggers.”

Until Fidel Castro nationalised his favourite sport and cut off the flow of Cuban players abroad in 1961, his country was the unquestioned powerhouse of baseball outside America, and accounted for two-thirds of the Latinos in Major League Baseball (MLB). During his first three decades in power, the only time foreigners got to see Cuban players was at international baseball competitions, which they dominated. But the trickle of defections that began in the 1990s has become a torrent in recent years, and today many of MLB’s mostexcitingstars (including Aroldis Chapman, pictured above) hail from the island. Last year Mr Castro’s brother and successor Raúl made a concession to reality and began allowing Cuban athletes to play abroad, so long as they paid taxes on their foreign income and returned home to compete in the Serie Nacional (SN, or National Series), the country’s domestic league. That left America’s trade embargo as the final obstacle preventing Cubans from playing freely in the United States. Because the Treasury department would be unlikely to grant a licence for lucrative contracts with players who would pay taxes to the Cuban government, only athletes willing to defect and sever ties with their country can play in MLB.

On the surface, the restoration of ties between the two countries does not change the status quo. Formally, only America’s Congress can lift the embargo, which was codified in the Helms-Burton Act of 1996. However, the text of the Cuban Assets Control Regulations gives the Secretary of the Treasury unfettered authority to approve transactions. None of the steps Mr Obama announced yesterday, such as loosening restrictions on travel and money transfers to the island, will have much impact on MLB. But if the president does want to let Cubans play in America while paying taxes to the Castros, he can authorise it with a stroke of his pen—and following his decision to shield 5m unauthorised immigrants from deportation, he has shown that Republican opposition in Congress will not deter him from using the full extent of his executive authority. Moreover, since his favourite team, the Chicago White Sox, already employs a Cuban who by one measure was the best hitter in the American League last year, he might well have both the interest and inclination to open the floodgates.

Although MLB, which issued a statement saying it was “closely monitoring…this significant issue”, would be delighted to gain easier access to Cuban talent, it would probably oppose an unrestricted surge. Cuban veterans represent the last remaining loophole in MLB’s regulation of players’ entry to the league, which helps to maintain competitive balance between rich and poor clubs. Residents of the 50 American states, Puerto Rico and Canada are required to register for the annual amateur draft, in which teams select players in reverse order of their finish the previous season and gain exclusive negotiating rights with them. (The reason Cuban defectors have historically established residence in third countries, such as Andorra and Guatemala, is to avoid the draft, which reduces payouts by preventing competitive bidding.) Players under contract in specified foreign leagues, such as Japan’s Nippon Professional Baseball or the Korea Baseball Organisation in South Korea, are transferred to MLB by a “posting” process, in which American teams pay the players’ current employers for the right to negotiate with or sign them. And international amateurs—defined as players under age 23 not eligible for the draft—are governed by a system of international bonus pools, which allow losing teams to spend more money on foreign youngsters than winning ones can, and impose heavy taxes on clubs that choose not to comply.

That leaves just one group of players who are still free to auction off their services to the highest bidder: Cubans 23 years and older with at least five years of experience in the SN. Such players have signed for sums that top draftees and foreign amateurs can only dream of: this August the Boston Red Sox paid $72m for Rusney Castillo, a second-tier prospect. If all of Cuba’s remaining stars were to hit the market at once, plutocratic clubs like the New York Yankees, whose efforts to rebuild an ageing and underperforming roster have been stymied by MLB’s competitive-balance policies, would once again be able to spend their way to the top of the standings.

The Cuban authorities—particularly Fidel Castro, still the country’s baseball-fan-in-chief—would have their own concerns as well. To be sure, the government would salivate over the prospect of tax revenue from MLB contracts so large they can be measured in percentage points of Cuba’s GDP. Moreover, a rapprochement would in theory offer the SN, whose season is centred around winter months when MLB teams do not play, the opportunity to welcome back prominent defectors. However, MLB has wielded an increasingly heavy hand with other Latin winter leagues, prohibiting high-priced players from participating or strictly limiting their usage to minimise the risks of injury and fatigue. If Cuba maintains its rule that players be available for the full SN season in order to approve contracts with foreign teams—a policy that would sharply reduce their value to MLB clubs—the best Cubans might still choose to follow the money and defect. That would exacerbate the devastation that defections have already wrought on the once-vaunted SN: in order to continue offering fans a quality product, it recently split its season into two halves, and lets the best teams draft players from the worst ones (which then disband) at midseason.

It will probably take years of fraught negotiations to devise a system for Cubans to play in America without defecting that satisfies MLB as well as the governments of both countries—and given that Helms-Burton will remain on the books for the foreseeable future, it could prove impossible if a Republican wins the presidency in 2016. The widespreadspeculation about MLB training academies dotting the island or even a possible Havana-based team (the city hosted a minor league club from 1954-60) appears to be off base: all 30 MLB teams already operate lavish facilities in the Dominican Republic (DR) where they could ship Cuban prospects, and there is little reason to think that an MLB team would be more likely to flourish in Cuba than in Puerto Rico or the DR. Nonetheless, the arc of history is clearly bending towards a normalisation of relations between America and Cuba on the baseball field as well as off. It now seems inevitable that the Caribbean country with both the largest population and the longest tradition in the sport will reclaim its historic perch near the top of the world’s baseball pyramid.

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