Venezuelan Bust, Baseball Boom: Andres Reiner and Scouting on the New Frontier

2. It's Their Game Too: The Origins of Baseball in Venezuela

14 On October 29, 1941, five Venezuelan planes dropped their payload on the Cuban gunboat nearing the port of La Guaira. It was not a battle in a conflict between the two countries but a celebration of Venezuela’s unexpected victory over Cuba in the championship game of the 1941 World Amateur Baseball tournament. Roses fell from the air, and sixty small boats approached the ship offered by the Cuban government to carry the Venezuelan team home from Havana . The players were overwhelmed by the warm reception on the sea, but nothing could prepare them for the size of the crowd and enthusiasm of the fans waiting to greet them when they disembarked. Government offices, businesses, and schools closed, and more than 100,000 people—one-third of the population of Caracas—lined the twenty-mile-long highway between La Guaira and the capital city. Arriving in Caracas, los héroes del 41 were welcomed by President Gen. Isaías Medina Angrita at the national palace and then met by another throng of adoring fans at the Estadio Nacional where Andrés Eloy Blanco, a beloved writer, poet, and politician saluted the team in the name of the people of Venezuela. Blanco was the perfect person to connect baseball with the spirit of national unity evoked by the victory. In 1918 he had played baseball for Los Samanes, one the country’s most popular teams, and in 1928 was jailed for his involvement in the student movement against the dictatorship of President Juan Vicente Gómez. Blanco began his speech with references to ancient Greece, the early Olympic games, and then fast-forwarded to the Spanish conquest in the sixteenth century. He continued by deIt ’s Their Game Too The Origins of Baseball in Venezuela 2 15 It’s Their Game Too scribing decisive battles in South American history as bases on a ball field. This grand historical overview was then linked to the victory in Cuba by a team composed of players from all regions of the country as a symbolic unification of the soul of Venezuela. Finally Blanco directed his remarks to the members of the team: “Thank you, in the name of the Venezuelan people, for this enormous feeling of joy.” Only a week earlier, on October 22, La Tropical Stadium in Havana was packed for the tie-breaking game between Cuba and Venezuela that would decide the best amateur team in the world. Both teams had finished the tournament with 7-1 records. Cuba had dominated the event in previous years and was unprepared for Venezuela’s challenge . Before the contest the Venezuelan manager, Manual “Pollo” Malpica, gathered his team in the clubhouse, asking them, “You are going to be playing against 27 players, four umpires and 30,000 fans. Does anyone need a pill to calm their nerves?” Venezuela was at a standstill with nearly everyone fixed on the radio transmission from Havana, and when pitcher Daniel “Chino” Canónico defeated the Cuban team to capture Venezuela’s first amateur championship, the country erupted in celebration.1 It was not just a triumph; it was a hazaña—a heroic feat. The victory over Cuba in 1941 was selected in 2000 as the Hazaña del Siglo,—the most important sporting event of the twentieth century—by the country’s association of sportswriters. The 1941 game is, without doubt, the defining moment in the sports history of the country. It served to consolidate baseball as the deporte rey—the dominant sport—in Venezuela . “The Venezuelans’ passion for baseball reached unimaginable heights after October 22, 1941,” reads a caption in the Museo de Béisbol. It was an unforgettable day for Cubans as well. The loss had broken the Cubans’ aura of invincibility.2 Andrés Eloy Blanco in his address spoke of two champions in the Havana tournament, the victorious Venezuelans and the Cubans. “If anyone should smile with satisfaction over the Venezuelan victory, it is Cuba,” Blanco told the crowd, “because it was Cuba that taught us how to play this marvelous game.” 16 It’s Their Game Too Cubans did indeed play a crucial role in the early development of baseball in Venezuela. Emilio Cramer went to Caracas in the early 1890s and established the La Cubana cigarette factory. Cramer and other Cubans spent endless hours in the Plaza Bolívar in the center of Caracas discussing...