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  • Chicago White Sox Slugger José Abreu Wins AL MVP Award

    NEW YORK (AP) — Chicago White Sox slugger José Abreu won the AL MVP prize Thursday, a reward for powering his team back into the playoffs for the first time since 2008. The first baseman from Cuba got 21 of the 30 first-place ballots in voting by members of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America. Cleveland third baseman José Ramírez finished second and Yankees infielder DJ LeMahieu was third. The NL MVP was to be announced later Thursday night. Abreu led the majors with 60 RBIs and 148 total bases, and topped the AL with 76 hits and a .617 slugging percentage. He played in all 60 games during the virus-shortened season as Chicago claimed a wild-card spot. The 33-year-old Abreu batted .317 with 19 home runs, connecting six times in a three-game series against the Cubs in late August. That barrage of longballs at Wrigley Field was part of his 22-game hitting streak, the longest in the majors this year. Abreu was the 2014 AL Rookie of the Year and is a three-time All-Star. He became the fourth different White Sox player to win the AL MVP, joining Frank Thomas (1993-94), Dick Allen (1972) and Nellie Fox (1959) in awards that have been presented since 1931. Smooth around the bag, Abreu ended an MVP drought for AL first basemen. None had won the award since Justin Morneau for Minnesota in 2006; Cincinnati first baseman Joey Votto won the NL MVP in 2010. Ramírez hit .292 with 17 home runs and 46 RBIs. His late-season surge helped Cleveland clinch a wild-card spot. No Indians player has won the AL MVP since Al Rosen in 1953. LeMahieu led with majors with a .364 batting average. Able to play all around the infield, he is now a free agent. AL Cy Young Award winner Shane Bieber of Cleveland was fourth and Angels outfielder Mike Trout was fifth. A three-time AL MVP, Trout had finished in the top four every season since he was AL Rookie of the Year in 2012. This will be the first time in more than 75 years the MVP trophies don’t carry the name and likeness of Kenesaw Mountain Landis, baseball’s first commissioner. In an Associated Press story in late June, former MVPs Barry Larkin, Terry Pendleton and Mike Schmidt said they favored pulling Landis’ name off future plaques because of concerns over his handling of Black players. BBWAA members overwhelmingly voted in October to remove any mention of Landis from the MVP trophy and the award won’t be named for anyone this year. The organization will discuss in 2021 whether to name it for someone else, with Frank Robinson -- the only player to win the MVP in both leagues -- and former Negro Leagues star Josh Gibson among those being mentioned as possibilities. Landis became commissioner in 1920 and no Blacks played in the majors through his reign that ended when he died in 1944. Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier in 1947. Landis’ legacy is “always a complicated story” that includes “documented racism,” official MLB historian John Thorn has said. In 1931, Landis gave the BBWAA control of picking and presenting the MVPs. During the 1944 World Series, the group decided to add Landis’ name to the plaque. His name had appeared on all MVP plaques since then and was featured more prominently than the actual winners of the Kenesaw Mountain Landis Memorial Baseball Award.

  • A History of Cuban Baseball

    "I had heard that Cubans are a deeply religious people. In two days in Cuba I have learned that baseball is their religion." - Samuel Harold Lacy, Legendary Afro-American sports journalist from Baltimore The beginnings Baseball was introduced to Cuba in the 1860s by Cuban students returning from colleges in the United States and American sailors who ported in the country. The sport spread quickly across the island nation after its introduction, with student Nemesio Guilló receiving credit for the game's growth in the mid-19th century. Nemesio and his brother Ernesto attended Spring Hill College, in Mobile, Alabama and both returned to Cuba in 1864. The two formed a baseball team in Cuba in 1868, the Havana Base Ball Club. Bullfighting was very famous in Cuba at that time, but this activity began to be replaced by the new sport that required greater power of concentration and that it was not as cruel as the bullfighting. In Matanzas as well as in Habana the game started to spread quickly. In 1868, during the first Cuban War of Independence against its Spanish rulers, Spanish authorities banned the sport in the island. On October 1st of that year, Francisco de Lersundi, General Captain of the island, passed a law banning the baseball practice throughout the national territory because he considered it "an anti-Spanish game with insurrection tendencies, opposed to the language and favored the lack of affection to Spain...". As such, baseball became symbolic of freedom and egalitarianism to the Cuban people. The ban also prompted Esteban Bellán to join the semipro Troy Haymakers. He became the first Latin American player to play in an Organized League in the United States. Bellán started playing baseball for the Fordham Rose Hill Baseball Club, while attending Fordham University (1863–1868). He also played for the Unions of Morrisania, a New York City team. Bellán played for the Haymakers until 1862; in 1861 this team had joined the National Association. After the execution of the medical students in Habana in 1871, several rich families sent their children to study to schools and universities in the United States. Nemesio Guilló - one of the founders of Cuban baseball - and José Dolores Amieva, along with his two brothers, were part of this wave that introduced the techniques in Cuba and helped to promote the sport they knew in America. They created a team in Matanzas and began to play in wastelands. The historic stadium Palmar del Junco in Pueblo Nuevo, Matanzas was built soon after and it was considered as the first of its kind in the island. It was also where the first official baseball game took place in Cuba on December 27, 1874. It was the first recorded organized game in the country. The historic had the Matanzas Baseball Club taking on the Habana Baseball Club. According to a report in the El Artista newspaper published in Habana city four days later, the Habana team won by 51-9 points supported by pitcher Ricardo Mora and hitter Esteban Bellán, of the Mutual Baseball Club of New York. The game finished at 5:35 minutes that afternoon, and the dark did not allow the hame to continue. Pitcher Ricardo Mora started and ended the game, he also hit a home run. In the historic game, Bellán became the first Cuban and Latin American player to hit three home runs in a game. According to the report signed by a sport editor named Henry, a large audience witnessed the game and the simple uniform of the Habana Club team drew peoples attention. Three years later, in 1877, the first "international" game with an American team was held at the same Palmar de Junco Stadium in Matanzas. In 1878 the passion for baseball emerged among Cuban people. The Cuban Professional League was created the same year. In the beginning, the Cuban League consisted of three teams: Almendares, Habana, and Matanzas. In that first season every team played the other two teams four times each. Habana ended up winning the first championship. The teams were composed of amateurs and were all-white, however, professionalism gradually took hold as teams bid on players to pry them from their rivals. Baseball quickly became the king of sports in the island. Stadiums were built everywhere in Habana, where dozens of enthusiasts came to see baseball games in places like Canteras de Medina, Melitón, Hacendados, Placer de Peñalver, and Quinta de Torrecillas in Puentes Grandes. By 1886 The Sport, a Cuban magazine, was already publishing the following "Baseball is today, without distinction of classes, age, and sex, the preferred diversion of all." What would later become one of the most beautiful, powerful, and controversial stories ever seen in sports, the history of Cuban baseball, had started. First Organized Baseball Game Played in Cuba December 27, 1874, Palmar de Junco Stadium, Matanzas (Photos: BaseballdeCuba Archives)

  • José Fernández ROY Award Ups Slim List of Cuban Winners

    Nothing underscores more dramatically the recent influx of young Cuban talent into the big leagues than the recent Rookie of the Year vote totals which found island refugees occupying three of the top four slots in the respective league polls. Miami Marlins novice hurler José Fernández walked off with the senior circuit title on the strength of a 12-6 won-lost mark and sterling 2.19 ERA that also marks him as a strong contender in the yet-to-be-announced Cy Young category. Fernández (born in Villa Clara but largely raised in Tampa) was trailed in the ROY polls (142-95) by flashy Dodgers outfielder Yasiel Puig, an actual Cuban League “defector” who early-on seemed a top-heavy favorite but in the end garnered only four of thirty first-place ballots. Over in the junior circuit the ROY title went to Tampa outfielder Wil Myers who edged another Cuban League refugee, Detroit shortstop José Iglesias (131-80 was the final vote total). Ironically, Myers’ overall offensive stats (88 games 13 homers, .293 BA) did not match those compiled by National League runner-up Yasiel Puig (104 games, 19 homers, .319 BA). Iglesias (who began the season in Boston) was technically still a rookie, although he had already appeared in a Red Sox uniform briefly during both the 2011 (10 games) and 2012 (25 games) American League campaigns. With his ROY title Fernández becomes the third Cuban native to win the award, joining José Canseco (1986) and Tony Oliva (1964) in that exclusive club. Oliva remains atop the list with the most sensational debut season by a Cuban big leaguer, having also claimed a league batting title (the first ever to do so) during his maiden campaign in the big time. Oliva would also claim a second batting title the very next year (again a big-league first) and later capture still a third crown (in 1971) before his injury-riddled career took a precipitous dip during the late seventies. Despite the heavy presence of Cubans in this year’s top rookie balloting, the actual ledger of Cuban MLB award winners remains quite small, totaling only eight entries for the three most prestigious ballot-determined honors: MVP, Cy Young (top pitcher), and Rookie of the Year. All six honors captured by Cubans have come in the post-1962 epoch, again suggesting that Cuba’s post-revolution-era baseball boasts a more lustrous face than the island game of the pre-Castro epoch. Liván and Orlando Hernández between them picked up a trio of post-season MVP honors to up the Cuban ledger to a grand total of nine trophies. Ironically, when it comes to non-ballot-determined honors (batting championships, home run titles, and RBI and ERA crowns), the overall Cuban list also now checks in at an identical total of nine total winners. And here again, all except one (Dolf Luque’s 1923 ERA crown) have come during the post-1962, post-revolution epoch. It should be noted, however, that despite all the hoopla surrounding the small flood of recent Cuban League “defectors” only Liván and El Duque in that group have so far found their way onto the below list of native Cuban MLB award winners. (Top photo of José Fernández/MLB)

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