• CLAUDIO Jérez puts all the strength of his 14 years into the ball as he warms up his arm on a modest field in the capital’s Playa municipality.

The players here are 13- and 14-year old who aspire to follow in the footsteps of some of their idols, whom they saw play in the recently ended World Classic.
The great sporting figures Germán Mesa and Omar Linares, the stars Cepeda and Yulieski Gourriel or Japanese player Ichiro Suzuki and U.S. star Derek Jeter are the most commonly mentioned.

Jérez explained that he has been told that he has a talent for pitching; however, he adds, "I like batting more and I admire Suzuki, his form of batting, he impressed me in the Classic."

The sun is intense during Havana’s spring but it is not as yet too hot when the 20 adolescents begin to train.

Like Jeter, Orlando Amador has been playing shortstop for four years, but he aspires to follow in the footsteps of Germán Mesa on the capital’s Industriales team.

"Cuba has the best quality in the world," he affirmed.

Jérez began to play baseball with his friends in a park near his house when he was seven years old. One day, he was told that he should enroll in this sport and so he did.

In Cuba, baseball is the national game and the majority of children play it in the street and dream of becoming baseball players.

Tony Castillo, head of the school department of the Cuban Baseball Federation, explained in a conversation with Granma International that, on the island, "the base is very wide in all sports but baseball has the largest."

Amador and Jérez are members of the 13 to 14-year-old selection for Playa municipality and participate in a championship among teams from 15 Havana municipalities.

Once finished with the tournaments, players from the province are selected to play in the provincial championships.

According to figures provided by Castillo, some 46,000 young people play baseball in each one of the sports areas that exist in the 169 municipalities in the country in categories corresponding to age: 7-8 years, 9-10, 11-12, 13-14, 15-16, and youth.

Adelio García, commissioner of the sport in Playa, explained that the children have permission from their schools to play in the afternoons during the two months of the championship.

García added that "the children are inexhaustible because Cubans have baseball in their blood."

The experienced trainer noted that, up to the age of 16, baseball players learn to play different positions and when there is no tournament, play two or three times a week.

The National Sports Institute (INDER) provides various items of sports equipment; the rest they have from previous years or "their parents buy them."

If they stand out in their provinces, Amador or Jerez will enter the

Sports Initiation School (EIDE). There is an EIDE in each one of the island’s 15 provinces with 752 players aged from 13 to 16 years.

The pool of baseball players is vast and the quality of Cuban baseball is reflected in its impressive list of international achievements: Cuba won three Olympic gold medals (1992, 1996 and 2004) and two silver medals (2000 and 2008), and finished second and fifth in the two Baseball Classics, to cite some of its greatest successes.

The list of prominent Cuban baseball players is a long one. Mesa, Linares, Orestes Kindelán and Antonio Pacheco are some of the legends. Among others, players like batter Frederich Cepeda and outfielder Yohenis Céspedes were outstanding in the last Classic.

With pride, García pointed out that Alexander Malleta, Cuba’s first baseman at the Classic, and Carlos Tabares, an outfielder for Industriales who played in the first Classic, were trained in Playa. In the current National Series, eight players from the capital teams – Industriales and Metropolitanos – were trained in this same municipality.