The Myth of Fidel Castro's Fastball

There is a famous story that Fidel Castro, the future dictator of Cuba, was scouted by major league baseball teams as a pitching prospect in the late 1940s. The story usually goes something like this. Young Fidel had a blazing fastball. He tried out for the Washington Senators, or the Yankees, or the Giants, depending on who's telling it. He was either rejected, or offered a contract he turned down. If he had signed, the logic goes, he would have become a ballplayer instead of a revolutionary, and the entire history of the Cold War would have been different.

It's a great story. It is almost entirely false.

The myth can be traced to a single source. In June 1964, Sport magazine published an article called "The Day I Batted Against Castro," written by former Pirates third baseman Don Hoak with journalist Myron Cope. Hoak claimed that during a winter league game in Havana around 1950 or 1951, a group of radical students from the University of Havana stormed the field, and a young law student named Fidel Castro took the mound and threw several wild pitches at him before police removed the students.

The problem is that the story doesn't hold up. When Hoak played in Cuba in the winter of 1953-54, Castro was in prison following his failed attack on the Moncada Barracks. The timelines don't match. Baseball historian Peter C. Bjarkman, the foremost authority on Cuban baseball, spent years investigating the claim and concluded that it was a fabrication. He called it "Hoak's Hoax."

Castro did play baseball. He pitched for his law school's intramural team at the University of Havana. A single box score has been found, from a game in late November 1946, in which an "F. Castro" pitched and lost 5-4. He may have attended one of Washington Senators scout Joe Cambria's mass tryout camps in Havana, the kind of open events where anyone could show up and throw. But he was never seriously scouted, never offered a contract, and never possessed anything close to professional-level talent.

As Yale professor Roberto González Echevarría, author of The Pride of Havana, wrote, "Fidel Castro was never scouted by any major-league team, and is not known to have enjoyed the kind of success in baseball that could have brought a scout's attention to him. In a country where sports coverage was broad and thorough, in a city such as Havana with a half-dozen major newspapers, there is no record that Fidel Castro ever played, much less starred, on any team."

Castro, for his part, loved the myth and never corrected it. He used baseball as a political tool throughout his rule, founding Los Barbudos (the Bearded Ones), his own team made up of revolutionaries, and playing exhibition games before professional contests to demonstrate his connection to the Cuban people. He dissolved professional baseball in Cuba in 1961, turning the sport into an amateur pursuit dedicated to revolutionary ideals.

The myth persists because it answers a question Americans find irresistible. What if a single contract had changed history? It's the kind of story baseball was built to tell. But in this case, the story is fiction, and the truth, that a mediocre intramural pitcher became one of the most consequential political figures of the 20th century, is more interesting than the legend it replaced.