Luis Zayas on the field, as always › Sports › Granma

Yes, there is news in the Cuban baseball season: Granma left Camagüey’s consecutive victories at ten, by beating them, without needing to hit home runs, and Yunier Castillo redeeming himself from his previous outing against the Toros. The other: the Avilanians won their 13th game, which was the seventh loss in a row for the Sancti Spiritus, and now they increased their advantage, after the defeats of the Toros and the Blue Lions, plus the suspension of Pinar-Santiago.

But we ask for the consent of the protagonists so that a lover of dance music, always attached to Afro-Cuban cults, enters the field; one of the good baseball players who played professionally in the Mexican, Nicaraguan, Canadian and American diamonds.

Yesterday we spoke with Luis Zayas, who is recovering from a very complex surgical intervention that required the sacrifice of one of his fast legs. But there he is, jovial, as always, reviewing many of the dialogues that, like a privilege, he has given us.

He flew around the bases, he had 3.6 seconds from home to first, and in Mexico he took three base stealer titles. He grabbed everything in center field, and he was also elegant at second base.

He played professional baseball in Cuba, with Havana in 1955, and with Cienfuegos in 1959. I asked him why he had gone abroad.

«At that time you were either a baseball player, a boxer or a politician. I loved it, and I love the ball. I didn’t like politics at all, especially because it was very far from me, a little black man orphaned by a mother, born in Lawton, not in Miramar, and to make matters worse, the son of a black bricklayer.

I told him, then, that he went to get money. «Of course yes, but I would have preferred fewer sacrifices: Not separating myself from my family, from my brothers. I had to work hard, I wanted to improve myself, but I had to leave school very early to help the old man. “It was sad to leave school 105, where, by the way, Camilo Cienfuegos was a student.”

Zayas spent five years in the United States, in class A, B and C. «We played very close to Little Rock, where black people were hanged; “He traveled in the back of the bus and ate in the kitchens.” In 1961, playing in Mexico, Luis Tiant and I were given the opportunity to play in the United States, at the highest level, with the Cleveland Indians. They said we had to live outside of Cuba to be able to make the team. Tiant said yes, I returned to Cuba.

Then, he recalled, “it was very difficult to find out, on a baseball field in the United States, about the attack on Playa Girón. And I asked myself: what am I doing here! In Mexico I learned of the victory, and here I am.

This Thursday, at his home in the Cerro neighborhood, the talk included Wilmer Lewis Calvo, president of the National Commission for Athletes’ Assistance, and Rodolfo “el Jabaito” Puente. About the shortstop of the Cuban and capital teams, whom he coached when he was a mentor for Metropolitanos, he said: “not only is this a great player, he is the best person in the world,” and he hugged him.

Zayas would not like us to leave readers without some considerations from the campaign day. Yesterday the bats did not sing, it was even the day with the fewest home runs, only two. In our opinion, Hurricane Alber Valladares, in seven completes, with five hits, two strikeouts and three walks, and no clean runs allowed, was the best of the mound, and the worst for Industriales. Castillo, despite his five bases in seven innings, left the Agramontinos with six hits, in a game in which Alexander Ayala went 2 for 4 and is the new leader of the hitters. With the kos from Guantánamo to Holguín and the leaders to the Gallos, there are already 17 in a fight that has completed its 15 days to date.

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