It makes for an intriguing story. And it is not at all hard to find scores of old Capital Region baseball fans who embrace their vivid memories of watching a young and promising pitcher take the mound at Hawkins Stadium, only to go on to worldwide fame for other reasons.

   The only problem is it certainly never happened.

   In the mid-1940s, the story goes, baseball scout and onetime Albany Senators owner Joe Cambria traveled to Cuba to look over the talent at, among other places, the University of Havana. There, he came across two brothers, pitcher and catcher, named Fidel and Raul Castro. At which point the story gets very, very murky.

   By some accounts, Fidel was in fact an accomplished sportsman (voted “Best Athlete” in his class at Colegio Belen in 1944), but years later when he become the Cuban head of state the people who should have been able to put to rest what was surely an urban myth offered only vague recollections that kept the story alive.

   Then-Albany assemblyman and local sports authority Richard Conners, for one, once speculated for publication that Castro’s name “may have appeared on some preseason roster . . .” because Albany and the Washington Senators, the team Cambria was scouting for, were affiliated at the time.

   Likewise, Tom McCaffery, who owned the club during the period in question, only managed to fan the rumors a little more when he told Knickerbocker News columnist Charley Mooney in the 1960s that he doubted the tale. “Joe Cambria sent word that he had signed up Fidel Castro and his brother, Raul . . . at first I wondered if they had any connection with the Convertible people,” McCaffery said, adding that, “Someone said that they played for awhile in the South before drifting back to Cuba. . . . Too bad, Albany could have used a brother battery.”

   On the other side of the coin, however, are numerous baseball fans in the area who will swear on home plate that they saw the powerfully-built Cuban leader throw baseballs around Hawkins Stadium in the years after World War II.

   “It’s absolutely true, Fidel Castro pitched at Hawkins,” one notably knowledgeable fan told a reporter in the early 1980s. But not, he said, as an Albany Senator. “He ended up, I think, with the White Sox organization and pitched here while he was with their Double A club.”

   What none of the tales takes into account, however, is the ticklish truth that the Castro baseball legend shows up in cities all over the country, with the appropriate adjustments to localize the legend. Folklorists have identified the story as an urban myth offering an “alternate history,” as does the Yale scholar who wrote the book on Cuban baseball.

   “Every time I mentioned that I was writing a book about Cuban baseball, the first thing Americans said had to do with Fidel’s . . . alleged prowess in the sport, and the irony that, had he been signed by the Senators or the Giants, there would have been no Cuban Revolution,” wrote Roberto González Echevarria. “The whole thing is a fabrication by an American journalist whose name is now lost,” he concluded, quite forcefully.

   Be that as it may, the Capital Region is entitled to make one claim linking U.S. baseball history and Latin America: in 1871, Troy signed infielder Esteban Bellan, making him the first Hispanic player in the big leagues.

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Copyright 2006 by Kenneth Salzmann

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