Pitching Around Fidel; A Journey into the Heart of Cuban Sports

New York: The ECCO Press (An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers), 2000. First Edition [Stated], First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. Victor Baldizon (Photographs). [6], 279, [3] pages. Illustrations (color). DJ has slight sticker residue at back. S. L. PRICE, a Senior Writer at Sports Illustrated since 1994, has written several books-including Pitching Around Fidel, Playing Through The Whistle: Steel, Football and an American Town, a biography of Aliquippa, Pa. Of Price's work, the New York Times said, "The seasoned reporter ... is a master of the new journalism developed by Hunter Thompson, Gay Talese and Price's personal paragon, Pete Hamill. Whenever he writes about sports-or about the craft of writing-he hits it over the fence." Along with his more than three dozen cover stories for SI, Price has also written for Vanity Fair, the New York Times, TIME, and The Oxford American. He has covered ten Olympic Games, two World Cups, interviewed Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, and played Barack Obama one-on-one in an Iowa YMCA. Derived from a Kirkus review: In a volume that is as much cultural anthropology as sports writing, Price examines a Cuba that remains obsessed with the considerable achievements of its principal athletes despite pervasive poverty and increasing numbers of defectors who flee to the US. Price visited the island many times and here assembles a pleasant patchwork that adheres only incidentally to chronology. Beginning with the March 1998 signing by the New York Yankees of Cuban phenom Orlando `El Duque` Hernandez, Price then moves back and forth in time, attempting to discover why Cuba remains `one of the last places where athletes play for little more than love of the game.` Along the way he manages to interview some of Cuba's greatest athletic heroes, including baseball greats Lazaro Valle (a talented pitcher on the downside of his career) and Jose Ramon Cabrera (a first baseman who fell from grace in a Black Sox-like scandal). He also explodes the persistent canard that Castro was a talented pitcher. Price describes a lovely, proud, impoverished people caught in repressive system that destroys thousands as it celebrates a handful.