MLB History: The best major leaguers to come out of Cuba
By Bill Felber
As the major leagues formulate a new method of bringing that nation’s stars here, a look back at the greatest players in MLB history to come out of Cuba.
More than 200 Cuban-born players have appeared in MLB history. If that number seems high, consider that the major leagues have operated for more than 140 seasons, and that Cubans have been playing for most of that time. On average, that means only about two Cubans per season have appeared on major league rosters.
That will certainly change profoundly with finalization of an agreement between MLB and Cuba making it far easier for Cuban natives to join big league rosters. Such players will no longer be required to have fled their homeland as refugees, often employing dangerous methods, as has been the case for many years.
Cuba has long been a baseball hotbed, producing first-magnitude stars. The first Cuban of note to make a big league roster was Armando Marsans, from Matanzas, who played for the Cincinnati Reds and several other teams from 1911 through 1918.
Ironically, Marsans came to the United States in 1898 as a refugee – of the Spanish American War. He was 11 at the time. He returned to his homeland as a teen where he was a star for a team that happened to play the Reds in a spring exhibition in 1908. The Reds were suitably impressed.
Probably the peak moment for Cuban involvement in the major leagues was the 1960s when –often in the wake of the Castro takeover of that island — players of the stripe of Tony Oliva, Bert Campaneris, Tony Perez, Mike Cuellar and Luis Tiant emigrated in search of better opportunities. Castro may have been a big fan of baseball, but he was not a big fan of his country’s best ballplayers leaving their home fields behind.
In recent years, too, talent has found its way from Cuba to the U.S. In the 1980s and 1990s, Jose Canseco and Rafael Palmeiro made their names. Today, stars of the magnitude of Jose Abreu, Aroldis Chapman, Yasiel Puig and Yoenis Cespedes perform.
Who are the 20 best players to have come from Cuba? This presentation ranks them based on their career Wins Above Replacement value. It’s a diverse list, ranging across more than a century of the game’s history. It includes seven pitchers and 13 position players. The only requirement for inclusion is that the player must have been born in Cuba. For each player, his hometown, the teams he played for, major league seasons and career WAR are shown.
You may detect one inherent bias…against present-day players. That’s due to our use of career WAR as the ranking stat, a decision that harms players whose careers have not yet concluded. As an example, that’s one reason Yasmani Grandal (+13.5 career WAR) is not (yet) included. He may make it someday.