All ears on World Series in Havana

The World Series of baseball began this weekend with the Florida Marlins and the Cleveland Indians slugging it out for the "fall classic". On Saturday night, the Marlins drew first blood in the series opener down in Miami. Generally speaking this is a good thing.

The Cleveland Indians have a silly, tritely offensive little Indian logo which we don't like. Furthermore they beat one of our favourite teams, the Baltimore Orioles to get into the series.

Besides imagine the sheer hometown drama of it. The Marlins are a five-year-old team, established during the league expansion of 1993 and built with their community in mind. Most of the players are Latin American and speak Spanish. On a close Saturday night in Miami, they played in front of 67,275 people, with word and sight of every pitch being relayed across the baseball communities of Central America.

Now the World Series of baseball has been a matter of sublime indifference to most Irish people for as long as curve-balls have been thrown, indeed this column paid it little attention until it happened upon two books by the Washington Post baseball guru Tom Boswell. Why Time Begins on Opening Day and How Life Imitates the World Series are two titles which defy you to ignore them.

Baseball is the gentlest and most sophisticated of sports. There is no better sporting way to spend a summer evening than grasping a hot dog and watching nine innings unfold. Hence this column claims the right to bore people stupid several times a year with its long distance ramblings upon the topic of baseball.

After half a decade or so of being bundled off to sporting events all over the country and further afield, the ambitions still left to this sporting hack are twofold. To attend a World Series and attend a big baseball game in Cuba, where the admission is free and the baseball is a national passion.

On Saturday night in Miami a Cuban defector called Livan Hernandez attended his first World Series game. He pitched a little over five innings for the Marlins while he was there, striking out five batters in the process and at, 22, becoming the youngest winning pitcher in a World Series opening game. For the uninitiated, imagine FA Cup finals and hat-tricks.

One can only imagine the confused feelings which news of Hernandez's success will give rise to down in Cuba. Even in these days of starvation by embargo and blockade, the Cubans dream of one day putting a team of their greatest players in against the best of the Americans. Yet the longer the bad times last and the worse things get the closer they come to seeing just how good their ball players are. The good ones used to stay. Now they defect.

Their departure leaves a wash of great sadness. Athletes like Sotomayor and Quirot and the boxer Savon have stayed and offered up their success for the revolution. Team sports offer a more diluted glory, however, and fewer chances to play against the very best. Major league baseball just miles away in Florida offers the greatest riches and glory imaginable.

Cubans listening in on their wirelesses will have considered Hernandez's deeds and wondered. Sport will have brought about a strange and uneasy communion of the spirit between the defected and the loyal.

Funny thing is that across in the land of the free and the home of the brave, where the deal is king, they are fretting about whether or not money has diminished baseball.

They are worried this October that perhaps the Marlins have bought their way to a World Series under the guidance of their deep-pocketed owner Wayne Huizenga. They look around them and see that what is happening to their sport is much like what is happening to English soccer. Clubs which were once part of the fabric of life in a city are becoming disconnected. Worse, they are becoming the trophy acquisitions of rich men.

In this respect, Huizenga isn't the worst offender. He brought baseball to a region of America which was previously only serviced by the enjoyably ersatz annual ritual of spring training games.

Money will consume any sport in the end but we can take comfort in the fact that the process is mainly slow and faltering.

In 1920, when Harry Frazee, the owner of ill-starred Boston Red Sox sold Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees for $125,000 (and a passel of loan guarantees) it was deemed by people like me that the deal marked the end of civilisation as we had known it. The Babe Ruth sale was the most expensive deal in the history of baseball, but it was widely held to be an example of how fiscally crazy the grand old game had become. Nobody was worth $125,000.

Babe Ruth was worth it as it turned out. The Red Sox had been naive enough to think that he was a pitcher. He wasn't a bad pitcher, World Series standard in fact but when the Yankees let him lose with the bat he changed the game forever. The Red Sox have never won a World Series since. Ruth was more than a player, he was a god. He went on to change the way the game was played forever.

The Yankee management made Babe Ruth PAY. The dividend was such that Yankee stadium became known as the house that Ruth built.

They stuck a bat in Ruth's hands right away and retired him as a pitcher. His first year with the Yankees he hit 54 home runs, four times as many as any other player in history had hit.

What was worrying then was the amount of money for which a mere ballplayer changed hands. What is worrying today is the lack of discrimination with which clubs (in all major professional sports) buy players. A moderately successful batter with a bad manner and a worse temper (Albert Belle) is currently flailing his way through a $48 million deal with the Chicago White Sox. That type of folly isn't unique to Chicago or baseball.

There is something of the desperation of the addict about the manner in which rich men spend to buy success. What's left for the rest of us is the stories and the thoughts of old men in Havana listening to the deeds of Hernandez and wondering.