BY THE end of the first inning the scoreboard at the little Paul Eames ballpark, sometime home of the Albany Polecats, showed the visitors 2-0 up, but the score scarcely mattered. The important tally was the number of Cuban players who showed up for the game.
Ever since their star pitcher, Rolando Arrojo, slipped out of his room at the Quality Inn during the early hours of Tuesday to try his luck in the capitalist big leagues, this small south Georgia town has been awash with rumours of the imminent disintegration of the Cuban Olympic baseball team.
Scouts from several major league teams were said to be in town, confident of a rush of defections. Joe Cubas, the flashy agent who spirited Arrojo to Miami, was supposedly on his way back to Albany, promising at least three more desertions. At the local paper they were taking bets on the eventual size of the Cuban delegation at the end of its week-long stay.
"I guess surreal is probably the way to describe it," said Walter "Sonny" Deriso, the affable local banker who lured the Cubans, to train in this sleepy manufacturing town along with the South Korean baseball team and athletes from Cameroon and Uzbekistan. "You pinch yourself and say is this really happening in Albany?"
Not that anyone expected the Cuban contingent to leave town the same size as it arrived. Albany is the last stop on the team's pre-Olympic tour and the closest point to Miami with its large population of anti-Castro Cuban expatriates. In Atlanta security will be tighter. "I can understand that," says Deriso. "If someone was going to leave, they would do it in Albany."
For Fidel Castro, once a minor league pitching prospect in his own right, participation in the Centennial Games was always going to be a high-stakes gamble.
On one hand, he desperately wants to repeat the success of 1992, when his Olympic squad brought home the fifth-largest haul of medals, proving that Cuba remained a sporting super-power even if it was crumbling in every other respect. On the other, by sending his sports stars into "the heart of the monster" he was inviting politically embarrassing desertions.
His anxiety was reflected by the absence of Cuba's finest pitcher, "The Duke" Hernandez, from the Olympic roster.He was said to be considered a likely bolter after the defection of his brother, Livian, last year.
So far the gamble looks precarious. A week before Arrojo's disappearance, two highly-rated boxers slipped out of the team's training camp in Mexico.
Addressing the 220-strong delegation in Havana on Wednesday night, Castro lambasted the sportsmen who had "betrayed" their country and urged his Olympians to flex their "muscles of the soul" as well as their physical ones.
The temptations faced by the Cubans would shake the loyalty of the most ardent patriot. At home Cuba's star first baseman Antonio Pacheco earns 500 pesos a month (around £18 at black-market rates) for working as an instructor at a sports centre and playing on the national team.
Like several of his team-mates on the Cuban side, which has dominated international baseball, winning every major competition including the 1992 Olympics, he has received countless lucrative offers from North American major league teams. Pacheco will not say which teams or how much, but two Cuban players who defected last year have received signing-on bonuses in excess of 1 million before collecting a cent of their salaries.
Pacheco insists it is not difficult to resist the financial temptation. "I like my country. I have my family. I like the way things are." But he concedes that he would love to play for a major league side if it were possible to do so without defecting: "It's not just the economic thing. It is a way to prove that you are the best."
Though the Cubans have put a brave face on Arrojo's loss, insisting that "everyone is replaceable", the delegation leader Evaristo Ruiz concedes the constant speculation about his players' loyalty is dispiriting. "It is really difficult to prepare a team when all the news people are looking for is desertions," he says, scanning the latest crowing headline in his motel room.
Wednesday night's game pitted the Olympic gold medal favourites against the Albany As, a team described by one local sportswriter as "a bunch of clowns that used to play baseball - has-beens and never-beens who shoulda given up years ago". Their stars were Matt Bennett, a local youth who "almost made it in the minors", and Tom Rosati, a fiercely competitive high-school coach whose team won all 22 of its games one season before losing in the play-offs of the state championships.
The final score was 8-0, scarcely a reflection of the visitors' complete dominance. But at dinner afterwards the Cuban coaches look satisfied. There were no empty seats.
