Cuban Baseball- The SNB- is Awesome
When people ask me what my favorite baseball team is I have to pause. It’s not that I’m trying to think of some elaborate or profound answer. Rather, it’s because I’m trying to judge at that moment whether the person asking me the question is interested in all of the baseball I watch or just Major League Baseball. If I get the sense that they are purely interested in MLB then I tell them the Chicago Cubs and the conversation moves on from there. On the other hand, if I get the feeling that they may make room for me talking about the unaffiliated baseball I have come to love then I know exactly who the first team and league are that I will talk about with them.
Last week the 61st season of Serie Nacional de Béisbol (SNB) kicked off and man am I glad to be watching Cuban baseball yet again. For a long time, I was worried that this season wouldn’t even take place. After all, the league starting in January isn’t exactly the typical starting point. Usually, these past few months would have been spent with me watching plenty of action from SNB. That’s a major reason why Cuba’s premier league became my favorite league in the world a couple of years back.
I’m not entirely sure when it happened, but I know how it happened. As much as I like, even love, a lot of other unaffiliated leagues they all have various factors working against them standing out from the crowd (I’m not including Serie del Caribe in this discussion as it is technically a tournament and not a league). For the majority of unaffiliated leagues, the games all take place around the same time. I have endless options all year long from about 4 p.m until 10 p.m. It doesn’t matter if it’s summer or winter, there are so many leagues playing every night that it’s hard to pick one league to stick with night in and night out. Of course, there are the various Australasian and European leagues, but they are hard to follow on a day-by-day basis because they are usually playing when I’m asleep.
Into that equation enters SNB and their willingness to play day baseball which for me in the central time zone often means early morning baseball. I quickly realized that thanks to SNB games often starting at 9 a.m. and running all day long I was watching more SNB than any other league. The other thing I realized was that I enjoyed the style of baseball played in SNB more than I did most other leagues. It felt like I was watching the same style found in MLB in the late 1980s and early 1990s, only with modern athletes. Add the style together with SNB running unopposed during the daytime most of the time and I fell in love with Cuba’s league.
There were other factors as well. The talent in the league was undeniable. Now, I know that the SNB has seen its talent level slowly decrease as defections have affected each and every season of the league for the past two or so decades. That being said, I’ve always felt and still maintain that SNB was once a major league and is still regularly at a high enough level that the action isn’t just fun, it’s highly skilled. Most surprisingly, I have found the Cuban online baseball community to be more welcoming than any other community. I have made some great friends through watching SNB and have come to enjoy and understand the game of baseball more than I did before thanks to those friendships.
What I’m trying to say is this; if you get me going I will talk just as much about SNB and my Leñadores de Las Tunas as I will the Cubs and MLB. In fact, SNB and the Leñadores are easier for me to talk about these days than the Cubs and MLB. Neither league nor team is perfect, but SNB and the Leñadores don’t make me feel dirty to my very soul like MLB and the Cubs do most of the time. A new SNB season is upon us and I for one am super jazzed to settle in for some day baseball and cheer my Leñadores on all season long.
