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Rating: 
Summary: Interesting read.
Review: A vivid and heartbreaking elegy to a place and time fading before our eyes.
Rating: 
Summary: A beautifully written, heartbreaking book
Review: Among sports books, Pitching Around Fidel is a rare thing: it is smart, honest, and beautifully written. With a novelist's eye for the telling detail and a breezy, engaging writing style, S.L. Price takes the reader on an amazing journey to another world -- the barely functioning sports machine of Fidel Castro's Cuba, circa late 1990s. Price writes with compassion about the sports heroes who dream about making it across the Florida Straits to America, where surely fame and fortune await them. Some of the most moving and heartbreaking moments of the book come when he introduces us to the wives and sons that the Cuban sports stars have left behind.Surely the best part of Pitching Around Fidel is Price's observation that Cuban sports are pure because it is one of the only places on earth whether one can find true amateur sports, where the only reward for a champion is a medal. But he also comes to realize that this pure ideal places a very heavy burden on the island nation's amateur sports stars, who are forever attempting to pitch and run (and even sail) around Fidel.
Rating:
Summary: A good story
Review: I was moved to tears by S.L. Price's poignant and unique view into the Cuban life. S.L. clearly drew on his sincere personal interest in Cuban culture to gain unprecedented access to compelling figures like Teofilo Stevenson and Lazaro Valle. We all know about El Duque, but Valle's bittersweet story, recounted with giddy mirthful hilarity behiond a dilapidated garage, left a haunting impression of perhaps the world's greatest pitcher, reduced to sneaking change out of a waiter's tip. Sweet as lemon pie.
Rating:
Summary: A good story
Review: If you're a sports fan this gives you a great look into a another world. It appears to be an even handed discussion of the good bad and ugly of Cuban sports Its worth it.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent but Unfulfilling
Review: In this period of Elian Gonzalez saturation, I was very pleased to learn of the book by S.L. Price. I was in graduate school at the time of the Bay of Pigs. I visited Cuba in 1979 for a period of 10 days. I have been an avid reader about the developments on the Island, before and after Castro. I cannot imagine anyone, however one feels about Castro or the Cuban revolution, not finding a mother lode of delightful information, commentary, annecdotes, etc., in Price's book. If one happens to be a sports fan, as I am, the book is doubly rewarding; to read of the tidbits about people like Canseco (who played in my hometown), Ordonez, Stevenson, et.al. Plus, the book gives the reader the context and texture of Cuba since Castro: its sights, its sounds, its people, and the extraordinary complexity of the issues involved in evaluating the success or failure of the revolution, or in assigning blame or fault for what has gone right, and for what has gone wrong. If I have a fault with Price's conclusion, it is in the nonjudgmental tone of the Postcript, where he says, "for me, the game is over. Castro's country is a place" as the cliche is about New York, to be visited, but no place to live. After all Price has seen heard and observed, and after his prodigious research, one would have expected him to say something more trenchant. I would at a minimum have expected him to wonder, however wistfully, what might the Cuban revolution have accomplished but for the implacable hostitlity of the United States. But alas, in the end, I suppose we are all patriots, though writers like Price seem to not understand that citizens of Cuba can also be patriots, however wierd that may appear to an American.
Rating:
Summary: A beautifully written, heartbreaking book
Review: It is a strange truth about baseball that, for all its poetry and grace on the field, it remains a game that only achieves its sublime balance under repressive labor conditions.
For most of American baseball history, that repression came in the form of the reserve clause: the congressionally-approved labor practice that denied players the right to sell their services on the open market.
A heinous and unforgivable practice, the reserve clause none-the-less allowed teams to retain their superstars by artificially holding down player salaries. The result was an environment in which each teams had an identifiable personality defined by a core of star players who, for the most part, spent their careers there. With success achieved mostly through trades, talent development, and general baseball acumen, teams from small markets such as Oakland, Cincinnati, and Pittsburgh could build powerhouses to rival anything ever put on the field by clubs from New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles.
A series of court rulings and bargaining concessions in the 1970's effectively disabled the reserve clause. The effect of freedom on baseball has been devastating.
Entrusted with a national heirloom, neither owners nor players seem willing to make even the smallest concessions for the sake of preserving the integrity of the game. Players switch clubs so frequently that baseball organizations no longer have recognizable personalities or philosophies, not to mention starting line-ups. With gross revenue now the largest single determining factor of success, the fragile competitive balance of the game has been shattered. Make no mistake about it, baseball pennants are now won on a team's wallet rather than its wits.
It is not surprising then that a nation of baseball purists are turning their lonely eyes to the myth, mystery, and dream of Cuban baseball; what author T.C. Price in his new book Pitching Around Fidel calls "...a place where free agency is unknown, where agents are a mystery, where no one gets traded and teams never move." "...one of the last places where athletes play for little more than love of the game."
Well, maybe.
Price peels back the layers of charming wood stadiums, accessible athletes, and cheap playoff tickets, to reveal yet another baseball utopia built upon a foundation of repression; this time in the form of a totalitarian dictatorship that not only restricts the movement of labor, but denies its citizens their freedoms. Baseball is not the only sport covered in Pitching Around Fidel, (subtitled: A journey into the heart of Cuban sports.) but it offers the most compelling dramas that, like all great sports tales, go much deeper than the on-field action to tell us something about the times in which they are played.
For Cuba and South Florida, these times are all about the head-on collision of opposing social philosophies - the one promising happiness through social equality, the other through material wealth. Having lost this war on all other fronts, the Castro regime, now more than ever, looks to success on the playing field to legitimize their failing system.
Baseball is Cuba's most beloved sport, yet no other Cuban athletes are so tempted by the guarantee of instant riches just across the Straights of Florida. Rafters such as Orlando Hernandez of the Yankees can hardly get the sand out of their cuffs before being offered multimillion dollar contracts. Cuban expatriate sports agents can make a career out of ear whispering at international sports festivals in hopes of getting a star shortstop from the National Team to jump the chain link fence. A senior writer at Sports Illustrated and columnist and feature writer for the Miami Herald, T.C. Price is one of the few American sports writers to have gone beyond a seat in the press box at Joe Robby Stadium Equal parts travelogue, athlete interviews, and light socio-political commentary, Pitching Around Fidel reads a bit like a sports writer's version of "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil" with Price inhabiting his subject, taking meetings with a gallery of oddball characters, and chronicling the absurdities of everyday life in a perposterous social system.
Rating: 
Summary: The Dictator of Baseball
Review: It is a strange truth about baseball that, for all its poetry and grace on the field, it remains a game that only achieves its sublime balance under repressive labor conditions.
For most of American baseball history, that repression came in the form of the reserve clause: the congressionally-approved labor practice that denied players the right to sell their services on the open market.
A heinous and unforgivable practice, the reserve clause none-the-less allowed teams to retain their superstars by artificially holding down player salaries. The result was an environment in which each teams had an identifiable personality defined by a core of star players who, for the most part, spent their careers there. With success achieved mostly through trades, talent development, and general baseball acumen, teams from small markets such as Oakland, Cincinnati, and Pittsburgh could build powerhouses to rival anything ever put on the field by clubs from New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles.
A series of court rulings and bargaining concessions in the 1970's effectively disabled the reserve clause. The effect of freedom on baseball has been devastating.
Entrusted with a national heirloom, neither owners nor players seem willing to make even the smallest concessions for the sake of preserving the integrity of the game. Players switch clubs so frequently that baseball organizations no longer have recognizable personalities or philosophies, not to mention starting line-ups. With gross revenue now the largest single determining factor of success, the fragile competitive balance of the game has been shattered. Make no mistake about it, baseball pennants are now won on a team's wallet rather than its wits.
It is not surprising then that a nation of baseball purists are turning their lonely eyes to the myth, mystery, and dream of Cuban baseball; what author T.C. Price in his new book Pitching Around Fidel calls "...a place where free agency is unknown, where agents are a mystery, where no one gets traded and teams never move." "...one of the last places where athletes play for little more than love of the game."
Well, maybe.
Price peels back the layers of charming wood stadiums, accessible athletes, and cheap playoff tickets, to reveal yet another baseball utopia built upon a foundation of repression; this time in the form of a totalitarian dictatorship that not only restricts the movement of labor, but denies its citizens their freedoms. Baseball is not the only sport covered in Pitching Around Fidel, (subtitled: A journey into the heart of Cuban sports.) but it offers the most compelling dramas that, like all great sports tales, go much deeper than the on-field action to tell us something about the times in which they are played.
For Cuba and South Florida, these times are all about the head-on collision of opposing social philosophies - the one promising happiness through social equality, the other through material wealth. Having lost this war on all other fronts, the Castro regime, now more than ever, looks to success on the playing field to legitimize their failing system.
Baseball is Cuba's most beloved sport, yet no other Cuban athletes are so tempted by the guarantee of instant riches just across the Straights of Florida. Rafters such as Orlando Hernandez of the Yankees can hardly get the sand out of their cuffs before being offered multimillion dollar contracts. Cuban expatriate sports agents can make a career out of ear whispering at international sports festivals in hopes of getting a star shortstop from the National Team to jump the chain link fence. A senior writer at Sports Illustrated and columnist and feature writer for the Miami Herald, T.C. Price is one of the few American sports writers to have gone beyond a seat in the press box at Joe Robby Stadium Equal parts travelogue, athlete interviews, and light socio-political commentary, Pitching Around Fidel reads a bit like a sports writer's version of "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil" with Price inhabiting his subject, taking meetings with a gallery of oddball characters, and chronicling the absurdities of everyday life in a perposterous social system.
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