U-23: Villa Clara, Finally

After a couple of very fought games, finally the Villa Clara team managed to win for the first time in National U-23 Baseball Championships, after defeating Santiago de Cuba team.

They were the great favorites before the competition, but after dividing games in the Guillermón Moncada stadium they also lost the first in the Augusto César Sandino and everything became very complicated.

However, once again they resort to their best weapon, the left-handed pitcher Oscar Hernández, who played long in the fourth game, until Randy Alonso decided on the bottom of the seventh inning.

Alonso himself gave another hit when his team was behind by one run and were against the wall in extra innings, two outs and bases loaded, to somehow "mend his error", because he had a lot of responsibility when Eddy Cajigal’s players scored the leading run on the top of that inning when trying to catch a hit in the center field that was a triple.

In the next inning the hero was Yuri Rodríguez, who hit a single that supposed the defeat of Santiago de Cuba. In the game the, relief pitcher Randy Cueto had his payback after receiving a lot of hits on the previous game against Santiago de Cuba and effectively launched the last innings.

The battle horse of Santiago de Cuba, Wilber Reyna, had another excellent performance from yhe mound, but the match was tied to two runs in the end and he had to leave the box.

Julio César Álvarez’s players were ratified as well as the best squad in the contest, which was marked by broad predominance of pitching.

This was one of the worrying aspects, because with an average speed of 85 mph can be batted.

Bad defense in a general and too many technical-tactical errors affected the quality of the contest, dived since it was reduced to only 15 games in its qualifying round.

It’s true that most players see little action in the National Elite series, but at that age everyone must perfectly master baseball basics, regardless the lack of hundreds of practice matches.

That must be the first task for organizers of the next competition, because otherwise those defects will never polish and, worse, they will drag them to the main sport event of Cuba.

These boys need to play more and more, and if we don’t want doomed the future of our baseball we must make efforts so they have a worthy competition were talents can be seen, because only 15 matches is too little specially after two years without our National Series due to the pandemic.

Make equal to our main tournament I do not know if it’s the best thing to do, especially because it poses a far greater logistics problem, having to move, feed and accommodate twice the personnel at the same time, but something must be done.