We Came Here to Play: Baseball Meets History
The sports pages usually offer a refuge from politics. Not always. Saturday, July 25, 1959, was one of those occasions when history intruded on the grassy green diamond. On a sweltering night in Havana, Cuba, the Rochester Red Wings were playing the Havana Sugar Kings. Rochester and Havana were part of the triple-A International League, which also included teams from Toronto and Montreal. Cubans were wild about béisbol.
The island nation had been unsettled since July 26, 1953, when an armed group of students led by Fidel Castro rose against the corrupt dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. Their unsuccessful raid on the Moncada military barracks marked the beginning of a revolutionary movement. On New Years Day, 1959, they overthrew Batista and took power.
When the Rochester ball club arrived for a weekend road trip, Castro, a baseball fanático, put on a Friday night exhibition. After practicing all day in his hotel room, he took the mound for a pick-up team, the Barbudos or “Bearded Ones.” He hurled two innings against a team of military policemen, his pitching described as “wild but fast.”
The next night’s action began with the conclusion of a game that had been cut short earlier in the season. El Cerro Stadium, twice the size of most minor-league ballparks, was packed with 35,000 enthusiastic fans. The Sugar Kings delighted their followers by driving in a run to win the suspended game.
The scheduled contest got under way late. The Rochester team took a 3-1 lead into the final inning. The Sugar Kings scored two runs in the bottom of the ninth, pushing the game into extra innings.
It was midnight. Perplexed Red Wing players watched the stadium lights suddenly go dark, a spotlight illuminate the Cuban flag, and everyone stand for the Cuban national anthem. It was the beginning of the celebration of July 26, now Cuba’s Independence Day. Suddenly the stadium erupted in gunfire. Baseball fans pulled out handguns. Soldiers fired rifles into the air. More volleys came from crowds outside the arena.
After a delay, play resumed. Red Wing infielder Billy Harrell smacked a homer in the top of the eleventh, and the sweating Wings again anticipated a victory, a shower, and a cold beer.
Not so fast. In the bottom of the inning, Sugar Kings catcher Jesse Gonder pounded a pitch down the left field line for a double. Gonder was a prospect from Arkansas who was working his way through the farm system. He would go on to a long major league career that included stints with both the Yankees and the Mets.
Red Wings manager Ellis “Cot” Deal rushed onto the field to argue that Gonder never touched first base. Facing a stadium of raucous and heavily armed hometown fans, the umpires did not hesitate to ejected Deal from the game. Gonder scored. On to the twelfth, tied 4 to 4.
Just as the Red Wings chalked up their last out in that frame, the excited fans let loose another burst of gunfire. The laws of physics intervened — bullets shot into the air returned to earth. One slug landed on the head of Red Wings third base coach Frank Verdi.
Normally a player, Verdi was recovering from having been knocked silly by a beanball several weeks earlier. He had started wearing a protective liner under his hat (modern batting helmets were not yet mandated). The precaution saved him from serious injury. The bullet only knocked him down and left him dazed. At almost the same instant the Sugar Kings shortstop was struck on the shoulder by another projectile.
At that point, Verdi said, the bullets were coming down “like hailstones.” Players on both teams sprinted for the clubhouse. The game was suspended. The Red Wings took the next plane out, skipping a scheduled Sunday doubleheader. Verdi told the Associated Press, “We came here to play ball, not to be shot at.”
The Cubans issued an apology and play resumed in Havana. The Sugar Kings won the league championship and the Junior World Series that year. But the Red Wing game left a cloud over professional baseball in Cuba.
As the Havana team began its 1960 season, relations between the United States and Cuba soured. Castro nationalized the property of American corporations. Internal dissent erupted into violence. In July, league officials abruptly moved the Sugar Kings franchise to Jersey City. That October, President Eisenhower imposed an embargo on Cuba.
With the disappearance of U.S. ball teams, a shared interest between the Cuban and American people was lost. The intrusion of politics affected many Cuban baseball players, who had to leave their homeland to play in the major leagues. Among them was Leo Cárdenas, the Sugar Kings shortstop who had been struck by a spent round during the Red Wing game. One of the great fielders of his generation, Cárdenas was a five-time all-star with the Cincinnati Reds and other clubs.
It wasn’t until 2014 that the long freeze in Cuban-American relations thawed a bit. When President Obama visited the island in 2016, he and his family took in a baseball exhibition between the Tampa Bay Rays and the Cuba National Team. The teams played in the same stadium where Rochester players had dodged falling bullets on a hot night in 1959 — two years before Obama was born.
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Wow another interesting topic Jack. Baseball has been a popular sport for many years and this was a good one and too bad all the gun shooting caused a few injuries but also some very good players. I enjoyed this baseball history.
Very interesting read, Jack. There’s so much history surrounding both the Red Wings and the Amerks. My father loved both teams and passed that on to me and I’ve done the same with my son. Can’t thank you enough.