To the dismay of baseball fan Kit Krieger, future travels to Cuba will no longer include get-togethers with ex-Washington Senators pitcher Connie Marrero.
Marrero, who played for Washington from 1950 to 1954, died in Havana last April at age 102, a few months after Krieger’s last visit and three years after Krieger helped arrange for Marrero a $10,000 annual pension from Major League Baseball.
Theirs was a special friendship, one of many forged by Krieger, 65, a Vancouver resident who will return to Cuba in late February — his 30th visit there beginning with a 1997 trip related to his job with the British Columbia teachers federation. That trip spawned a love affair with the country and its baseball scene.
Krieger would go on to found Cuba Ball, a company bringing baseball-loving tourists to the island nation — a venture begun really to enable himself to visit affordably with groups.
With President Barack Obama’s December announcement on renewing diplomatic relations with Cuba, Krieger sees a double-edged sword: Cuba will emerge from U.S.-imposed isolation, but the country’s professional baseball league could take a serious hit, ultimately losing many of its players to Major League Baseball teams and their minor-league affiliates.
In the near term, he figures, Cuban baseball will remain unchanged, since the country can hardly be expected to allow foreign teams to poach its premier talent (at least not without hefty payments, as in Japan). Individual players, Krieger believes, are unlikely to risk defecting while knowing that renewed diplomacy could prompt Washington’s lifting of an economic blockade, enabling them to legally sign lucrative contracts abroad.
Krieger sees Cuba as “the largest pool of untapped baseball talent in the world, and no one knows if [the news] will open this pool.” But he fears “the beginning of the end” of a Cuban baseball reality caught in a sweet time warp.
His love for Cuban baseball led him more than a decade ago to join the Society for American Baseball Research, where he recruited like-minded fans for the trips. He’s similarly passionate about family history, frequently conducting research on Jewish genealogy websites. Thanks largely to meticulous records kept by his ancestors, Krieger can trace several branches in Poland and Germany back to 1700.
“I can even tell you the name of my grandfather’s mohel,” he quips.
Krieger’s baseball and genealogy interests at times have coincided: His late mother, Ann Kohlberg, grew up in an apartment building at 320 Riverside Drive in Manhattan, across the hall from New York Giants star Mel Ott. Kohlberg’s cousin, Don Taussig, played outfield with the franchise after its move to San Francisco.
Marrero, a 5-foot-5 right-hander who posted a 39-40 record in the majors and made the American League’s All-Star team in 1951 at age 40, benefited from Krieger’s attention in his final years as he lost his eyesight and hearing. Krieger solicited notes of appreciation from Marrero’s U.S. contemporaries. More than 90 letters arrived, and scores more for Marrero’s 100th birthday.
Eddie Robinson, a former official with the MLB Players Alumni Association and a Senators teammate of Marrero, played a key role in securing the pension, to which Marrero had not been entitled previously because he wasn’t vested.
Krieger now hopes to raise $69,000 for new plaques honoring members of Cuba’s Hall of Fame, and is looking forward to attending more games.
“I went to a game in San Cristobal, in western Cuba,” Krieger recalls. “A guy hits a homer to win the game, gets on his bike to go home and gets stopped by a fan who gives him a live chicken. They’d played on a chain-link-fence field. The seats were concrete slabs, and everyone else watched from the beds of pickup trucks. For the baseball purists,” he says, “those who love to go to Cuba, it’s a unique baseball culture.”