La Tropical Park, Then and Now

In February 2001, more than a dozen members of the Society for American Baseball Research joined the first Cubaball Tours visit to enjoy a week of baseball in Cuba. Most tour participants felt the weeklong tour was one of the best travel experiences they’d ever enjoyed. The group, led by Kit Krieger and Peter Bjarkman, saw five ball games in four stadiums, met with Connie Marrero, visited a baseball academy, joined Havana’s daily outdoor baseball discussion group, paid homage at Martin Dihigo’s final resting place, and talked a lot of base­ball for the whole week.

We didn’t get to meet Fidel, but this was a dedicated group of baseball fans, and it amused participant Peggy Engle that we were so wrapped up in talking with Marrero that almost no one but her noticed the topless tourist by the “Havana Libre” hotel swimming pool just on the other side of the plate-glass window from the room in which we were meeting.

At one point, on February 23, on the way back from a seminar on Cuban baseball history at the Institute for Friendship Among the Nations, our jefes had the tour bus stop at a former baseball stadium known as La Tropical. This interested Bill Nowlin in particular because he’d visited Havana’s Biblioteca Nacional the day before, researching two games that Ted Williams and the Red Sox had played in Cuba in 1946. A visit to La Tropical, initially built in 1930 for the Pan American Games, was not on the original tour itinerary. A Krieger query about the location of the stadium revealed that it was currently used as a track and field facility and was little altered from the days when Martin Dihigo, Oscar Charleston, Josh Gibson, and Cristobal Torriente roamed the grounds. Our itinerary was adjusted to seize the opportunity to visit this historic site.

We climbed down from our bus and entered La Tropical (now called Pepe Marrero, named after a hero of the revolution) through gates along what had been left field. If the fences are placed as they were in 1930, it was clear that the stadium was a pitcher’s park, save for a short porch in right field. The center field fence was well over 500 feet distant from home plate, and left field was more than 400 feet away.

As everyone was looking around, one or two tour members noticed a couple of worn and faded plaques affixed to a wall inside the stadium. They looked like they’d been there a long time, and the heavy patina made the inscriptions difficult to read.

Suddenly, Krieger shouted, “Holy shit!” and we crowded around to see what caused the commotion. Working to make out the wording on the plaque, it became clear that in 1930 a touring group of major league ballplayers had come to Havana and played what was truly an all-star game at Tropical. A commemorative plaque featured the two rosters and facsimile signatures of the stars. As the names of the participants were deciphered and read out loud, it was clear that the game included quite a number of future Hall of Famers.

On Saturday morning, Bill Nowlin returned to the library and flashed his newly acquired library card from the day before, requesting the October 1930 run of the newspaper Diario de la Marina. It turned out that this was not just one game, but a seven-game series between Las Estrellas de Davey Bancroft and Las Estrellas de Jewel Ens: Bancroft’s Stars versus Ens’s Stars. The Ens team won five games, while Bancroft took two.

About 20,000 attended the opening ceremonies at what was then named Stadium Cerveza Tropical. 

In all there were nine future Hall of Famers in the series. They were Davey Bancroft, Heinie Manush, Rabbit Maranville, Paul Waner, Al Lopez, Pie Traynor, Chuck Klein, Carl Hubbell, and Bill Terry. The scores of the games were as follows:

• Game 1: Ens 1, Bancroft 0 (this game took only 1 hour and 9 minutes to play—not much time for TV ads in 1930!)
• Game 2: Bancroft 4, Ens 2
• Game 3: Bancroft 5, Ens 4
• Game 4: Ens 3, Bancroft 2
• Game 5: Ens 1, Bancroft 0 (a two-hitter thrown by Tiny Chaplin)

In between games 5 and 6, the Bancrofts played a Habana all-star team and beat them, but only by 2-1, winning in the ninth. Ramon Bragana pitched for Habana.

• Game 6: Ens 4, Bancroft 1
• Game 7: Ens 6, Bancroft 2 (October 19)

Series MVP (actually, the newspaper phrased this as en nuestra opinion, la figura mas destacada de le serie) was Larry French, who won three of the five games his team won. Tom Oliver, Lopez, Terry, Maranville, and Chaplin were others noted as standouts.

In game seven, Diario de la Marina noted, “El viejo Maranville fue otra sensacion del game. Sus cogidas de balsillo gustaron sobremanera al publico y sus actos comicos aun mas.” Maranville was 2-for-5 on the day.

There was an entire page of photos in the rotogravure section, showing fans coming to the game, in the stands, and play on the field. The box score:

One of the umpires was Magrifiat, who also happened to umpire 16 years later at the Red Sox vs. Senators two-game exhibition there in March 1946, which Bill Nowlin had just researched. This was Jose M. Magrifiat, whose box of bones we found later that day inside the 1942 Baseballists Monument in Cementerio Cristobal Colon. That’s another story!

The day after this series concluded, on October 20, Luque pitched for the Habanistas Rojas against the Louisville Coroneles. Unfortunately, Cuba’s national library lacks a photocopy machine, so the only way to get box scores from there is to copy them by hand. We present the box score for game seven.

Even though our discovery was made in the year 2001, one of the players who participated was still alive and well in Tampa: Al Lopez. Born in 1908, Lopez broke in with the Dodgers in 1929. The receiver hit .309 in his first full season (1930) and was invited to join the touring party.

Soon after returning to the States, Nowlin phoned Lopez and found that he remembered the visit well:

There was a lot of fine ballplayers that went on that tour. We stayed at the Biltmore. It was very nice. It was during the Machado regime and I think there was a lot of rumbling and dissatisfaction among the people there. John McGraw, the manager of the Giants, had some interests, I think, at the Tropical racetrack, the horse track. And he was very friendly with the people in Cuba at that time, and they asked him to bring two all-star teams to go over there. We were there for two weeks.

We played seven games in all. There were some good players on both teams, and we had some real good games at Tropical Stadium. It was a real big ballpark. I don’t think there was any home runs hit in the whole seven games we played there. It was big. Yeah, I hit a triple in one of the games.

Then we went back again in 1931, with the Brooklyn club. We formed two teams and played. We had a good time. I like Havana.

Are you going to write about this thing? If you do, mention Blanco Herrera. Went out of his way as a host to treat us very nice. He was the owner of the Tropical Brewery. He did everything he could to be nice to the players and the management.

They were very close ballgames! In fact, some of the fans—because we beat them one game and then they came back and beat us the next day—some of the fans were thinking it was prearranged to go that way.

They were fast ball games. They had tremendous crowds. They didn’t have enough capacity in the grandstands, so they roped the field off, on both sides—the left-field side and the right-field side. We didn’t take any Cuban players. They were playing their regular season at Almendares Park.

In a separate interview, Russ Scarritt’s grandson Russ shared what he had heard about the tour. He had heard that Blanco Herrera, who obviously had a real love of baseball, traveled to the States “and handpicked a group of men from different teams. Paid them $1,000 per game. He [grandfather] and his wife and other players and their wives traveled down.” The $1,000 per game figure seems unlikely, but for the seven-game series it may well have been the pay the players received. They traveled by cruise ship and, grandson Russ heard, played every day and partied every night.

The plaque lists 12 names under the Ens name and 15 under Bancroft. Pretty small rosters by today’s standards and, as Al Lopez notes, the rosters were not supplemented by any Cuban players during the tour. The plaque commemorating the 1930 touring American stars is one of four plaques mounted on the walls of La Tropical. One offers a tribute to Don Julio Blanco Herrera, the owner of the La Tropical Brewery who was remembered so fondly by Al Lopez after nearly seven decades. A date—1956—is inscribed on the plaque, the only one of the four with such an inscription.

Another bronze commemorates the 2nd Central American Games, which took place at La Tropical from March 15 to April 5, 1930, only six months before the American baseball squads arrived in Cuba.

The fourth and final plaque commemorates the Second World Baseball Championships, played at La Tropical, August 12-26, 1939. The inscription reads that this was the “Primero en America.” In fact, the first world championship, a competition of amateur teams played from 1938 to 1953, had been hosted by the English and featured only teams from Britain and the United States. In 1939, the host Cubans won the championship, going undefeated in a three-team tournament. Nicaragua split their six games while the Americans went winless!

Because the plaque clearly needed attention, Kit Krieger financed a cleaning and restoration, and was able to return to La Tropical in April 2003 to see that the work had been performed. The four bronzes now gleam and can be easily read by visitors to the historic park. Cubaball has also paid for the cleaning and restoration of two monuments, dated 1942 and 1951, at the Cementario Cristobal Colon. Weathering and neglect had caused many of the inscriptions on the monuments to become nearly illegible.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Cuban friend of Krieger’s has discovered that the artist who designed the plaque commemorating the 1930 series is alive and well on the island. He is Adolfo Gonzales Crespo, now 69. He claims to still have the original molds for the work. On a future visit to Cuba, Krieger hopes to contact Crespo and have a copy made for the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.

There were no strikeouts in the game.

Peter Bjarkman, a student of Cuban baseball, says that La Tropical was built by the Machado government for the 1930 Central American Games (the first staged in Havana and second Central American Games overall.) Roberto Gonzalez Echeverria’s book The Pride of Havana provides further detail. The stadium was built on the Tropical Brewery grounds, and Tropical’s Don Julio Blanco Herrera invited the major leaguers to visit Havana and stimulate interest in Cuba and Cuban baseball.

La Tropical was largely abandoned for baseball after the 1946 opening of Cerro Stadium; it has since been used as a soccer stadium and track field under the name of Pepe Marrero Stadium.

Bjarkman adds, “Tropical was used as a Cuban League park for only 15 years; its greatest glories came as a site for Baseball World Cup (Amateur World Series) matches in 1939, 1940, 1941 and 1942. The most famous game in Cuban baseball history (Conrado Marrero and Cuba losing to Daniel Canonico and Venezuela in the 1941, World Cup finals) was played there. Details of that game are available not only in Echeverria’s book but also in my own Elysian Fields Quarterly story on Marrero.

BILL NOWLIN has written extensively on the Red Sox, most recently Blood Feud (Rounder Books) and is currently Vice President at SABR. KIT KRIEGER pitched three innings for the Pacific Coast League Vancouver Mounties in 1968 and currently operates Cubaball Tours.