As a young man before the Cuban revolution, Fidel Castro tried out for the New York Yankees, almost making the team.
I believed this! Until I read the debunking on NPR, I thought this was true. Something in the same vein as Hitler having been rejected from art school. An “if only” sort of feeling washes over you as you contemplate the way the world would have gone had Hitler been accepted, or if Castro had made the team.
But it’s not true. Adrian Burgos Jr., University of Illinois history professor and author of Playing America’s Game: Baseball, Latinos and the Color Line, says it simply didn’t happen. One way he knows that is because the Yankees didn’t scout in Latin America until the 1960s and the Cuban Revolution began in 1953 and ended in early 1959.
“He didn’t try out for the Yankees,” Burgos tells NPR’s David Greene. It’s possible…
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