A World League of Champions Clubs: this is the latest project of the World Baseball Softball Confederation, and the plan is for it to start operating in 2023.
The new competition would have a format similar to that of the European soccer Champions League and a promotional tournament would be organized in 2022.
“The WBSC is working for baseball to go global and not just at the national team level. We want to do something similar to what happens in football,” said the president of the international federation, the Italian Riccardo Fraccari.
Fraccari made this announcement on his recent four-day trip to Havana, Cuba.
Details about the format of the competition and whether it could attract clubs from the American Major Leagues and other professional leagues such as those in Japan, South Korea and Chinese Taipei are still unknown.
The best-known international baseball tournament at the club level in the Americas is the traditional Caribbean Series, founded seven decades ago by the Caribbean Professional Baseball Confederation. The organizers of this event have not yet commented on the WBSC initiative.
The Caribbean Series annually faces the champions of the winter tournaments of Mexico, Puerto Rico, Venezuela and the Dominican Republic, plus two occasional or permanent guests.
At this time, Colombia and Panama appear with that last status, after the exclusion of Cuba at the beginning of 2020 due to bitter discrepancies with the president of the CBPC, the Dominican Juan Francisco Puello.
Fraccari arrived in Havana to attend the commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the National Series established in 1962, after Fidel Castro decreed the elimination of professionalism. However, its main purpose was to reactivate projects and agreements with the State Sports Institute (Inder) and the Cuban Federation, some of them designed before the scourge of the global pandemic.
Cuba received this delegation from the WBSC after a fateful season marked by its historical elimination from the Tokyo Olympic tournament, a record number of desertions in international tournaments, and a constant escape from the island, through a safe and legal migration, of teen and youth players with an eye on the US sports system.
The alleged contracts with their respective clauses, promoted more than a decade ago by the sports authorities to be signed between the athletes of the different categories with the high-performance entities within Cuba, have become a dead letter, according to the events. current.
Last September 12 players left the Cuban team during the WBSC Under 23 World Championship in Ciudad Obregón, Mexico. This stampede had never been recorded before. According to undesirable statistics in the Cuban sports scene, this massive escape in a tournament equaled the “record” of 12 Cuban soccer players in a Concacaf under 20 tournament, in Tampa, Florida, in November 2018.
Although at the time the WBSC did not allude to the negative event, now Fraccari brought it to his agenda in Havana.
“We analyzed what happened in the U-23 World Cup where half the team stayed. We spoke with the Inder management to increase the number of players in professional leagues so that they can later return to represent the country”
On this occasion, the Cuban interlocutors were different, since in October 2019, on his previous visit, Fraccari was attended by the president of the Cuban Federation, Higinio Vélez, and the national commissioner, Ernesto Reynoso, both of whom died of Covid-19 in 2021.
At that time Fraccari had signed an agreement with Cuba for the WBSC to be the “international agent” mediating the hiring of players and coaches from the island in clubs from other professional leagues in the world, with the exception of Major League Baseball in U.S
Even at the end of 2019, Around The Rings learned that the WBSC had managed the insertion of some Cuban players in the Mexican professional league.
“Now, Fraccari said before leaving Havana, we have the conditions and the perspective to change some things. Cuban baseball deserves to return to the top of the international scene. It won’t be a one day thing, but I see conditions, will and budget to act with a detailed strategy”.
Asked about how to deal with the endless departure of players from Cuba, Fraccari said that “it is a difficult issue” and insisted on the possibilities for the players to carry out their tasks in Cuba and play in leagues in other countries.
Fraccari alluded to these routes in the face of the interruption by the United States government of the agreement between the MLB and the Cuban Federation signed in December 2018 and canceled in April 2019.
The Italian director referred to “a legal plan” for the representation and protection of athletes through the WBSC, for which, he said, joint work is lacking, but there is the disposition of several leagues, something already discussed two years ago.
Fraccari defended his proposal to return to the Olympic program in Los Angeles 2028, to play the games in seven innings, which would reduce the number of participants and the duration of the games. This format was already tested at the Women’s World Cup in Viera, Florida, in the summer of 2018 and in other events of lower categories.
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