The Cuban baseball team is one powerful magnet. It has attracted scouts from across Major League Baseball to the World Baseball Challenge.
One of those talent-seekers is Tim Hallgren, who is in Prince George on behalf of the Detroit Tigers. Hallgren, from Cape Girardeau, Missouri, is here primarily to watch the Cubans, who are favoured to win the six-team tournament being played at Citizen Field.
"We didn't really have a guy to come up here to see the Cubans play," Hallgren said. "They [the Tigers] asked me if I could do it and I said, 'Yeah, I can do it.' They want to have reports on file just in case, in the future, Cuba does open up to signing free agents. Or sometimes you get defectors. We want to make sure we have scouting reports on the Cubans so in case we do want to try to sign them, we do have reports."
As a communist country, Cuba does everything it can to keep its players playing on home soil. However, since 1980, it is estimated that close to 200 Cuban baseball stars have defected. One of the most high-profile defectors is pitcher Jose Contreras, who made his exit from Cuba during the 2002 Americas Cup in Mexico. He signed a four-year, $32 million contract with the New York Yankees. Contreras spent two seasons with the Yankees, moved on to play for the Chicago White Sox and Colorado Rockies and now throws for the Philadelphia Phillies.
Hallgren said opportunities to see top-level Cuban teams play are rare. In fact, when he watched Cuba beat Toshiba Japan 4-3 on Saturday night at Citizen Field, it marked a milestone moment in his 26-year career.
"Being mostly on the draft side of the scouting, I'd never seen them in person," said Hallgren, a first-year member of the Tigers organization after 17 years with the Texas Rangers and eight with the Los Angeles Dodgers. "It's tough, because you're not allowed to go to Cuba to scout Cubans -- they don't let you do that so you've got to catch Cuba when they're over in another country in a world tournament or whatever and basically that's what we try to do."
Hallgren will be in Prince George until Thursday. He'll return home for a few days and then head north again, this time with Alaska as his destination.
Other major league teams that have scouts present at the WBC are the Yankees, Phillies, Seattle Mariners, Milwaukee Brewers, Kansas City Royals and San Francisco Giants. The Toronto Blue Jays, one of the title sponsors of the tournament, will have eyes here this week.
