Cuban baseball legend Michel Rodriguez finds a second home, career in Spain

In 1996, Michel Rodriguez had to make the decision of a lifetime.

The 18-year-old infielder for Cuba’s junior national team had a choice: Should he sneak out of his team’s hotel in the Boston area in search of fame and fortune in professional baseball in the United States?

Or should he return to Cuba out of deference to his family, fear of repercussions in his native land and concern that a foreign society might be too much for a teenager to handle?

He opted to return to Cuba and continue his life as it was.

He called it “the worst mistake of my life.”

But after decades of frustration in his home country, Rodriguez, 46, is enjoying a new life in the top tier of baseball in Spain, where the sport has been played for 120 years.

Defections by Cuban baseball players were still rare when Rodriguez faced his decision.

Though it is unlikely he would have reached their stature, the lives of two of the most famous siblings to leave Cuba show what could have happened if Rodriguez had made a different choice.

Shortly before Rodriguez decided to return to Cuba, Livan Hernandez had become one of the earliest players in a wave of Cubans to roll the dice for the chance at big-league riches when he walked away from the national team in Monterrey, Mexico, carrying only a single bag and a head full of dreams.

Defecting from the national team was an extremely risky move that led Hernandez to the pinnacle of professional baseball — 17 years in the major leagues, including almost four seasons with the Marlins, a World Series MVP award in Miami in 1997 and more than $50 million in earnings.

But the good times didn’t last.

He had a hard time adjusting to life in the United States. His weight ballooned after he discovered fast food, he squandered his money and in 2017, two decades after leading the Marlins to a championship, he declared bankruptcy.

There was also collateral damage.

Hernandez’s half brother Orlando, a Cuban league superstar, was suspected of planning to follow in Livan’s footsteps. He faced increasing discipline that culminated in his being banned from the Cuban league.

He eventually took a dangerous and circuitous route that led him to the major leagues, where he was an important part of the New York Yankees championship teams of 1998, 1999 and 2000.

Rodriguez, meanwhile, surrounded by family and in a society that was familiar, but to him less than ideal, thrived in the top Cuban league, then considered the best in the Caribbean.

He played 19 years, compiling a .307 lifetime average.

“He is a tough, clutch, everyday hitter who hits to all fields,” said Cuban journalist Ivan Garcia Quintero, who followed Rodriguez’s career in Cuba that lasted to 2014 and still keeps tabs on him. “He was and is a special hitter.”

Despite his offensive prowess, Rodriguez was never selected for international competition or asked to play in postseason tournaments.

He is convinced his opposition to the Cuban government and friendship with former player Julio Estrada, who was convicted in Miami in 2017 of smuggling Cuban players to the United States, landed him on a government blacklist.

Rodriguez said he and Estrada were friends from their days as teenage baseball players who had lost touch but reunited briefly by chance in the early 2000s. They bumped into each other, shared a beer, then again went their separate ways, Rodriguez said.

While being overlooked for international play, Rodriguez at first thought it was because of shortcomings in his game. Later he concluded that his friendship with Estrada was at least part of his problem.

In 2014, at age 36, Rodriguez decided he had no future in Cuba and moved to the Dominican Republic, where he coached at private baseball academies.

It was there that he got a visit from Cuban security forces asking if he was helping Estrada sneak players to the United States.

He denies involvement in Estrada’s business, which was responsible for helping former American League MVP Jose Abreu, San Francisco Giants DH Jorge Soler, who played for the Marlins in 2022-23, and others reach the majors.

Rodriguez was forced to return to Cuba in 2015, when, he said, the government evicted his wife and two daughters because he was not living in the family home.

He was not allowed to play, or even get a job, after he got back.

During an interview through an interpreter at the municipal baseball diamond in Valencia, where he plays first base for the Valencia Astros in Spain’s top division, he recalls telling his interrogators in the Dominican Republic, “You ruined my career all on a hunch. You didn’t have any evidence.”

After two years in limbo, in an effort to return to the game he loved, Rodriguez contacted a fellow Cuban who was coaching for Valencia, one of Spain’s elite teams. The effort paid off.

Baseball arrived in Spain early in the 20th century, brought by Caribbeans returning to their ancestral homeland in the wake of the Spanish-American War. The sport’s governing body in Spain was born in 1944. Because of its language and hertitage, Spain served as Latin American players’ gateway to Europe, leading to Spain’s baseball heyday in the middle of that century.

“That’s because baseball in the rest of Europe sucked” at that time, said Juan Garcia, the longtime head coach of the Astros, a Spaniard who grew up in Massachusetts and New Jersey. “It’s much better now than it was.”

An influx of interest and money in other countries, particularly Italy and the Netherlands, propelled those nations ahead of Spain later in the century. But since the mid-1980s, the quality of play has improved steadily in Spain. Whereas fastballs for top pitchers in the league went about 85 mph in the 1990s, most teams now have at least one pitcher who can reach the mid-90s. And rosters are dotted with many more foreign-born players with MLB-affiliated baseball experience than a generation ago.

Garcia and players who played professionally in the United States liken the quality of play to that of lower-level professional baseball, such as rookie ball or Class A.

“There are some talented players in the league,” Astros left fielder Tanner Donnels said. He was born in Houston where his father, Chris, played for those Astros. The younger Donnels played briefly in the minors before continuing his career in Europe.

Rodriguez, who is listed at 5-foot-9 and just 168 pounds, arrived in Valencia in 2017 and immediately started delivering eye-popping statistics.

“A 40-year-old rookie and the best player in the league, by far,” Garcia said.

That first year, Rodriguez won the triple crown, hitting .440 with 11 home runs and 48 RBI during the Astros’ 30-game schedule (that would project to more than 50 homers and 200 RBI over a full major-league season).

Since then, he has twice hit .500 or better. His poorest statistical year was 2022, when he hit .370.

He’s off to a slow start this year. His hair speckled with gray in his mid-40s, Rodriguez isn’t sure how much longer he will play, but he knows he will stay in Spain.

He was granted political asylum by the Spanish government and was able to bring his family to live with him after five years of separation.

He misses playing for a living full-time, supplementing his Astros stipend with a job for a snack and beverage distributor. And, while Cuban games were played in front of thousands of raucous fans, attendance at Astros games is usually in double digits.

Despite the much dimmer spotlight, Rodriguez says his quality of life in Spain is “by far superior to that in Cuba.”

“Spain gave me a new opportunity at life,” he said. “What’s important is that my daughters will get a good education and, hopefully, have more opportunities than I had in Cuba.”