PUERTO PLATA, DOMINICAN REPUBLIC—It’s time once again to leave football-obsessed North America for warmer climes, someplace where baseball is king year-round. The northlands may have those major leagues and their multimillion-dollar contracts, but for this week, the capital of hardball is the city of Santiago, in the center of the Dominican Republic, where the Caribbean Series (as we’ve said before, leave the world out of it!) is being played to determine the champion of champions among the Hispanic American winter leagues.
The last time we did this, the very first game of the series was a barn-burner: an 18-inning epic between the champion Cibao Eagles and Venezuela’s representative, the Aragua Tigers. This year, Cibao and Aragua are back in the series representing the Dominican Republic and Venezuela, respectively. The Mexican representatives, the Obregon Yaquis, won their first Mexican Pacific League title in 27 years to get their shot at the Caribbean crown. Missing from the picture are last year’s hosts, the Puerto Ricans. As we discussed back in August, the Puerto Rican winter league didn’t hold its season this winter, an obvious setback after 69 continuous years in operation. Although at least seven Puerto Rican players will make the trip to Santiago, they’ll be playing for the Mexican and Venezuelan squads, not under their own flag.
Under the Caribbean Series’ rules of operation, that means the host country gets a second team in the tourney, so Cibao’s arch-rivals and Dominican League runners-up, the Licey Tigers, become “Dominican Team #2″ in the Series. To use a convenient cliché, these two teams are the Red Sox and the Yankees of the Dominican Republic. The Eagles are under pressure to win because they’re playing in their home stadium, and because they trail the Tigers in Caribbean Series titles won, five championships to nine. Licey’s under pressure because it’s their 100th-anniversary season, and because they’re out to avenge a bitter loss to Cibao in the final series—a loss in which the Eagles surpassed them for the most Dominican League titles won, by taking their twentieth crown.
Dominicans, rather baseball-crazy to begin with, now have a rooting interest in 10 of the 12 games we’ll see this week. As in previous years, the Caribbean Series is a round-robin tournament in which each of the four teams plays the other three teams twice. Two games—on Monday and Thursday night—will continue the inter-Dominican grudge match we saw in January. Meanwhile, the two other teams will hope to find their Dominican rivals distracted by their rivalry and limited by having to divide the Dominican Republic’s pool of reinforcements (additional players each team selects off the rosters of other teams in their league) two ways, rather than simply cherry-picking the best talents for a single national team.
I’ll be reporting on the action from the tournament, both on the main page and here on Unfiltered. The games are daily double-headers, with the first game starting at 3:00 PM Eastern, and the second game scheduled to start at 8:00. All the games are being broadcast on ESPN Deportes, and you can follow the action pitch-by-pitch using MLB.com’s Gameday service. The projected pitching matchups for the series are:
Day One, Saturday February 2nd
Dominican Team #2 – Jose Mercedes (RHP)
vs.
Venezuela – Jose Santiago (RHP)
Mexico – Nelson Figueroa (RHP)
vs.
Dominican Team #1 – Alfredo Simon Cabrera (RHP)
Day Two, Sunday February 3rd
Dominican Team #2 – Ramon Ortiz (RHP)
vs.
Mexico – Justin Lehr (RHP)
Dominican Team #1 – Derek Lee (LHP)
vs.
Venezuela – Andrew Lorraine (LHP)
Day Three, Monday February 4th
Venezuela – Giovanni Carrara (RHP)
vs.
Mexico – Dan Serafini (LHP)
Dominican Team #1 – Fabio Castro (LHP)
vs.
Dominican Team #2 – Omar Beltre (RHP)
Day Four, Tuesday February 5th
Venezuela – Willie Collazo (LHP)
vs.
Dominican Team #2 – Francisco Rosario (RHP)
Dominican Team #1 – Joselo Diaz (RHP)
vs.
Mexico – Alberto Castillo-Betancourt (LHP)
Day Five, Wednesday February 6th
Mexico – Andres Meza (RHP)
vs.
Dominican Team #2 – Jose Capellan (RHP*)
[* We have a curious case of the two Jose Capellans, here. One’s a 21-year-old lefty, the other’s a 27-year-old right-hander who’s been up and down to the majors, most recently with the Tigers, and both of them played in the Dominican League this winter. It’d be pretty hard to mix these two up on sight—the elder Jose has two inches of height and 65 listed pounds on the young southpaw Jose—but I haven’t yet had a chance to find out which one’s pitching in the Series. Since whichever one of the Capellans has joined Licey as a reinforcement, there’s no obvious way to tell who it is until I give him a good look-over, or until I get a better press guide.]
Venezuela – Rosman Garcia (RHP)
Vs.
Dominican Team #1 – Bartolo Colon (RHP)
Day Six, Thursday February 7th
Mexico – Nelson Figueroa (RHP)
Vs.
Venezuela – Jose Santiago (RHP)
Dominican Team #2 – Jose Mercedes (RHP)
Vs.
Dominican Team #1 – Alfredo Simon Cabrera (RHP)
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