Dr. Whacko's Guide 
to Slow-Pitch Softball 
by Bruce Brown
Collier Books 1991

FOR ME, DR. WHACKO'S GUIDE has been like firewood that leaves the proverbial woodcutter twice warmed.

It was a whole lot of fun to "research" and write, and it's been a continuing source of pleasure to hear from people all over the world who say that Dr. Whacko has improved their game, and made them laugh.

The following chapter, set in Havana, is typical of the way Dr. Whacko's Guide uses a good yarn to illustrate a useful softball tip. In fact, each chapter of this comic novel cum how-to is followed by a set of related slow-pitch softball tips.

The Tip at the heart of Chapter One -- Hitting the slow-pitch strike -- is worth the price of admission all by itself. The ball can look as big as a grapefuit as it comes floating down toward the plate in slow-pitch softball, but if you don't know where to stand in the batter's box so you can actually hit the slow-pitch strike, you're out before you ever swing.

Click here for Chapter Eleven, Chapter Five, and the fabled Lost Chapter.

THE BIG BLACK Soviet limousine rolled heavily in the turns as we sped through Havana in the early evening. Riding in the back seat, I flopped from side to side between my two bulky companions.

They were both dressed in slacks and pale pastel guayabera shirts with tiny pleats and pearl buttons. One was clean-shaven and cradled a trim leather attache, while the other was mustachioed and smoked an unfiltered cigarette.

"A little early sliding practice?" I asked as we bumped together for the dozenth time. The man with the attache translated my comment into idiomatic Spanish, even though I knew the other man spoke excellent, softly inflected English.

"We don't want to be late," the man with the moustache replied with a slight smile. Then he added something else in Spanish to the driver, who nodded and steered us off the large downtown boulevards into the older workingclass residential areas on the east side of the city.

Driving with the windows open, I could smell a pungent mix of hibiscus and fried palm oil. The traffic thinned, but we were stopped twice by young boys playing baseball in the street who would not let the car pass until they were through.

It was nearly 7:30 P.M. when we arrived at a ball field set in the midst of a colorful jumble of somewhat seedy houses. We parked behind the grandstand, which was built of concrete and brick and looked solid enough to withstand a direct rocket attack. After the man with the moustache, whose name was Barbaro, had removed a khaki duffel from the trunk of the big black car, we went into the bowels of the stadium.

There we were shown into a dressing room. I took off my tourist togs and donned an all-new softball uniform, with Cuban manufactured jersey, pants, stirrup socks, and even spikes and gloves, all straight out of the box. Each bore the insignia of the Cuban sports equipment concern Batos, which takes its name from the ball and stick game played by Cuban Indians when the first Spanish explorers encountered them in the fifteenth century. My uniform pants were dark blue with a thin red and blue stripe up the side, while both my socks and shirt were red. Emblazoned across the chest in blue was the word Desporte, Spanish for sport.

I took an extra long look at myself in the mirror before going down the runway to the field because it was all a little hard to believe. For the previous two weeks I had been travelling in Nicaragua on the Baseballs Not Bombs program. We were giving away American baseball equipment in an effort to foster international goodwill through love of baseball. During my group's two weeks in Nicaragua, we visited dozens of towns and played a little pelota ourselves in several of them. Now I was trying to figure out who in Nicaragua had set me up for this little Cuban detour.

My flight home was booked ahead of time on an Air Canada flight to Vancouver, B.C., which made a stop in Havana. Soon after we touched down at Jose Marti International Airport, some of us were asked to show our passports. I was the only United States citizen on the flight, and the one they seemed interested in. When the Cuban inspector saw my American passport with the proudly embossed eagle, he asked me to get my carry-on baggage and accompany him. I protested that I was just a tourist. I may have even said something about my mother worrying if I got home late.

It didn't do any good. Two more uniformed Cuban officers poked their heads through the doorway of the plane, and there was some murmuring among the flight crew forward. We all sat there for another ten minutes or so until it became apparent that nobody was going to move unless I did. So I finally got up and followed the officers out of the plane. Walking across the hot, steaming tarmac in the early Havana evening, I was struck by the airport's bustling international mix of aircraft and airlines. The impression was a brief one, though, for I was quickly ushered into a first-floor interrogation room.

There I found myself face to face with a tall, mustachioed man with an easy air of authority. He said he believed he knew something about me, adding, "I want to warn you -- we view this as a very serious matter." Then he cracked a smile and asked, "Would you like to play a little softball?" I replied that I'd love to, but added regretfully that I had no equipment with me, not even a pair of tennis shoes. "No hay problema," Barbaro said.

"We want to see for ourselves this crazy physician of the baseball."

Four hours later, I found myself playing second base for the Ministry of Sport. Most of my teammates worked for the Ministry of Sport, and their locker-room banter about the job and various personalities from the office was immediately recognizable to anyone who has played on a company softball team in the U.S. In fact, the whole scene reminded me of the urban recreational leagues in America, with the exception that the Cuban facilities were better. Few American public park facilities provide dressing rooms, and many do not have dugouts.

Warming up on the sidelines before the game, I was surprised to see that the covered grandstand was over half full. Fifteen minutes before the game there were already several hundred men, women, and children lounging in the shade and jabbering between sips of colas and coffees. It was here that I first glimpsed our opponents stretching on the other side of the field. They wore midnight blue uniforms with the word Propaganda in yellow on their shirts. When I asked Barbaro what that meant, he replied that the other team represented the Ministry of Propaganda. "The Ministry of Sport against the Ministry of Propaganda. It is a moral contest, no?"

Replying that virtue was clearly on our side, I inquired about the other team's personnel. "They have a good quick infield, and a decent outfield," Barbaro said as we tossed a ball back and forth on the sidelines. "One guy, their regular right fielder, played baseball for the Havana team in the Series Nacional. He's left-handed, and a dead-pull hitter. The best player on their team is the pitcher, though. He is that fellow over there, the paunchy one.

His name is Raoul, and he has been at the game for a long time. When he was sixteen he ran away from home to join Che Guevara's column. During the fighting for Santiago de Cuba, he is said to have once lobbed a grenade into the open turret hatch of a tank. Now he just tosses softballs, but he is still feared by his opponents."

Studying him from the dugout during the top half of the first inning, I could see that Raoul had an unusual perhaps even eccentric-style. Before each pitch, he held the ball up for the batter to inspect, as if it were some sort of a holy orb or object of profound reverence. I didn't detect anything particularly impressive about his stuff, except that our half of the inning was over before Barbaro could get his cigarette lit. It took Raoul a grand total of five pitches to retire the side, and although one ball was hit pretty hard, the right fielder was there to make an easy catch.

I faced him for the first time in the third, with one on and one out. While I dug myself a place in the batter's box, he took the throw from his shortstop, walked off to the side of the mound with his back to me, and then turned and toed the rubber. His expression as he gazed in at me was mild and almost friendly as he held up the ball for me to inspect. It was as if he was saying, "See, here it is. Hit it if you can." I thought to myself, "Thank you very much," and I lashed an outside pitch hard on a line -- straight into the hands of the second baseman.

Back out on the field, I pondered the international differences in the game. Cuban slow-pitch allows the pitcher a great deal more latitude in terms of his motion and the speed of the pitch. He can break rhythm -- a la Satchel Paige's "hesitation pitch" -- as well as throw faster, relatively flat pitches that would not be allowed in the United States. The effect is still the same -- it's still impossible for the pitcher to overwhelm the batter -- but there is room for more cunning. Compared to the many varieties of American slow-pitch, the Cuban game is closer to United States Slow-Pitch Softball Association rules than the more widespread Amateur Softball Association rules.

That evening in Havana, the Ministry of Propaganda scored three more runs to take a five-run lead under darkening skies. It had been hot and sunny less than two hours before, but now the late afternoon filled with broken clouds which sent dramatic shafts of sunlight plunging to the surface of Havana Bay and the golden green water of the Caribbean beyond. By game time the clouds began to thicken overhead, promising rain. The big banks of lights were turned on at the ball field in the fifth inning, and soon silent lightning flickered in the clouds. Before the end of the inning, the first drops began to fall, buzzing in the red clay dust like flies in a spider's web. The rain increased until it raised a din on the metal roof of the grandstand, and then passed as quickly as it had come.

The air had a clean, cool feeling of home when I came up again in the fifth inning. The two batters before me had singled, showing that Raoul could be reached. They stood on first and second as I watched the pitcher go through his ritual. I felt relaxed and confident enough to look for a particular pitch. Since I had gone the opposite way the first time up, I thought he might try to pitch me inside. I decided I'd look for an inside pitch to pull. The first pitch fell over the inside corner of the plate. It would have been a strike, but I drilled a long line drive that the left fielder took on the run at the fence along the foul line. A lot of times a hit like that would go for extra bases, but not this time.

1 got my only fielding opportunity the next inning -- a grounder to my right -- and handled it flawlessly. Otherwise, however, things did not go well. The flashy right fielder for the Ministry of Propaganda belted a huge two-run homer, and they went on to win by a score of 7-2. Showering in the dressing room afterward, Barbaro did not seem deeply saddened by the outcome, though. "Another victory for propaganda," he commented matter-of-factly as we hurried to get out of the way for the team playing the next game.

Back at the car, we found the driver listening to a Miami radio station on the Soviet-made radio, but he quickly turned it off and got out to open the trunk for Barbaro's duffel. This time Barbaro and I rode alone in the back, for the translator had been excused for the rest of the evening.

"You are hitting the ball well," he said as the car pulled away.

"Not well enough," I replied.

Barbaro paused as we passed a Fiat on the left. "The key to hitting Raoul," Barbara continued, "is understanding what he is doing with his windup."

"You mean that silly bit where he holds up the ball?"

"No, that is just show. The thing you have to watch is what he does before. You see how he always walks to the rubber from one side of the mound or the other. The direction he comes to the rubber from is a signal to the rest of his team. That's how he tells them whether the next pitch is going to be inside or outside.

"The defense behind him always knows where the pitch is going to be, and so where the ball is likely to be hit. The fielders are careful not to move too soon and give it away. But you'll see that they are in motion as the pitch leaves his hand."

"Well, what's the point of holding the ball up like some sort of grail?"

"Have you ever studied magic?"

"Lo siento?" I said, beginning to feel a little strange.

Barbaro continued, "I'm not talking about witchcraft, but illusionism. The magician always presents something obvious for popular scrutiny, but actually the real business takes place elsewhere, while people's attention is distracted." Barbaro looked at me out of the corner of his eye and blew a lazy cloud of smoke, adding, "There are also several obvious analogies to U.S. foreign policy."

At that moment we vaulted over an unlit railroad track, and I was flung into his lap.

"Dr. Whacko's Guide to Slow-Pitch Softball" © Copyright 1991 Bruce Brown
Original jacket cover illustration by Tim Curry.

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NOTE: If you enjoyed this story of softball in Havana, you might also enjoy Bruce Brown's classic portrait of Cuban baseball from the Atlantic Monthly...