Nine years later, Linares was a veteran, as was longtime cleanup hitter Orestes Kindelan. The move to wood bats had stolen a lot of the Cuban thunder. They had to cope with the inside fastball like everybody else and their bats were inferior. Smuggling decent America wood into Cuba had become a cottage industry.
So, on Sept. 27, 2000, in a makeshift ballpark on the edge of the vast Olympic complex, Lasorda's prediction came true. A young righthander from the Milwaukee farm system named Ben Sheets shut out the curiously detached Cuban veterans, who failed to win an international tournament for the first time since Castro decided he would rule the amateur baseball world.
Earlier in the Olympic tournament, Lasorda told me, "Ben Sheets is going to be a big-league pitcher, but the kid with the best arm on the team is this Roy Oswalt kid. He won't pitch much because he lacks experience. But he's a tough little [bleep] with big-time velocity. He can really rush it up."
Most of the players from that unique gold-medal collection of Triple A veterans and Double A prospects made it to the majors. A handful are still in the Show.
Sheets and Oswalt appear to be on the front burner as Phillies general manager Ruben Amaro tries to cook up a trade-deadline stew, tries to turn this pumpkin of a team back into a gleaming carriage to lead a World Series parade.
There are other names being regurgitated by the tireless rumor mill, of course. All are well-compensated starters who are having less-than-stellar seasons for teams whose poor records have turned them into sellers with a need to jettison payroll.
Teams dumping salary don't want to take salary on, or to rent an impending free agent looking to score a megadeal.
