Nine thousand 999 days after hitting his first home run in a national series, Frederich Cepeda became the all-time leader in hits in Cuban baseball championships today.
El Gallo Mayor, now playing for the Tigres Avileños as a reinforcement of the Elite League III, fired his 2503rd hit against pitcher César García at the Mártires de Barbados stadium, under the burning sun of the legendary city of Bayamo, in the eastern part of the island.
It was only a matter of time before Cepeda broke the embrace of almost a day with another legend of our baseball, the Tunero Dánel Castro, the only player with 30 national series played, four more than those accumulated by the man who as of Wednesday is the hit man in Cuba.
Cepeda hit his first hit on 16 November 1997 at the José Antonio Huelga Park in his native Sancti Spíritus against left-handed pitching from Matanzas, Ariel Tápanes, according to the archives of statistician Benigno Daquinta.
Since then, his «spurs» in baseball grew and he became one of the best Cuban hitters of all time: exquisite touch, sustained power and discipline at home, merits that led the stellar Major League commentator Ernesto Jerez to say that Cepeda would also have shone in the Big Leagues.
Now, at almost 45 years of age, he remains a virtuoso with the wood, although his name has been erased prematurely from the candidacy for the national team, when he could have been the only Cuban player with all five world classics on his CV.
But Cepeda let that bad ball pass in his career and focused on playing with the same nobility for his public, feeding a legend that surpasses statistics and places him, symbolically, in the middle of a lineup of historic players who make the whole country proud.
Every hit off his bat will be a record and confirmation that baseball, in addition to talent, requires perseverance and love for the sport, virtues that Frederich Cepeda carries in his chest, who many years ago ceased to be the exclusive patrimony of Santi Spíritus to ascend to the baseball Olympus as the Gallo Mayor de Cuba (Cuba’s Greatest Rooster).
