Delivering A Strong Pitch

Baseball has rarely seen anything like the seven-city Hernandez-Fernandez negotiation tour in December or the frantic bargaining at the Hotel Plaza Naco in Santo Domingo in January. The New York Yankees offered Hernandez $500,000 more than Florida did, and when Hernandez chose Miami because of its Cuban flavor, Yankees owner George Steinbrenner lit into one of his negotiators with a profanity-laced tirade. The Blue Jays blew up at Cubas after finding they had lost out on both players, and Cubas vowed never to deal with Toronto owner Paul Beeston again.

To the Marlins, Hernandez's talent and heritage made him worth almost any effort to land him. Florida suffered a massive attendance drop in 1995, from 3,064,847 in '93 to 1,700,466 last year, and in its four years of existence it has yet to win a devoted following among South Florida's hundreds of thousands of Cuban fans. "We needed to sign him," Dombrowski says. "We get to the 1998 All-Star Game, and he's pitching and he's not a Florida Marlin? And we could've signed him? I didn't want to answer that question."

On Dec. 7, El Duque talked to Livan for the first time since he defected. They spoke by phone of baseball and family and things, and as the time flew too quickly, El Duque sensed something else happening. Again and again Livan told him to expect a package. "I'm going to help you," he kept promising, and in those words Orlando felt a fundamental shift in his relationship with his brother. "Now he is the big guy, and I'm happy," El Duque says. "He sent me two pairs of training shoes so my feet, my [sore] toes, don't bother me." He laughs. "They're the best pair of training shoes I ever got in my life."

El Duque gets up, slides a cassette into his tape deck. He pushes PLAY, and the room is filled with the sounds of a fuzzy radio broadcast, crackling in and out, of Livan's first interview after his defection. Livan is saying that he needs a new challenge. Orlando nods. "He's ready," Orlando says. "He is ready to pitch in the major leagues." The tape goes blank and Livan's voice is gone, replaced by silence. El Duque looks up, eyes shining. "It was a short interview," he says.