Cuba Dugout covers baseball in Cuba — the Serie Nacional and Liga Élite, the national team, and the Cuban players who go on to play abroad. It combines original reporting and photography with reference pages built for people who want the record straight.
Who is behind it
Phil Selig is a photographer and film maker who has been travelling to Cuba for over a decade, shooting the domestic leagues from inside the dugouts and the stands. His film “Have Malleta Will Travel” was exhibited at the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, and screened at the 2017 Cooperstown Film Festival. His photograph archive — several hundred frames of Cuban ballparks, players and crowds — is the backbone of this site, and almost none of it exists anywhere else.
Why the site exists
Cuban baseball is badly served in English. Rosters and results are scattered across Spanish-language sources, state media and statistical portals, much of it inconsistent and none of it written for an English-speaking reader. Cuba Dugout tries to close that gap: to explain how the leagues actually work, to track the players who leave for MLB, Japan and Mexico, and to keep a usable record of a competition most reference sites cover thinly or not at all.
How we work
- Photographs are documentary. The images here are Phil’s own, taken in Cuba. They are cropped and colour-corrected, never generated or altered to add or remove content.
- Sources are named. Where a figure comes from a Cuban source, a statistical database or a wire report, we say so — including when those sources disagree with each other.
- Disagreements are shown, not smoothed. Cuban baseball records are frequently contested. Where a date, a spelling or a statistic is disputed, we say that rather than picking one silently.
- Mistakes get fixed. If something here is wrong, tell us and we will correct it. Corrections are credited on request.
Independence
Cuba Dugout is independent. It is not affiliated with INDER, the Federación Cubana de Béisbol, Major League Baseball, or any club. The site carries advertising, which is what keeps it free to read; advertisements are selected by Google and are not endorsements.
Get in touch
For corrections, use the correction form. For anything else — licensing a photograph, a research question, or an interview request — email [email protected].