HAVANA, Cuba — Yasiel Puig, Jose Abreu and other Cuban baseball players arriving in the major leagues in recent years all come from the same pipeline: state-run academies that produce hundreds of players in the baseball-mad island.
While major league teams have academies where they groom their own prospects in other talent-rich Latin American countries like the Dominican Republic and Venezuela, players in Cuba are hand-picked by the government in elementary school and developed to feed its national team and dozens of national and regional leagues.
"I started when I was 6," said Yasmany Tomas, a slugger who fled Cuba in 2014 and signed a $68.