www.baseballamerica.com/international/136554/SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic—Hector Olivera knows the questions are coming.
He knows, because for a five-year stretch, Olivera was a star in Cuba. At home, he dominated Serie Nacional, Cuba’s top league. He was a standout on the Cuban national team during international tournaments, including the 2008 Olympics and 2009 World Baseball Classic. At the 2010 Intercontinental Cup in Puerto Rico, where he was teammates with current big leaguers Jose Abreu and Yoenis Cespedes, as well as current Cuban stars Yulieski Gourriel and Alfredo Despaigne, it was Olivera who earned the tournament MVP trophy.
Wherever he played, Olivera grabbed the attention of major league scouts. He was a righthanded-hitting second baseman who had size, speed, good power for a middle infielder and advanced strike-zone discipline, and he routinely barreled balls up to all fields with plus bat speed. The scouting and the analytics translating his Serie Nacional performance in Cuba all pointed to an above-average big leaguer.
“I liked Hector Olivera a lot,” one longtime scout says now. “When I saw him, he was one of the better players. He was big, athletic and he could hit. He was an average power guy who could steal 20 to 25 bases and play every day in the middle of the field. I had a really big grade on him.”
But Olivera knows that teams don’t want to talk to him about what it was like to be a star in Cuba. They want to know why, in his mid-20s, Olivera missed the end of the 2011-12 season, sat out the entire 2012-13 season and didn’t play in any international tournaments during that stretch. And why, when he finally returned to Serie Nacional last season for the 2013-14 campaign, did he play just 29 games of the 90-game season at second base and spend most of his time at DH?
“Everybody asks,” Olivera said in Spanish. “It’s the same things they ask.”
The word for years had been that Olivera, 29, was sidelined due to a blood disorder in his left biceps. Through his recent play on the field during the tryout process, both at his open showcase games and private workouts, Olivera has answered questions about his present ability and conditioning level after scouts had gone years without seeing him in person. Yet the uncertainty about his medical past and how it could shape his baseball future is what has even highly interested teams feeling uneasy, especially with a big price tag.
“We like him,” says another veteran scout. “How could we not like him? I certainly respect his numbers and his ability, but he’s (almost) 30 years old, with a history of health problems and no national team exposure in recent years. We like him, we just have a lot of questions. I think the biggest question is, what’s wrong with him, and how serious is it? Nobody really knows. People can say they know, but they don’t. They can speculate, but nobody knows for sure.”
Blood ProblemsOlivera’s run as an elite performer in Serie Nacional started with a breakthrough 2007-08 campaign for Santiago De Cuba. As a 22-year-old, he batted .353/.467/.542 with 10 home runs, 55 walks, 28 strikeouts and 21 stolen bases in 22 attempts that season.
By the 2011-12 season, Olivera already had established himself as a star on the international stage and a premium prospect in the eyes of major league scouts. He was 26 years old, having the best season of his career. There were two months left in the 2011-12 season, but Olivera had already set a personal single-season high with 17 home runs. His OBP and slugging were the best marks of his career, with a .341/.462/.626 slash line in 60 games.
In a game at Isla de la Juventud on March 3, 2012, Olivera hit third in the lineup, went 2-for-4 and played second base. It ended up being the last game Olivera played not only that season, but the last game he would play for a year and eight months.
“My arm was heavy and it got swollen,” Olivera says. “When they did an ultrasound, they noticed I had a blood clot in my left biceps. The arm felt different. It just felt heavy and it was swollen.
“The doctors told me I would have to take three months off at least, and then I could come back. When it happened, it was almost toward the end of the season, so I took the end of the year off.”
The doctors gave Olivera blood thinners. They told him he couldn’t play while he was taking the medication, so Olivera missed the last two months of the 2011-12 season. Olivera thought he would be able to return for the 2012-13 season. Instead, the doctors told him they wanted him to stay on the blood thinners for a full year, causing him to miss the entire 2012-13 campaign. No games, no practice, nothing. Olivera just spent time resting at his house and hanging out with his family.
“It was very hard,” Olivera said. “I felt like I was becoming a complete player. I only needed two home runs to get to 100 (career home runs) and 36 hits to get to 1,000 that year, which I thought I was going to do.”
Olivera was one month shy of his 27th birthday when he played that final game of the 2011-12 season. He was in the prime of his career. Had he been healthy and left Cuba then, international scouts would have been pounding the table for their teams to sign him. Instead, Olivera’s blood clot meant scouts went years without being able to see him in person because he couldn’t play in any international tournaments, including the 2013 WBC, where Jose Miguel Fernandez emerged as the team’s new second baseman.
“It was tough because I felt like I was at my peak and I was already the established second baseman,” Olivera says. “It was tough for me not to participate.”
Back To BaseballBefore the 2013-14 season began in November 2013, the doctors told Olivera he no longer needed to take the blood thinners and that he was cleared to play baseball again. Olivera said he hasn’t taken the medication since then. He returned to the field and hit well, batting .316/.412/.474 with seven home runs, 38 walks and 25 strikeouts in 273 plate appearances.
But that season raised more questions for teams. His offensive performance remained robust, but Olivera played just 29 games at second base. He played a few games at first base, but most of his time he spent at DH. Olivera said that was his decision.
When the 2013-14 season started, a sore hamstring hampered Olivera. He spent the first three games of the season at DH, but he missed nearly three weeks after that to allow his hamstring to recover. After a few games at first base, Olivera returned to play second base full-time. For the rest of the first half of the season, Olivera played the position every day, including both ends of doubleheaders.
In Cuba, the season is split into two halves. The teams that finish in the top eight in the standings of the 16-team league advance to the second half of the season, while the bottom eight get eliminated. Those top eight teams then hold a draft—five rounds in 2013-14—to select reinforcement players from the teams that were eliminated in the first half.
Santiago De Cuba barely squeaked into the second phase, finishing the first half tied for seventh place at 24-21. When the second half started, the team took a nosedive, going 1-8 to drop to 25-29 before the Serie Nacional season paused for nearly three weeks for the Caribbean Series.
During Santiago De Cuba’s slide, Olivera played two games at second base and spent the rest at DH. The two other second basemen the team used were Anibal Sierra, a light-hitting 19-year-old with a good glove, and Michael Gonzalez, a 29-year-old reinforcement from Mayabeque who’s more advanced in the field than at the plate. Olivera didn’t play another game at second base the rest of the season.
“The reason was we got disqualified early (from playoff contention),” Olivera says. “The manager and I talked about giving the younger kids a chance to play. So I asked him to just DH me and play the younger guys.”
When the Caribbean Series ended and the Serie Nacional season resumed, Gonzalez spent the next week playing second base, then gave way to 22-year-old Adriel Labrada, who became the team’s regular second baseman the rest of the season, with Olivera hitting in the middle of the order at DH.
Santiago De Cuba went 12-30 in the second half of the season, finishing 36-51 overall, last place among all second-half teams. By the end of the season in March, with nothing left to play for, Olivera stayed at home with the team’s permission and didn’t play the last week of the season.
Teams can choose whether to take Olivera at his word as to why he spent so much time at DH during his final season in Cuba, but the timeline of his story checks out. Had he known his playing time in the field would have been so heavily scrutinized by scouts due to his medical history, maybe he would have done things differently. But by then, Olivera had already become fed up with the system and the government in Cuba.
“When I got hurt at the very beginning, yeah, they were taking care of me,” Olivera says. “But as time went on, I felt like they didn’t care about me, that they had forgotten about me, that I had to make my own arrangements to get to the doctor, that I had go to find my own transportation to go to Havana to get treatment. So I saw the writing on the wall and said if I get hurt or something like that, these people are not going to take care of me. I’m only as good as the last thing that I’ve done for them.
“I was very disillusioned with that. One of the biggest reasons why I wanted to DH was because I was really pissed off that I felt like I wasn’t being treated correctly.”
Even after Olivera returned for the 2013-14 season, his future on the Cuban national team was in doubt. At the WBC, Fernandez emerged as the national team second baseman and one of the most promising players on the island. Since October, Fernandez, 26, has been suspended in Cuba for what’s believed to be an attempt to defect. At that time, though, Fernandez had second base locked down on the national team.
When Cuba hosted USA Baseball’s Collegiate National Team for a five-game series in July 2014, Cuba built its team around players in their 20s with an eye toward the 2017 WBC. Fernandez, of course, was the second baseman. Behind him was David Castillo, a decent player in Cuba, but nowhere near Olivera’s caliber. Olivera wasn’t even on the team.
“By that time, I was already disillusioned,” Olivera says. “In Cuba, whoever’s going hot at the time, that’s who they are going with. I felt very disillusioned with that.”
So in September, Olivera fled Cuba to pursue a contract with a major league team. Now training in the Dominican Republic, Olivera said he feels reinvigorated with the opportunities ahead of him that he never had at home.
“In Cuba, no matter what you do, you’re going to have the same,” Olivera says. “Here, you feel motivated to do well and get better every day because you get compensated. The better you do, the more you get compensated.”
Young StarOlivera’s father is Hector Olivera Gonzalez, who batted .459 for Las Villas in 1980 to become the first Cuban hitter to hit .400. Olivera’s father had a 13-year career in Serie Nacional and was an accomplished hitter on the Cuban national team in the ‘70s and ‘80s.
Baseball runs in Olivera’s family, but his father isn’t the one who taught him the game. Olivera grew up with his mom, and while Olivera said his dad always supported him, he developed his love for baseball on his own during an excursion to a Cuban baseball academy run by the government.
“When I was in fourth grade, I left my house one day and disappeared to go to this place where they train all the better kids,” Olivera said. “I didn’t come home until late at night. My mom was worried about where I was. I told her I wanted to play baseball, and that I had enlisted myself in the academy to play baseball.”
Cuban baseball officials quickly realized Olivera was one of the top talents in the country for his age group. The first time Olivera ever left Cuba was in 1997, when he played in an international tournament for players age 11-12 in the Dominican Republic.
“When we came here, we played at Estadio Quisqueya,” said Olivera, referring to the Dominican League winter ball stadium in Santo Domingo. “I saw how far the fence was and how high. I went, ‘Oh my God!’”
Olivera played in another international tournament that year in Colombia, where he said he played left field and hit .400. Five years later, Olivera had become one of the top hitters in the Cuban junior leagues, batting .430 and slugging .663 in the country’s national 18U league in 2002 as a 17-year-old. He earned a spot on the junior national team, traveling to Canada in 2002 for the 18U World Championship and to Curacao the next year for the 18U Pan American Championship.
Some Cubans never get to leave the island, but Olivera had already traveled to four different countries as a teenager before he started a remarkable but abbreviated career on the Cuban national team, with the most high-profile events being the 2008 Olympics in Beijing and the 2009 WBC, which included a trip to San Diego to play in Petco Park.
“That experience in San Diego was a magical experience,” Olivera says. “It was a very nice place to experience the culture. It’s always a beautiful thing when you get to participate in those kind of events outside of your country, especially in the United States.”
The Cubans faced South Africa and Australia, then played Mexico and Japan twice, with two losses to Japan that eliminated them from the second round of pool play.
“The pitching was pretty much the same,” Olivera says. “There were guys who threw 94-95, but their concept of pitching, the way they maneuver those pitches—like breaking balls for strikes, breaking balls away—it’s just a little different. It wasn’t that big of a difference because back then, Cuba had a lot of hard-throwing pitchers. So it wasn’t like I was overwhelmed with velocity or anything. It’s just that the command was a little sharper and the strike zone was a little smaller, but it wasn’t a big difference.”
Now, though, the gap is getting bigger, with defections draining the quality of play in Cuba, not just among the stars but a wave of players behind them that are leaving the island faster than major league scouts can keep track of them.
“No doubt, losing so many players has hurt the talent level,” Olivera says. “There are younger guys who are now coming, so in a few years it should improve again, but it’s not quite the talent that it once was.”
Olivera now can only watch from afar as the Cuban team wins the Caribbean Series in Puerto Rico in February. It’s not the national team—technically it’s the Pinar Del Rio club that won the Serie Nacional championship last season—but the team was heavily reinforced with the country’s top players.
“I feel very happy for them and I feel very proud,” Olivera says. “I always feel good when they win because when they win, they get compensated and they’re able to help their families. After all, that’s the most important thing there is.”
Some of Olivera’s family is still in Cuba. He lives in a house in Santo Domingo with his wife. His mom, who had lived with him and his wife in Cuba, has been able to visit them, but she’s back in Cuba now. So is his five-year-old son from a previous marriage. Olivera’s son lived with his mom in Cuba during the week and stayed with Olivera on weekends, but they lived close by, so Olivera used to see his son nearly every day.
“It’s a sacrifice,” Olivera says. “I felt it was something I needed to do because I would like to have them with me in the near future, and I would like to fulfill my dream of playing in the big leagues. They’re a big support to me.”
New MotivationIn his new home, Olivera’s typical day is split into two sessions. In the morning, from 9 a.m. until 1 p.m., Olivera does baseball activities; fielding grounders, taking batting practice, facing live pitching or playing in a loosely organized game. After recharging, he goes back to the field from 5 p.m. until 9 p.m. to work on his strength and conditioning, lifting weights, running sprints and doing other track-and-field workouts. He’s also had three open showcases and held private workouts for teams.
“Definitely this has been harder than anything I’ve done because it’s more demanding,” Olivera says. “Physically, I feel like I’ve worked hard to go to the complexes, to have to run the 60 every day, to do a lot of things every day where you have to look your best and you have to look better every time. I feel like I needed to train as hard as I have, and I’ve been able to have really good results every time.”
He’s a big man, bigger than he was when scouts saw him on the Cuban national team. Olivera had a livelier, more athletic frame back then, but he had gotten heavier in his final season in Cuba. He’s now 6-foot-2, 220 pounds, up from his national team days but carrying the weight better than he did during his final season in Cuba.
His three open showcase games have attracted hundreds of scouts and evaluators. In his first game, he had three hits. In his second game, he pulled two home runs to left field. He reached base in all five plate appearances of his final game, going 3-for-3 with two doubles, a walk and a hit by pitch. Olivera isn’t facing big league pitching, but in these games and throughout his history of international competition and Serie Nacional performance, he’s shown good strike-zone management and bat-to-ball skills.
“I always try to get a good pitch to hit,” Olivera says. “I try to get a good fastball where I can put the head of the bat on the ball and drive the ball.”
In his final open showcase game, two of Olivera’s hits went to right field, including a double into the right-center field gap. “I like to let the ball travel deep,” Olivera says. “I use the right part of the field because I feel like I can drive the ball that way.”
Olivera primarily played second base in Cuba, but teams looked at him at second and third base, even a little bit in the corner outfield. Olivera hasn’t played much third base in a while, though he came up through the Cuban junior leagues as a third baseman and played there briefly when he entered Serie Nacional.
“The only difference is, at third base you have to be more aware because things happen quicker and the ball gets to you quicker,” Olivera says. “At second base, you have to be concentrating more on your routes to the ball and moving quickly because you have to cover more of the field. At third base, it’s one step here, one step there and the ball gets on you. So you just try to be really focused because the ball gets in on you quickly.”
Still, the questions for teams aren’t so much about whether Olivera can handle second or third base, but whether he’s healthy enough to play the field every day. It’s one thing to play every day in Cuba, where 90 games comprise the schedule, with a consistent, repeating game schedule of three days on, one day off, with breaks during the season for international tournaments, no cross-country flights. It’s another to be able to adapt to the 162-game daily grind of Major League Baseball.
Olivera is confident he can handle it, that his health issues are a thing of the past. Entering his 30s, Olivera’s prime years may be behind him, but there’s still an excitement in the international scouting world that, if he’s able to play every day, he could make an immediate impact in the middle of a major league lineup like Cespedes did in Oakland. He could follow in the footsteps of his good friend Abreu and win the rookie of the year award, but that’s not on Olivera’s mind right now.
“I don’t think about anything other than going all out and taking care of business,” Olivera says. “I don’t set any goals. I figure that if I do all those things, I go hard every day and I concentrate and I focus, at the end of the year, all those things will take care of themselves.”