You all know I'm a pretty serious seamhead. The baseball draft, which took place last Thursday and Friday, commanded a shocking amount of my attention at a time when I should've been focused on tasks of far greater importance to my life and career.

My Cardinals had a pretty simple and obvious strategy in the draft's early rounds: Get some hitters, preferably guys who can play a position besides first base. (The current guy should be around for a while.) They took college third basemen in the first and fifth rounds, a high-school shortstop in the third round, and college second basemen in the ninth and tenth rounds. Since we're talking about baseball, it would be a successful draft if one of those guys turns out to be a legitimate star and one other makes it as a better-than-average starter. If three of them become major-league regulars, it would be considered one for the ages.

That's one of the reasons why I was so intrigued to see this news scrolling along the bottom of my TV screen last night: Cuba's top teenage player, third baseman Dayan Viciedo, had defected to the U.S.

My first thought: I hope the Cardinals pay whatever it takes to get this guy.

As Michael Lewis explains in this Vanity Fair article (which I assume is an excerpt from an upcoming book), Cuba's best ballplayers never defect to the U.S. in their prime:

There may be no entrapped pool of human talent left on earth with the dollar value of Cuban baseball players. “I compare Cuba to the Dominican Republic,” says Phil Dale, an Australian who played in the Cincinnati Reds’ organization and now scouts players in the Far East for the Atlanta Braves. “But the Cubans are better. Their island has bigger and stronger athletes.” Their island also has more people -- 11 million to the Dominican Republic’s 9 million. There are now more than 1,700 Dominican players under contract to U.S. professional baseball teams -- compared with just 40 Cubans -- and close to 100 are playing in the big leagues. Back in the old days, before Cuba was closed for business, it supplied more players to the major leagues than all the other Latin-American countries combined. ...

But relatively few Cuban players have left their island and almost none of the best. What has come to the U.S., instead, is a rattlebag of players past their prime, players in political trouble, players injured, and players who were never very successful in Cuba. Orlando “El Duque” Hernandez escaped by boat in 1997, when he was in his early 30s, and became a star with the Yankees -- but he had spent most of his prime in Cuba, and insisted that he never would have left had he not been banned from baseball by the Cuban government because his half-brother, Livan, had fled Cuba two years earlier. ... Rey Ordoñez, who spent seven years as the starting shortstop for the New York Mets, left Cuba in 1993 only after it became clear that he was blocked by better players from starting for his Cuban team, the Havana Industriales.

At least one guy, however, isn't convinced that Viciedo is really all that. (It's worth noting that Lewis writes extensively about Viciedo's team, its manager, and its star center fielder without even mentioning him.) Here's John Manuel, editor in chief of Baseball America:

Viciedo, born in March 1989, is listed at 6-foot-1, 210 pounds, but reports are that he was bigger than that last year at the World Junior Championship in Mexico. Viciedo has excellent power and hitting ability, however, with one scout comparing him to Giants prospect Angel Villalona. He slugged over .500 two of the last three seasons in Cuba’s Serie Nacional, its top-level league, hitting 14 homers in 2005-2006 -- as a 16-year-old -- in his best season.

"His body could go the same route as Livan Hernandez, and when I saw him in Mexico, he wasn’t very good at third base anymore," one international scouting director said. "But he can really hit; in fact, I think he’s probably a better hitter than Villalona."

Villolona received a $2.1 million bonus from the Giants in 2006 and is currently playing for low Class A Augusta.

Another scout who had seen Viciedo was less enthused about him as a player, pegging him as a first baseman-only hitter with a bad body. "You know everybody liked Kendry Morales," the scout said, referring to the Angels’ Cuban DH/first baseman, "and he had some other tools. But his body’s gone south and he’s pretty much just a DH. So I think it’s premature to get too excited about this guy."

How weird is it to think that a 19-year-old ballplayer might be over the hill? But when we're talking about Cuban ballplayers who go from a totalitarian system to the land of milk and honeys, conditioning issues really do become a factor, as Lewis explains:

Nothing in their experience had prepared them for American life. One of Gus Dominguez’s new Cuban clients, Ariel Prieto, took his $1.2 million signing-bonus check from the Oakland A’s, stuck it in his jeans, and ran them through the washing machine. Eddie Oropesa, awed by the size of American refrigerators, bet a fellow player he could stay inside one for 15 minutes -- and might have suffocated if Dominguez hadn’t opened the door and found him shivering. Latin players were just then flooding into American professional baseball, but these Cubans weren’t like the others: they’d been governed by fear, and when you took the fear away they were rudderless. They ate too much and listened too little, all the while longing for their loved ones back in Cuba.

Another issue, Lewis notes, is that today's Cuban ballplayers aren't as strong as their predecessors:

The kid on the mound -- a reliever named Alexei Gil, brought in an inning ago -- has just hit 96 m.p.h. on the radar gun. He shouldn’t have that kind of heat. He’s 21 years old, which means he was 4 in 1991, when the Soviet Union pulled its subsidies. Soon thereafter, the average weight and height of Cuban children collapsed, too. The Cold War ended, and East Germany ceased to send powdered milk, heavily discounted, in exchange for lemons. The shortage of calcium expressed itself in the bones of Cuban children, including those children who became pitchers. Thus you can count among the many consequences of the fall of the Berlin Wall the temporary decline of the Cuban fastball -- and a temporary reprieve granted to Cuban hitters with long, slow swings.

All of which is a reminder of the ongoing weirdness of the Castro Brothers' regime in Cuba. Here you have a beautiful island nation just 90 miles off our shores, with a fully educated population and ballplayers worth a half-billion dollars, in Lewis' estimation. You have to think that Cuba's doctors and professors, now working for $20 a month, could instantly make real money in a free market. And the tourist revenue would be worth multiple billions.

Every time I think of Cuba, I think of what a waste of human talent it is for both sides to continue on the path they've taken for virtually my entire life.

How much of the problem is Fidel Castro's intransigence, and how much is stupid American policy toward Castro, dictated by bitter exiles? I don't know. I'm happy to read that Barack Obama proposes a change in our Cuban policy, and I hope it works. Just speaking as a baseball fan, I know my team needs some better infielders.

Monday baseball meat:

Speaking of the intersection of baseball and politics, Rob Siders sent along this intriguing profile of Nate Silver, a baseball stat guru who's applying his analytical techniques to politics:

So far, Silver's system shows Obama and McCain splitting the popular vote 50.0 percent to 50.0 percent, with Obama winning the Electoral College 274.4 to 263.6. Today, McCain runs about 10 points better than Bush in parts of the Northeast -- his strongest region, comparatively -- but it's not enough to swing any states. The Arizonan's best chance for a flip? Michigan. Obama, on the other hand, currently swipes Colorado, New Mexico and Iowa from the GOP, and is within striking distance in Indiana, Missouri, Ohio, Virginia and even Alaska. And thanks to Nebraska, where electors are awarded by congressional district, Silver even suspects that McCain and Obama could, um, tie. "Right now, Obama's losing the state by 10 points, but that's 10 points better than Dems usually do," he says. "If Obama wins Colorado, Iowa and the city of Omaha, where he's popular, it would end up 269–269 and go to the House of Representatives. Crazier things could happen." 

As someone who's followed the stat revolution in baseball (I'm proud to say I knew all about it years before reading Michael Lewis' Moneyball), I'm amazed that no one has applied the same analytical rigor to politics.

Until now, that is.