The Cuban baseball team was eliminated from the race for gold in the XXV Central American and Caribbean Games after losing to Nicaragua on Thursday by 5-6 in the final match of the Super Round, as reported by the state sports media JIT.
After this outcome, Cuba will have to settle for competing for bronze, while the final has been determined between Panama and Nicaragua.
The pattern that sunk the team led by Germán Mesa was the same as in the previous defeat: the starting pitcher could not hold the game. Raymond Figueredo, considered a reliable option for that challenge, was hit hard and allowed six runs, exactly the same number that Panama had scored in the loss on Wednesday.
Offensively, Cuba responded with five runs, three of which came from home runs with the bases empty. Luis Vicente Mateo was the standout batter of the game with two home runs, but the output was not enough to turn the score around.
The defeat against Nicaragua mirrors the narrative of the loss to Panama by 2-6, where the starting pitcher was also hit hard early on. In both cases, six runs against proved impossible to overcome for an offense that, despite its flashes of brilliance, arrived too late.
Cuba concluded the Super Round with a record of three wins and two losses. Before the defeats against Panama and Nicaragua, the team had entered this phase undefeated after defeating Curacao, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic in the preliminary round, and then beating Colombia 3-0 in the first day of the Super Round.
The elimination extends a drought that has already lasted three consecutive editions without a title. Cuba has not won the gold in baseball at the Central American and Caribbean Games since Veracruz 2014, twelve years ago. In Barranquilla 2018 and San Salvador 2023, the team finished with a silver medal.
The contrast is striking for a team that has accumulated 15 historic gold medals in this tournament and arrived in Santo Domingo with the explicit goal of reclaiming the throne. Before the tournament, Mesa stated that the team was "quite complete" and emphasized the combination of defense, pitching, and hitting as its main strengths.
The pitching, however, turned out to be the Achilles' heel. In the only two losses of the tournament, the starters failed to perform their role, and the damage was already done before the offense could respond.
Cuba will now have one last chance to reach the podium in Santo Domingo 2026. The opponent for the bronze medal has not yet been confirmed, but the team will need to win that match to avoid leaving the Dominican capital empty-handed for the first time in the recent history of Central American baseball.
Related videos:
Filed under: