Let's go back to the late 1950s, and zoom in on Cuba. A man named Joe Cambria (known as "Papa Joe") scouted for the Washington Senators there "and he liked to have a drink or two in Havana's Floridita bar" (no stranger to Hemingway). In 1961 the Senators moved from Washington and became the Minnesota Twins.
Papa Joe had his eye on a young slugger named Pedro and wanted the Twins to take him on. The trouble was that the young man wasn't so young; in 1960 he would be 22, too old for Twins owner Calvin Griffith to consider.
Around the same time Hemingway (known of course as "Papa Hemingway"), a baseball fan himself, "was sixty years old and in failing health. He and his fourth wife, Mary, were forced to leave their bucolic estate in Havana. For nearly twenty-two years, the Hemingways had made Cuba their home base."
Could Papa Hemingway have met Papa Joe? DeBerg imagines it happening in his short tale, "Ernest Hemingway And Tony Oliva: A Tale Of How The Great Writer Helped The Great Ballplayer" by Curtis L. DeBerg ($9.95 in paper, self-published; also for Amazon Kindle). For Pedro was Tony Pedro Oliva, inducted on July 24, 2022 into baseball's Hall of Fame.
DeBerg imagines that with Papa Hemingway's help, Pedro was able to use his younger brother Antonio's "birth certificate to fabricate his age in order to obtain a travel visa to the United States." So Pedro became "Tony" Oliva, three years younger than he really was, signing with the Twins as a nineteen-year-old.
Did any of that really happen? Even Tony Oliva's biographer doesn't know for sure. DeBerg's earnest yarn invites readers to think that it could have.
