On December 31 of the recently concluded 2021, Cuban player Maikel Azcuy was inducted into the Great Britain Baseball Hall of Fame, publishes the journalist Francys Romero in his blog.
The 40-year-old Cuban is the all-time British baseball leader in home runs with (45), hits (322) and RBIs (273). He is the second in doubles and triples.
In 2015, he won the Triple Crown with the Herts Falcons team, hitting a 467 average with six home runs and bringing 28 teammates to the plate.
He made his debut with the British national team at the 2012 European Championship and was a member of the team that participated in the World Baseball Classic IV Qualifier in 2016. Due to injury, he had only one at-bat in which he produced a double. England was finally eliminated by Israel.
Since 2018, due to an illness of one of his children, Azcuy moved to Germany. Play in the first level of that country with the Berlin Flamingos.
Azcuy had said goodbye to baseball
Maikel Azcuy was slow to start playing baseball, despite the fact that his father, Fidel Azcuy, pitched in five National Series. At first he tried to follow in his father’s footsteps as a pitcher, but he was more talented as a hitter.
An injury kept him from pitching for good and sent him to the outfield, but he wasn’t comfortable there either. In time, he would discover that his was the infield.
However, Azcuy would come to hate baseball after a series of disappointments. It was thanks to his wife and in England, a country with very little baseball tradition, that he reconciled with this sport, as he told Swing Completo in 2020.
In 2005, Azcuy began living in England after getting married. “When my wife arrived, she looked for me in a club called Pirates of Croydon, I even got a little upset with her, but it was the best thing that happened to me in Europe and thanks to that I got back to love baseball, I was very well received At that club, I started playing in the second league because I didn’t want to play seriously and it went well for me, they wanted to move me to the 1st division where they had another team but I didn’t want to. “
English baseball has an amateur level. The first division, to which Azcuy arrived, is known as the National League. Although this league has not yet opened to professionalism, it has six teams and has contributed to the development of baseball in the United Kingdom, which allowed them to reach the World Pre-Classic in New York.
The British team was also made up of Cubans Rei Martínez and Arley Lorenzo. Martinez struck out former Major League Baseball players Nate Freiman and Ike Davis in his outing against Israel., although the team was defeated.
The other players inducted into the Great Britain Baseball Hall of Fame on December 31 were Martyn Dutton, JG Lee and Julian Dodwell.
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