Under Father's Proud Gaze

On his favorite type of morning, Diego Segui gets up before the sun, puts a fishing pole in the water and has his senses bathed in Midwestern quiet. Sometimes when he's waiting for nibbles, his thoughts will drift, all the way back to Cuba.

He might think about working 12-hour shifts on a plantation for $1.35 (total), or about his first baseball glove, made from a burlap sack, or about the balls with which he learned to pitch, little hunks of rubber wrapped in tape.

Segui grew up in Holguin, just outside Santiago, on Cuba's southeastern coast. Now he and his wife, Emily, live in northeastern Kansas, on the outskirts of Kansas City. It is an economic and geopolitical galaxy from his childhood, a leap made wholly possible by baseball.

So Diego Segui thinks of the game often. He thinks of his dear old friend, Jose Tartabull, against whom he played back in Cuba, and played with in Kansas City. He thinks of his godson, Danny Tartabull, with the Yankees, and of course, of his own son, David, who's playing first base for the New York Mets.

Diego Segui smiles when all this tumbles toward him. Thirty years ago, Diego and Emily were regular dinner companions of Jose and Maria Tartabull. Diego and Jose were both A's then, living in the same Kansas City hotel. Maria would cook arroz con frijoles (rice and beans), picadillo (a meat dish) and other Cuban delicacies. Danny was a toddler. David was yet to be born. Today, the sons are major players in the New York baseball summer. These things you do not plan.

"It's funny how things happen sometimes," Diego said. "God knows what He wants to do, all the time."

"I know Diego so good from Cuba," Jose Tartabull said. "I am proud to know him."

Diego Segui, 56, pitched until he was 47. He spent 15 seasons in the majors: with the Kansas City and Oakland A's, the Senators, the Seattle Pilots and Mariners, the Cardinals and the Red Sox. After he left the big leagues, he pitched eight more years in Mexico. He is newly retired after seven years as a minor-league pitching coach for the Giants.

The American League earned-run average champion (2.56) in 1970 with Oakland, Diego was known for a Marichal-like leg kick, a big curve and a forkball, stuff that exasperated more than one hitter.

By far the pinnacle for Tartabull was 1967, when the Red Sox won their second pennant since the days of Babe Ruth.

"The Impossible Dream," said Tartabull, a coach for the Royals' rookie-league club in Florida. "There was nothing like it. Nothing else close."

Jose remembers playing the bongos in the Red Sox clubhouse, pounding out a rhumba beat. He remembers the spraying champagne, the jumping and hugging, when the Red Sox clinched the pennant on the last day of the season, and how his little boy Danny couldn't get enough of the ballpark life.

"All the time, he was messing around," Jose said. "He lived on the field. He would slide into all the bases after games. He would try to imitate different players. He loved to imitate Rocky Colavito."

"I'd get into everybody's locker, from Yaz to Reggie Smith to George Scott," Danny said. "I'd get their bat, their ball. I'd (copy) their stances. I thought I was everyone's entertainment."

Sometimes Jose's friends, guys like Bert Campaneris and Orlando Cepeda, would come over to the house. Danny made sure he was in on the conversation.

"I grew up around baseball all my life," Danny said. "I just wanted to be like my dad."

And so it was with David Segui. "My dad never pushed me at all (to play ball)," David said. "He didn't have to push." David has his own fond Fenway memories, from 1975, when Diego pitched out of the pen for another Red Sox pennant-winner. David won a bike in a father-son long-ball hitting contest. The bike was swell, and so was the fact that he hit one just like his all-time baseball hero: Frank Howard.

As much as he admired his father, David actually learned more of his line-drive batting stroke and prodigious glove skills from his mother, who would throw batting practice and hit grounders to her three sons and daughter. Diego's ballplaying precluded him from spending much time at home, the one downside to a baseball career, for Segui, for Jose Tartabull, for every ballplayer with a family.

"It was tough," Diego said. "Now I am really enjoying being around my grandsons, because I didn't have time to be around my own kids.

"All the credit must go to my wife. If my wife never take him to play, hitting, ground balls, he would never be what he is."

"You got so used to him not being around," David said. "When he would come home, it was almost like, `Who's that stranger in the house?' "

The Seguis have grown much closer now. They fish and hunt together in the offseason. Between them, they have almost 90 acres on adjacent Kansas City parcels. Diego stocks one of David's ponds with bass and then catches them.

The Tartabulls talk a couple of times a month during the season, and try to get together after it.

"We're very close," Jose said. "I treat my kids as a friend. We talk with each other about everything."

They also talk about Cuba, a far less light-hearted topic. Jose, from Cienfuegos, has not been back since he signed with the Giants and left in 1961. Segui, signed by the Reds, left a year earlier. He hasn't been back, either.

Tartabull, who made $135 a month in his first contract, has not seen his now 78-year-old mother, or anybody else in his family, since he left. "It was very, very rough," he said.

"The first couple of years, I cried," Diego said. "But if you see somewhere to climb and you don't do it, you're a bum."

Diego does not like to talk about Cuba, or Fidel Castro. He likes even less to recall how his father, Felix, was given a three-year jail term for no just reason, how his parents' farm was confiscated. It took nine years of dealing with Castro's government, but Diego was able to get his parents, sister and a couple of nieces out of Cuba in 1971. David remembers going to the airport in Kansas City to meet his grandparents for the first time.

Danny said he would love to visit Cuba someday, though it's clear he has not much use for Castro.

Danny Tartabull has a daughter and two sons. Zachary, coming up on 2, already shows signs of baseball interest, and so does David Segui's son, Cory, 2, who loves nothing more than being at the ballpark. At 6 months, Cory was carrying a little bat. Just the other night, he went to sleep wearing David's first baseman's mitt.

It seems to be not so much baseball fever as a high-powered baseball gene. It has been passed from generation to generation, and after many stops across many years, it has come here, from Holguin and Cienfuegos, Cuba, where Diego Segui and Jose Tartabull dreamed of playing ball, and of a better life for their families.

The hurt these men feel over the loved ones left behind - that never really goes away.

But they have found the better life. And it is a very nice thing to think about for Jose Tartabull, as he tutors his aspiring Royals, and for Diego Segui, who you might see smiling with a fishing pole in his hand, before the sun comes up.