TSN: Crossman and Parajon: An incredible journey: The story of six Cuban baseball defectors

Perez, Galbizo, Cordero, Guevara, Limonta and Escobar (Look for David Cone to tie that in with Miller’s Crossing).

Children’s screams pierced the air. The six players stood together throughout the trip. Destination: the Florida Keys. Yunel Escobar remembers a 1-year-old. Perez recalls three boys and a girl, ages 5 to 11. Cordero can see, in his mind’s eye, two boys, 5 and 7. Everyone around the players vomited. If the waves didn’t make the passengers throw up, if the people around them throwing up didn’t make them throw up, the overpowering smell of gasoline did. Escobar—a proud man—admits he vomited.

For two days and two and a half nights this went on. There was no food and no water. And sharks circled the boat.

“To see those sharks so close nearby, it would scare anybody,” Perez says. “The boat had to get out of there in a hurry because it really started to get ugly.”

Everyone was exhausted, physically and emotionally. The boat, slowed by the weather, finally hit land at about 1 a.m. on October 9. “Nobody wanted to get out,” Perez says. “We didn’t know where we were.” He worried the boat had done a giant circle and arrived back in Cuba. “The guys driving the boat said, ‘We’re here,’ but nobody wanted to get out because we were all scared—still from the sharks. And then we had to jump in the water.”

What if it was Cuba? What if the players waded ashore and Fidel Castro’s border guards met them?

It was not Cuba. It was the United States.