Hugo Chavez: Just A Young Baseball Player Who Wants to Play in Yankee Stadium

If you’re a political wonk, you’ve been in your glory this week with the news coming out of the United Nations. From President Barack Obama’s pandering to the crowd with his ‘we’re different, really’ pleas to the delegates walking out on the speech of Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to the 90-minute rambling diatribe of Libyan leader Muammar al-Gaddafi -- or his stay in a tent on one of Donald Trump’s properties this week -- there has been no shortage of political talking points.↵↵That’s why this nugget from Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez doesn’t even crack the top 10 of political sound bytes coming out of New York this week. But for the purposes of a sports blog, this seems fair (and balanced) game. Is Hugo Chavez more like Fidel Castro than we imagined? He spoke with CNN’s Larry King, and the two talked, along with many other politically charged things, a little baseball.↵

↵↵⇥King: Truth -- would you rather have been a Major League Baseball player than President of Venezuela?↵⇥
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↵⇥ ↵⇥Chavez (through an interpeter): It was my dream. It was my dream. I would have preferred, personally, to do that. However, things do not decide what they are going to do. I went to the army because I wanted to be a baseball player. I became a soldier, then Venezuela just shattered -- but I am still the young baseball player who wanted to play in the Yankee Stadium. ↵⇥
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↵⇥ ↵⇥King: Would you rather have been a singer?↵⇥
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↵⇥ ↵⇥Chavez: I love to sing!↵↵↵That’s the kind of hard-hitting stuff we expect from King. Actually, the interview was rather in-depth, if you can get past the fact that King looks about 1,000 years old in that chair. And who knows, had Chavez not gone into the military, perhaps he would have been the next Luis Aparicio. Well, Aparicio -- the only Hall of Famer from Venezuela -- had a .231 batting average with just 30 RBI in and 62 runs in 666 plate appearances at Yankee Stadium. So maybe he’s not the best example.↵

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