Emilio Sabourín del Villar

===BODY===
Paradigm of the Cuban baseball player of the 19th century, who combined his passion for sport with his commitment to the independence cause.

He was born in La Habana. He was educated in the United States, and graduated from a business school in Washington.

He returned to Cuba in 1868 and worked as a customs agent, while also being among the founders of the Habana Base Ball Club (BBC).

He participated with this team in a match on December 27, 1874, against the Matanzas BBC, in which he played left field and scored the highest number of runs, eight.

He joined the Habana club alongside Francisco Saavedra, Eduardo Cadaval, Ramón Saavedra, Manuel Landa, Ricardo Lawton, Ricardo Mora, Nemesio Guilló, Esteban Bellán, Beltrán Senarens, Enrique Canal and Rodrigo Saavedra, which competed in the first official championship in Cuba, which began on December 29, 1878.

As a player he participated in seven official championships between 1878 and 1887, and in sixteen games he accumulated 15 hits, scored 11 runs and batted .208. He managed this team and was proclaimed champion in 1888-1889, 1889-1890 and 1891-1892, with forty-three wins and fourteen losses.

His managerial style was characterized by discipline, intelligence and rigor in training, although he maintained fraternal relations with the players.

He was an active conspirator on the eve of the War of Independence, and once the conflict began he carried out intense work gathering weapons and supplies to send them to the mambí army. He bought weapons in poor condition from military pyrotechnics barracks, which he sent to the mambises once repaired. Four thousand five hundred Winchester rifle cartridges that were kept in his home were never able to be detected by Spanish authorities.

One of his most daring actions was providing shelter in his house, which was the headquarters of the Habana club, to General José Lacret Morlot, who had arrived in the city hidden in the coal bunker of an American steamship.

His participation in the failed escape of General Julio Sanguily from the La Cabaña prison led to his detention on September 15, 1895.

In a trial held in February 1896, known as the Military Pyrotechnics Case, his death sentence was commuted to deportation to the Castillo del Hacho in Ceuta.

Sabourín shared in Ceuta the rigors of imprisonment with Juan Gualberto Gómez, who left a moving testimony of the integrity and gallantry of the former baseball player.

His body ravaged by double pneumonia, he died on July 5, 1897 in the African prison almost upon turning 44 years old. Gómez wrote of him: "He had loved deeply, and almost equally, these three things: baseball, his family and his homeland."