Dominican baseball

Baseball , the most  popular sport  game in the  island

History:

Baseball was introduced in the Caribbean in 1866 by U.S. sailors loading sugar in the then Spanish colony of Cuba. Also, it is known that two Cuban students, brothers Ernest and Nemesio Guillo, attended Spring Hill College in Alabama during 1860 and brought baseball to Cuba. Eight years later, in 1874, the first organized game of baseball was played between Cuban teams. In the years to come it would be Cuba that spread baseball throughout the Caribbean. When the Ten Years' War (1868-1878) in Cuba brought turmoil to the colony, many Cubans fled their country and migrated to the Dominican Republic, bringing baseball with them. In the 1920s the Dominicans began to play against neighboring countries.

In the early 1900s, four Dominican teams formed. These teams still exist today, and form the foundation of Dominican professional baseball:

- Tigres del Licey (1907)

- Estrellas Orientales (1911)

- Leones del Escogido (1921)

- Sandino, later renamed Las Águilas (1937)

To date, 420 players from the Dominican Republic have played in the Majors (1956-2005), and according to Major League Baseball there are 119 players representing Latin America, which is 24% of major leaguers. Of these 119 players, 90 players come from the Dominican Republic. There are more Dominicans playing in the Majors than from any other country in Latin America, and the Dominican Republic has more players in the Majors than all other countries in Latin America combined. Dominicans have even made strides in other aspects of the game. In 2003 Tony Pena, formerly of the Kansas City Royals, coached against Felipe Alou, of the San Francisco Giants, making it the first time that two Dominicans coached against each other in the Majors. And in 2004 Omar Minaya became the first Dominican General Manager, working the front office for the New York Mets.

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History of MMA

The history of Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) dates back to the Olympics of ancient Greece. Mixed Martial Arts fights originated as hand-to-hand combat performed as a sport called pankration, from the Greek words pan and kratos, meaning “all powers.”

The Greek competitors had only two rules: no biting and no eye gouging. Pankration was a popular event, and the competitors became heroes and the subjects of legends.

The teachings of ancient Greek pankration spread to India thanks to Alexander the Great and his habit of recruiting athletes as soldiers because of their strength and combat knowledge. A Buddhist monk traveling through India picked up on aspects of pankration and brought that knowledge to China, where it birthed Asian martial arts such as kung fu, judo, and karate.

As people branched into new lands, they took these arts and built on them, often creating a new style or form of martial art. For example, an expert in judo traveled the globe and ended up in Brazil to spread his teachings, an act that gave birth to the art of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.

As martial arts spread, so did the idea of mixed-style competitions. Often a practitioner of one martial art challenged a practitioner of a different one for ultimate bragging rights. These mixed-style competitions took place worldwide for several decades, eventually gaining intense popularity in the United States.

Participants in these competitions learned from their opponents and began to realize that in order to become well-rounded fighters, they must study any combative art form that could give them an edge in the game.

For instance, if a kickboxer was matched with a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu practitioner, the kickboxer would realize that he must become more adept at defending takedowns, thus prompting him to train with Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu fighters. (Jiu-Jitsu ground fighting incorporates various submission holds, such as joint and compression locks and chokes.) From that point forward, competitions were no longer between athletes who focused on a singular martial art but between two mixed martial arts athletes.

Biography of Anderson Silva

Born in Sao Paulo, Brazil on April 14, 1975 Silva was born into a humble household. Silva took to martial arts quickly and wanted to learn Brazilian Jiu Jitsu as a child, but his family could not afford the costly lessons. So Silva learned what he could from his friends and at age 14 enrolled in a Taekwondo class that his family could afford. Silva spent his teens learning Taekwondo and the Brazilian martial art of Capoeira.

SIlva started training Muay Thai under Fabio Noguchi, at his gym and would eventually discover the Chute Boxe gym in Curitiba. At Chute Boxe, Silva got hard lessons in fighting as their training sessions were famously intense. Full contact sparring in which team members knocked each other out was the norm at Chute Boxe and Silva had true masters to learn from in MMA legends Wanderlei Silva and Jose "Pele" Landi-Jons. And under the tutelage of Chute Boxe's coaches, including the legendary Rudimar Fedrigo, Silva would grow into a formidable fighter.

By Sheralber Antonio Labata

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