Cuban National Series

About Cuban National Series

The Cuban National Series (Spanish: Serie Nacional de Béisbol, SNB) is the primary domestic professional baseball competition in Cuba. Formed after the dissolution of the Cuban League in the wake of the Cuban Revolution, the Series is a part of the Cuban national baseball system.

Since 1993, the league has had 16 teams: one representing each province, and one for the city of Havana. Each team is made up of players from the province it represents.

In Havana, most of the top tier players take the field for Industriales, traditionally the strongest team in the league. Other typically strong teams include those from Santiago de Cuba, Pinar del Río and Villa Clara.

The 96-game regular season stretches from early August until late January, split into two halves – the fall period stretches from August to early October and the winter period from late October to early January the following year, and culminates with a six team postseason tournament in January to decide the league champion.

In the 2008–2009 season, the Cuban League was reorganized to determine playoff qualification by zones rather than groups, as it had been the previous 15 years. The two zones represented the country's geography, with teams split into Western and Eastern Zone divisions.

In the 2011–2012 series, there were 17 competing teams, since Havana Province was split into two: Artemisa Province and Mayabeque Province. Thus, the Western League had nine teams, including the two new clubs, the Artemisa Cazadores ("Hunters") and the Mayabeque Huracanes ("Hurricanes"). The CNS dropped to 16 teams beginning with the 2012–13 season when the Metropolitanos (long seen as the "farm club" of the powerhouse Industriales) dropped out.

In the 2012–13 season, the zone qualification format was dropped in favor of a phase qualification system. All teams would play 45 games in the "classification phase". The top 8 ranked teams from this phase would move on to the "qualification phase", which determines the playoff participants. In the 2016–17 season, the number of teams in the qualification phase was dropped to six. In the 2020–21 season, the phase format was removed from the league, and the league determined qualifiers based on a single table of standings, with the top teams at the end of the regular season advancing to the postseason, thereby ending divisional play.

The Cuban National Series also serves as the first stage in the selection of players for the Cuban national baseball team, for international competitions during the summer as well as for the World Baseball Classic and the Olympics (1992–2008 and from 2020 onward). The Cuban National Team Preseleccion is selected from the Series and practices in Havana. Sometimes more than one team can be asked to select players for international duty as part of the national team.