Baseball World Goes Nuts Over Cuban Fan With Horn At World Baseball Classic

The World Baseball Classic is back and better than ever.

The global event kicked off for the first time since 2017 on Tuesday night with a game between Cuba and The Netherlands.

This year’s tournament is the largest yet, featuring 20 teams.

Among the teams are newcomers like Great Britain, the Czech Republic and Nicaragua. But there are also stalwarts such as Japan, the USA, Puerto Rico and Cuba, who have made an appearance in every edition of the WBC.

It’s the latter, however, who stole the show against the Netherlands on Tuesday night.

Cuba has not yet won a World Baseball Classic. But it finished at the runner-up in the initial event in 2006 and is always a threat. But it was the Netherlands flexing its muscles in the opener and claiming a 4-2 victory in pool play.

Neither team, however, stole the show quite like the Cuban fan that had Twitter up in arms.

Meet Pablo Avila, a Cuban-born baseball fan living in Houston. MLB.com writer Matt Monagan discovered that Avila is a Cuban super fan who goes not only to every WBC, but every International event he can with his trusty horn supporting his country.

It’s an awesome story. But the horn itself also makes a sound that unmistakable both in the ballpark and over the airwaves.

And not everyone was a fan of his noise-making.

https://twitter.com/mookieplzhomer/status/1633328607878852611?s=20

Avila, however, was undeterred by the the haters.

“Wherever they go, I’m going,” he said, taking a break to yell out to the field.

He jokes that he’s not only one of the most famous people in Cuba, but the entire world. The crowd at Intercontinental — mostly baseball fans from Taiwan — immediately took a liking to Avila. They cheered with him and, in between almost every inning, groups of people went down to take selfies with him. – via MLB.com

Whatever your take on Avila, it’s clear he’s just out there living his best life.