Taking the game far afield

But they’ve never seen the gentlemen from Eastern Massachusetts.

Next month, 60 local slow-pitch softball players from the Eastern Massachusetts Senior Softball Association head to Havana to play a series of exhibitions against Cuban opponents of roughly equal age and ability. The American players will range in age from 57 to 74, and include two women.

“To get to go to Cuba and have softball as the vehicle is a double win,’’ said Bob Clifford of Hingham, a speedy 64-year-old outfielder and a retired school guidance adviser.

The trip is unusual, but not unprecedented. Ten years ago the Baltimore Orioles played an exhibition in Havana. To get permission to go to Cuba, the softball league applied for a license from the Office of Foreign Assets Control, under the US Department of the Treasury. In 2008, 21 applications were approved for travel to Cuba for “public performances, athletic and other competitions,’’ one of several categories under which travel to the island may be allowed, said a Treasury spokeswoman.

The 15-year-old Eastern Massachusetts league will send four travel teams of different skills and ages to the island. Cuban softball officials have offered to provide two teams for each of the American travel squads to play. The league’s players will each play seven games over the one-week trip, including some double-headers. The league has been planning the trip since the spring, said Stu Gray, a 60-something real estate lawyer from Chestnut Hill who is also the league’s commissioner.

“This is serious ball for us,’’ said Gray.

The league has about 350 players, from age 50 to around 80, drawn from more than 100 communities in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire, said Gray, who is a pitcher. The Cuba trip was open to any player in the league, at a price of about $3,000, he said.

Third baseman Michael Eizenberg, 62, who first visited Cuba for academic research in 1998 as a Bentley College professor, originally suggested the Cuba softball trip, said Gray. Eizenberg and Gray were part of a small delegation from the league that visited Cuba in August to meet with Cuban softball officials. They discussed rules and the makeup of the teams and viewed several ballfields, Gray said.

At 57, outfielder David Brisson will be the league’s youngest athlete in Cuba. He’s a compact left-hander who still runs well. His parents honeymooned in Havana in 1951, before Fidel Castro’s Cuban Revolution. “I thought this was a great opportunity for a week of ball in an exotic place that has a mystique about it because of the revolution and the travel ban,’’ said Brisson, of Wayland, who runs a corporate communication business. “It’s a forbidden place, and a beautiful place from what I hear.’’

On Wednesday, a handful of the men planning to make the trip played in an inter-league scrimmage under the lights at Cochituate Field on West Plain Street.

Though the atmosphere was light, the competition was serious.

The senior game is slower on the basepaths, but there’s plenty of power at the plate. Batters launched screaming line drives all over the field, and a few moonshots to the deep recesses of the ballfield.

“A lot of these guys still hit the hell out of it,’’ said Clifford.

Brisson grounded out and jogged back to the bench a little ticked off. “I topped the ball and pushed it out toward second,’’ he said.

Like many of the players, Brisson works out regularly to stay in shape for softball season.

He also plays football and basketball. “I play all the same sports now that I played when I was 10,’’ he said.

He lacks the jumping ability and physical explosiveness of his youth, he said, but through regular training has maintained decent range in the outfield and a good throwing arm.

Players in the league work hard to stay competitive, Gray said. “A lot of them do elective surgeries to keep playing this game. We have people with hip replacements, knee replacements. Ten percent of the league has prostate cancer.’’

The men joke that when a player tries to stretch a double into a triple he’s running into “heart attack territory,’’ said Gray, who suffered a heart attack while running the bases during the season’s final tournament in 1998.

He was back on the field for the next opening day.

“It becomes a passion,’’ he said. “We’ve played all over the country. It’s such a thrill to compete at a high level at this age.’’