| Written by Maria Elena Salinas |
| Monday, October 27 2003 |
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| Miami - I must have gone to at least a dozen locations looking for Florida Marlins T-shirts for kids, and they were all sold out. I wanted to capitalize on the interest in baseball that the World Series had sparked in my little girls. It had to be Marlins memorabilia, because we live in Miami and my daughters are loyal Marlins fans. They especially like Ivan "Pudge" Rodriguez. But for most kids in
baseball-loving Latin America, there is a hero on just about every team.
Just one look at the starting lineups of both the Marlins and the New York Yankees leaves no doubt that Hispanics have given the Great American Pastime a distinct Sabor Latino. The Marlins never would have made it to the fall classic without players like Dominican Luis Castillo; Venezuelans Miguel Cabrera, Alex Gonzalez and Ugueth Urbina; and, of course, Puerto Rican-born Mike Lowell and Ivan Rodriguez. The Yankees' Latino talent includes Dominican Alfonso Soriano; Karim Garcia from Mexico; Mariano Rivera from Panama; and Cuban defector Jose Contreras.
That Latin America has exported to the United States some of the best baseball players of all time is probably not news to avid baseball fans. Actually, Latino players have been on major-league rosters since 1902. What is new is that Hispanic presence in the big leagues has more than doubled in the past decade, and this season Hispanics made up 30 percent of the players.
Most of them come from Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. The few Cuban players who can either defect while on tour or escape the island on homemade rafts, commonly known as balsas, end up in the major leagues. Regular Cuban citizens live a very precarious life, with no access to basic rights. There are limits on where they can live, what they can eat, what establishments they can enter, and most are not allowed to leave their town, let alone their country. But athletes are among the privileged. They can travel abroad and are fed hearty meals. Still, Yankee pitcher Contreras would be lucky to make $30 a month in Cuba - a far cry from the $30 million contract he has with the Yankees.
Puerto Ricans are passionate about two things, politics and baseball - maybe you can add a third: music. But with all the baseball tradition that exists on the island, and with decades of generating great players, Puerto Rico still has not been able to get its own Major League Baseball team, and players have to come to the mainland to play ball - even though Puerto Rico is part of the United States. Ivan Rodriguez was only 16 years old when he was recruited by the Texas Rangers from a high school in Vega Baja, Puerto Rico. And the kid - now 31 years old - has given back, with much benevolence. Among other things, he established his own foundation that assists families whose children are battling cancer in both Dallas and Puerto Rico.
Dominican Sammy Sosa might not have made it all the way to the World Series, but for thousands of Dominican kids, he is the biggest hero of all. He comes from the poor town of San Pedro de Macoris, a breeding ground for major-league players, where as a kid he made a glove out of milk cartons, a bat out of a tree branch and a ball out of a rolled-up sock with tape around it.
Like "Pudge" Rodriguez and so many other millionaire baseball players, Sosa has been very generous with his good fortune and donates thousands of dollars to needy children in his country and in the United States. Yet these athletes' contribution to their homelands can't really be measured in dollars and cents. Rather, they are perennial heroes and true role models for many youngsters currently dreaming, pitching and batting away in Latin America. |
