Agran Cites Baseball as a Common Bond

Speaking in heavily accented Spanish, Irvine Mayor Larry Agran welcomed the Nicaraguan national baseball team to City Hall Thursday.

“I’m sure that everyone here has, in some way, felt the tension that exists between the government of your country and ours,” Agran said in a prepared statement. “Speaking as one American to another, though, I feel compelled to say that one of the surest ways to overcome this tension is by communicating through the common bonds that exist between us. Baseball is one of these bonds--a national pastime in both of our countries.”

The United States is backing rebels, known as contras, trying to topple Nicaragua’s Marxist-led government.

The Irvine visit is the Nicaraguan team’s only stop in Orange County during a weeklong trip to California. Agran and one of the tour sponsors, a Los Angeles-based organization called Bats Not Bombs, arranged the meeting to precede an afternoon game against Cal State Long Beach in Long Beach.

Pewter Paperweights

Agran presented the coaches of the Nicaraguan team with pewter paperweights bearing the Irvine city seal, and he passed around a new baseball for all the players to sign.

The Nicaraguans, who are visiting California for a series of exhibition games against college teams, seemed to enjoy the 45-minute meeting with Agran and a handful of city employees who stopped by the council chambers to introduce themselves.

“I’m impressed that the mayor of a city would take time out of his schedule to meet with us,” said Cesar Chavarria, the team’s catcher. Chavarria, 23, a computer-programming student, said sometimes he hears fighting between Sandinista army soldiers and rebels outside his hometown, Nueva Guinea. But, Chavarria said, the baseball team carried no political message on its trip to the United States.

“We aren’t representing anyone but our country,” Chavarria said. “We are here to play baseball and make friends.”

And the team apparently did that quite well Thursday afternoon, beating Cal State Long Beach, 9-5, before the game was called in the fifth inning because of rain.

The Nicaraguans won the first game of the series last Sunday, defeating UC Berkeley, 7-5. Today, they play at College of the Canyons in Valencia, and Sunday they face Santa Monica City College at Jackie Robinson Stadium on the UCLA campus.