Nicaraguan Baseball Team Hits a Home Run With Its Fans

Nicaraguan immigrants--a Los Angeles community long divided by the politics of its embattled homeland--shared an afternoon of baseball and camaraderie Sunday, cheering wildly for a touring team of Nicaraguan all-stars and leaving their ideologies at home.

Not that the visiting Nicaraguans needed prodding. They were ahead 7-0 at the end of the first inning, against a much younger and less experienced Santa Monica Community College team.

“It’s clearly no match,” said Eduardo Molina, 38, of Buena Park, waving at a friend he spotted across the stands at UCLA’s Jackie Robinson Stadium filled with more than 1,000 fans. “But, we’re having a good time because we’re all paisanos here . . . we’re enjoying the feeling of unity.

“In sports, politics do not exist,” he added, echoing the sentiments expressed again and again by others in the stands, by members of the two teams, coaches and organizers of the weeklong California tour that ended Sunday.

Outside the stadium, however, about a dozen placard-carrying demonstrators denounced the sporting event as “communist propaganda” and expressed support for the U.S.-backed war to overthrow Nicaragua’s leftist Sandinista government.

“They’re just making fools of themselves,” scoffed Francisco Gonzalez, 38, as he and his family walked by the demonstrators. “As world opinion knows, the real aggressor in this situation is the United States.”

Leaving the protesters and politics behind, Gonzalez added: “I came today as a Nicaraguan and a sports fan to watch baseball and support my team, not a political ideology.”

The Nicaraguan team, returning to the United States for first time since participating in the Olympic Games in Los Angeles two years ago, came at the invitation of a group organized under the name “Bats Not Bombs.”

Team members said they received a warm welcome in the San Francisco Bay Area, where they played the University of California, Berkeley, as well as in Southern California, where they played Long Beach State University and the College of the Canyons in Valencia earlier in the week.

Some Nicaraguan players conceded that the teams they played offered little competition. But that did not bother Ronald Martinez, one of three officials of Nicaragua’s national amateur baseball federation traveling with the team.

‘Compete in Friendship’

“For us the important thing is the opportunity to come and compete in friendship. The best expression between nations is people-to-people, and we have been very well received,” Martinez said.

But the tour didn’t go as smoothly as organizer Andrew Liberman had hoped.

Standing behind a table selling T-shirts emblazoned with the event’s logo, Liberman complained about the lack of support he encountered raising funds for the tour. Expenses have totaled about $20,000, including air fare and team accommodations, he said.

Liberman, a free-lance writer, organized the tour “almost single-handedly,” with the help of personal friends, he said. He added that some groups opposed to U.S. intervention in Central America, whose support he had counted on, actually pressured him to hold back on the tour because they thought he had not allowed enough lead time to organize it successfully.

Thanks to Mother

“If it wasn’t for my mother, there wouldn’t be a tour,” he said, explaining that she had allowed use of her credit card to pay for some of the expenses, provided transportation, and even had cooked for the team. He said that most of the expenses were covered through donations.

Some college coaches also criticized the event’s organization, contending that the timing of the tour--during the college baseball off-season--and the short notice some of them received, didn’t offer the best opportunity for making the games more competitive.

Praising Liberman for his “well-intentioned concept,” University of Southern California baseball director Rod Dedeaux said that he nevertheless “warned him (Liberman) early on of the perils of putting this thing together” without the necessary organizational and logistical backup.

“We shouldn’t do anything with foreign countries unless we can do it absolutely correctly and first class,” said Dedeaux, a longtime promoter of international competition. “I’d feel badly if the Nicaraguans don’t get the right kind of competition.”

Glad for Chance

Nevertheless, most coaches who agreed to play the Nicaraguans said they were glad for the chance to pit their players against the highly ranked Nicaraguan national team.

“It’s a great honor to play such a quality team. They’re just about professional level,” Santa Monica Community College baseball coach Marty Berson said as he watched the Nicaraguans warming up for Sunday’s game. “We’re just hoping to give them some competition and to keep from getting embarrassed.”

The game’s final score was 20 to 8.