THE 1987 PAN AMERICAN GAMES : Baseball : U.S. Puts Nicaragua to Rout by 18-0

It’s not often that Jim Abbott is overshadowed when he pitches, but he was way down on the believe-it-or-not list Wednesday at the Pan American Games.

First of all, no pitcher, not even one who was born without fingers on his right hand, is going to stand out when the hitters on his team have scored 42 runs in three games. Then there was the matchup--the Ollie North special--the United States vs. Nicaragua. As if that weren’t enough for one afternoon, among the crowd at Bush Stadium, besides Indiana Gov. Robert Orr, was jet-setting Bianca Jagger, the former Mrs. Mick Jagger, Nicaraguan expatriate and CBS special correspondent.

Besides, there wasn’t much to notice about Abbott after his first pitch.

The Nicaraguan leadoff hitter, center fielder Ceyetano Garcia, decided to test Abbott, dropping a bunt to the left of the mound. Abbott, never removing the glove from his stub of a right hand, fielded the ball cleanly with his bare left hand and threw Garcia out by two steps.

After that, the Nicaraguans didn’t try anything cute. Abbott was just another pitcher they couldn’t beat.

To beat him Wednesday, they would have had to score 19 runs. Instead, they scored none and lost, 18-0, in a game that was called after seven innings because of international baseball’s 10-run rule, also known as the slaughter rule.

By the time Abbott reached the mound in the bottom of the first inning, he already had a 10-0 lead. He pitched five innings, long enough to record the victory, while allowing four hits, striking out six and walking four.

“I didn’t have very good control,” said Abbott, a fastball pitcher who was clocked by major league scouts Wednesday at between 85 and 89 m.p.h. “I was really anxious to get out there and throw the first pitch. But I just sat there and waited and waited and waited.”

The United States set a Pan American Games record for runs in the first inning as their first eight men to the plate had hits.

That included a three-run home run by the third hitter, first baseman Tino Martinez of Tampa University. He came up again in the first inning with two men on base and doubled them home, giving him five runs batted in for one inning. He had another double in the fourth inning to drive in another run.

Through three games, all victories for the United States in the eight-team, round-robin tournament, Martinez is 9 for 13, including six extra-base hits, with 14 runs batted in.

“Shhhh, you might wake him up,” catcher Scott Servais said when asked about Martinez.

“Coach (Ron) Fraser won’t let us say anything to him when he comes to the dugout. He says, ‘Tino, go sit by yourself.’ He’s afraid we might do something to break the spell.”

Fraser, coach at the University of Miami for the last 25 years and the national coach when the United States won its only world championship in 1973, said he was concerned when the bus driver Wednesday morning couldn’t find the field where batting practice was scheduled.

“Maybe we shouldn’t take any more batting practice,” Fraser said. “I keep telling everyone we’re not a long-ball hitting club. Every day, they go out and make a liar out of me.”

In three games, the United States has scored 10 runs against Canada, 14 against Venezuela and 18 against Nicaragua. At that rate, the American will score 22 in their next game Friday night against the Netherlands Antilles.

When U.S. baseball officials asked Fraser to take the job, he said he would only if he could coach his way, which means aggressive, speed-oriented baseball. His players are always looking for ways to take an extra base. The power they’ve shown has been unexpected, but they never quit running even when they’re far ahead. They were successful on a double steal in the third inning Wednesday with an 11-0 lead.

Already leading 18-0 in the top of the seventh, shortstop Dave Silvestri of the University of Missouri tripled, then tried to score when the second baseman jogged back into the infield with the ball. Silvestri was thrown out, but barely.

Deciding that enough was enough, the Nicaraguan pitcher threw behind the next hitter. But no one got excited. Why bother at that point?

“This was like a boxing match,” Nicaragua’s coach, Argelio Cordova, said through an interpreter. “You hit a man one time and knock him out flat.”

After the first-inning knockout, Cordova called his team around him on the third baseline.

“I told them they knew what they were up against, but not to let their spirit down,” he said.

Spirits were high before the Pan American Games in Managua, the Nicaraguan capital. Nicaragua finished second in the 1983 Pan American Games, beating the third-place United States in the medal round, and was expected to contend for another medal this year. “We are a threat to the United States and Cuba, and that threat is baseball,” the head of Nicaraguan sports, Umberto Ortega, said in a farewell address to the athletes last week.

But Nicaragua has lost two of three games and is in danger of not advancing to the medal round, which consists of the four teams with the best records after the round-robin tournament.

The only other undefeated team through three games is Cuba, which beat Aruba, 13-2, Wednesday night. Cuba and the United States meet Saturday.

“Baseball is the No. 1 sport in the country,” Cordova said. “Victory for the team is victory for the country. Just because you’ve lost two battles doesn’t mean you’ve lost the war.”

Speaking of war, it was a popular subject among the crowd Wednesday.

One group carried a sign that said: “No More Money for the Contras.” Another had a sign that said: “Beat the United States; Stop the War.”

The most prominent spectator, in her slinky red dress, was Jagger, who was hired by CBS to do a commentary on baseball and where it fits into a war-torn country.

When a Miami Herald reporter in a postgame press conference started a question to Cordova by saying, “Considering the political climate . . . “

“That’s enough,” said a volunteer who was supervising the press conference for the Pan American Games Organizing Committee.

“This is the United States,” the reporter reminded the woman. “He doesn’t have to answer the question if he doesn’t want. But you can’t stop the question from being asked.”

When Cordova heard the entire question, which concerned his view of a baseball game between two countries that are at odds, he didn’t mind responding.

“If we had beaten them, I might even have had a drink of Coke right now,” he said.

Fraser is a political conservative who refused to leave the field to meet Cuban President Fidel Castro during a recent five-game series in Havana. Castro had to come to him. But Fraser said politics had nothing to do with the United States’ victory Wednesday.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” he said. “I don’t think our guys even think about that.”

Abbott agreed.

“Most of the guys on this team don’t even know who’s on whose side,” he said.

Who needs the contras when you’ve got Tino Martinez?