A Lot of Care, a Little Bit of Conniving Are Behind This Scouting Success Story : Island Helps to Shape an NL West Contender

Late last summer, sundown is turning the bamboo that crowds their mountain village from green to pink as a group of young baseball players and coaches from American Legion Post 76 charge out of the Estadio Municipal.

Laughing and shouting, they pile into cars and bounce through the craters of the parking lot and into the street. They turn left and onto a winding road of two lanes, then one lane. They sneak past tiny shacks stocked with cigarettes and liquor, sneak around roaming chickens and finally pull up in front of a shack bigger than the others, which qualifies it as a restaurant called Los 2 Mangoes.

On the side of the road overlooking a valley of thick, wet green, they unload and pile in to eat. And how they eat. There is caldo de pollo. There is conmontongo. There is a drink called Coco-Rico; for those daring enough to imagine, imagine carbonated coconut water.

American Legion Post 76 has just won the Puerto Rican championship. Of all the great young talents here, who learn to play baseball as we learn to read, they are the best. In 6 hours of salsa and singing this night, they look as you’d expect any other championship team from a mountain on an island in the middle of the ocean to look.

With one exception: They are wearing San Diego Padres uniforms.

Real, once-worn-by-Padres uniforms.

Padre pin-striped shirts. Padre brown socks. Padre brown cleats. And the money spent on this party comes largely from paychecks given the coaches by the Padre front office more than 3,500 miles away.

This is crazy?

This is paradise.

If popular opinion is to be believed, the Padres will wake up many mornings this summer in first place in the National League West. Some say it is because they have great starting pitching. Or they have terrific hitting. Or they have a great bullpen.

Yet there is another, bigger reason; a reason the size of Connecticut, with a different voice and rumpled clothes and a habit of pushing people to the edge of reason.

The Padres have Puerto Rico.

Like Puerto Rico has Bacardi.

Their best two young major league players--catcher Benito Santiago and second baseman Roberto Alomar--are Puerto Rican.

Three of the organization’s top 12 minor league prospects--catcher Sandy Alomar Jr., third baseman Carlos Baerga and pitcher Ricky Bones--are Puerto Rican.

One of their best starting pitchers came as a result of a Puerto Rican--remember when Dennis Rasmussen was acquired for Candy Sierra?

There are 19 Puerto Ricans in the Padre organization, about 16% of the total number of Puerto Ricans (about 120) in organized baseball. Eight members of the Padres’ current 36-man big-league roster, or 22%, are from Puerto Rico. Walk in their clubhouse, close your eyes, and you could be in, well, the Bronx.

“Those numbers are pretty much unheard of,” said Randy Smith, Padre scouting director.

“Look out,” outfielder Carmelo Martinez said with a laugh. “Before you know it, the Puerto Ricans rule this club.”

The change of power is the result of an overthrow of attributes that make the Padres one of the mildest-mannered organizations in baseball.

If you think the Padres are above a little guerrilla warfare, then you have not seen them among the farmlands of Dorado (Martinez’s hometown), the dusty streets of Lucca (Benito Santiago) or the fish shanties of Salinas (the Alomar family). You haven’t seen them surrounded by children in monthly tryout camps on fields of hard dirt, teaching dozens how to bunt and back up and take the extra base, kids who previously thought San Diego was a guy living down the street.

You haven’t seen the Padres sitting in open-air garages of these children’s parents, talking long and loud over the endless chirp of the coqui, talking of how the wonders of the island do not compare with the wonders of a professional contract, particularly one with an organization whose nickname is the Spanish word for “father.”

And certainly, you didn’t see them in the spring of 1983 when they signed Candy Sierra. In fact, not many of the Padres saw that.

At the start of spring training in 1983, Luis Rosa, then a Padre scout, was prepared to sign hard-throwing Ulises Sierra from the little north coast town of Loiza. The problem was, Sierra wouldn’t be 16 (then the official signing age) until March 27, and other scouts were beginning to notice him. So Rosa flew Sierra to the Padre spring training site in Yuma, Ariz., to hide him for a month.

That much was not unusual. What happened when Sierra checked into the hotel was.

“I didn’t want anybody to find us here, so I had to change his name,” Rosa recalled recently. “I saw him eating a lot of candy, so I made it ‘Candy.’ ”

On March 27, 1983, the minute he turned 16, Sierra became a Padre. Five years later, thanks to him, the Padres acquired one of their top starting pitchers.

So who cares that there is a kid running around today with a name in the record books that is not his name and not a name known by anyone in his homeland?

“I knew Sierra was at spring training back then,” said Tom Romenesko, the Padre farm director who then also supervised the club’s scouting, “but I had no idea it had anything to do with changing his name or keeping him hidden.”

Just another day in paradise.

Sometimes the Padres have played it fast, other times loose, but in the end their approach has been honest, and the result on this island of 4 million has been trust.

“Bottom line,” Randy Smith said, “is that we just work harder there than anybody else. And the people know it. They know the Padres will take care of them. And that’s what matters.”

Or perhaps, what used to matter. Things will change this summer, because major league baseball recently passed a rule that will end the days of circus recruiting and free spending. Puerto Ricans have been thrown into the same June draft as players from the United States. Suddenly, with regard to that good young kid from Fajardo who wants to play for your team, you must either draft him or hope he goes undrafted before you sign him.

While it seems the rule was designed to halt the Padres’ rush, they say it was only to stop a rush of money. It has grown such that some top Puerto Rican prospects can command $100,000 before they are able to legally drive.

Furthermore, the Padres insist the rule will not seriously affect them. The Padres say the only difference is that when they uncover a top talent, they will now just stop telling other teams about it.

“Other scouts always calling my wife and asking her where I go,” said Ronquito Garcia, the Padres’ Latin-American scouting supervisor. “In the past, she always tell them. They can know who I’m looking at, I don’t care, we still sign the kid.

“But now it’s different. Now, if I go south, my wife tells them I go north.”

Roberto Clemente’s life-sized statue is there as it ought to be, tall and black, an unmoving sentry for the eastern San Juan baseball complex that bears his name.

Good thing he’s facing the street.

“Thank goodness Clemente can not see this,” says scout Luis Rosa, who left the Padres in the winter of 1985 and now works for the Chicago Cubs. “He would not like this.”

On this Sunday morning, this planned symbol of hope for the underprivileged ballplayers is a candidate for welfare. The road through the complex appears as if someone has been chewing on it. Because of rain the previous evening, two of the three baseball infields are traversed by streams. The other infield has been smoothed out for a practice game, one that will be witnessed by thousands of outfield weeds.

The symbol here is not of hope but of disillusionment, a feeling that has pervaded these want-to-be-happy island people in their dealings with outsiders for 400 years. As soon as they trusted the weather, there were been hurricanes. As soon they trusted the Spanish, here came the United States.

This mistrust was something recognized by Padre Manager Jack McKeon when he first managed here in 1971 in the Puerto Rican winter league. He took that mistrust by the hand and whispered in its ear.

“He was one of the first Americans to come down here and be our friend,” said Garcia, formerly a general manager in the Puerto Rican League, which plays a 60-game season often used by big leaguers for a winter workout. “He liked us, he liked Puerto Ricans. And we loved him.”

The way McKeon tells it, the courting was easy. He walked into Arecibo his first year and found a team bogged down with older American players, who were usually the main attractions. He promptly benched the Americans and filled the starting lineup with young Puerto Ricans. For the next 6 years there, his teams always were led by young Puerto Ricans. The rest of the Puerto Rico did not forget.

“I was the first one to try that, and before you knew it, I had the island in my hand,” McKeon said recently, pointing to the several proclamations and thank-you plaques from Puerto Rico that hang in his office. “That was all it took. I played their kids, and soon they all wanted to play with me, both in Puerto Rico and the big leagues.”

McKeon was in the Kansas City Royals’ organization at that time, but only as a manager, not a player personnel guy, so his influence was wasted. As soon as he became general manager of the Padres in 1980, he made up for lost time. He hired Rosa to be his scout and began calling in markers.

“McKeon is very, very big man here,” Rosa said. “As soon as he joined the Padres, everybody want to join the Padres.”

The Padres were happy to send them contracts. While teams such as the Dodgers and Toronto Blue Jays have won championships thanks to the Dominican Republic, which supplies three times as many players to pro baseball, the Padres prefer Puerto Rico for a few reasons.

--With no visa required to enter the United States from Puerto Rico, the players are easier to move.

--With at least a minimal exposure to English on the island, the players are easier to teach.

--With better nutrition, the players are healthier.

“All around, it’s a better situation,” Romenesko said. “You go get a 17-year-old kid in the Dominican Republic, he may have the body of a 14-year-old, with no concept of our language, and then you have to hassle to move him to the United States.

“With a Puerto Rican kid, you pretty much know what you are getting.”

And that is?

“A kid who is pretty easy going, pretty hard to rattle,” Romenesko said. “A kid who knows and understands baseball and understands, if he doesn’t make it in the big leagues, he can always go to the United States some other way. Or he can always go home to his village, where it’s bad, it’s sometimes poverty, but it’s not the awful situation of other places.”

“In other words, he is a kid with nothing to lose. And he plays like it.”

Amazing Statistic No. 1: Not one person on the baseball side of the Padre front office speaks fluent Spanish.

“I just got this report from one of our people down there, it looks great,” Randy Smith said, waving a piece of paper. “Problem is, I have no idea what it says.”

Amazing Statistic No. 2: It doesn’t matter. Nobody listens to them anyway.

The Padres’ front office voice in Puerto Rico is strictly the voice of their scouts. The Padre success story here is the story of these scouts, currently three middle-aged men whose chief ability, it seems, is to be able to walk through any of 2 million doors here and be hugged and toasted and invited to stay for dinner.

In the United States, Padre scouts are people who simply work for them. In Puerto Rico, their scouts live for them. The scouts not only speak the language, they also talk the talk. They not only know where all the ballplayers are, they know where the best fish pastries are sold and the best beer is swallowed and all the shortcuts.

“By the time you sign a kid down here, you have lived with his family for years,” Ronquito Garcia said before taking a visitor on a back-roads tour that covered three towns, one living room and this Spanish exchange with a father concerning his son.

Father, pointing to boy: “Ronquito, my son, he is a shortstop, he can play.”

Garcia, looking as sincere as if that boy were Benito Santiago: “We will see, we will see.”

The boy was 8.

Indeed the Padre scouts see, although it’s rarely there in front of them. In the United States, scouts simply watch high school baseball games. Here, incredibly enough, there are no high school baseball games. There is only various versions of what is called Juvenile League, which ultimately feeds an American Legion league, all of which generates such chaos that the scouts simply take over the teams as sponsors or managers to ensure they know the players.

The Cidra American Legion team, for example, is managed by the Padres’ three scouts on a rotating basis. One will work the game while the other two scout other games. The most important manager is Garcia, because he is the one who brings in the old Padre uniforms from spring training every year.

Also, in the United States, games are played most every afternoon or evening of the week, making it easy to see every team at least once. In Puerto Rico, the games are played only on the weekends.

“You see two innings one place, two innings the next place, you drive all over the island and get home at midnight,” said Jose Cora, father of Padre second base prospect Joey and a part-time scout. “Here, you work.”

Here, you learn ingenuity. When Santiago was playing Little League, his manager was--you guessed it--part-time Padre scout Abraham Martinez. The scout was playing the boy at--you’ll never guess this--shortstop.

“But then I notice that he makes every catch one-handed, even tough ground balls, never puts his other hand in the glove,” Martinez recalls. “I think, this would be good for a catcher, and organizations need catchers, so I tell him his future is as a catcher.”

And a rookie of the year was born. Of course, Martinez can’t be given all the credit. In Santiago’s first game as a Juvenile League catcher, he surprised everyone by picking a guy off second base from his knees and was promptly ordered never to do that again lest his ruin his arm.

Here, you also learn resourcefulness. The day before the baseball owners created the rule this winter that required Puerto Ricans to be drafted, the scouts threw together a tryout camp up the mountain in Cidra. They showed off their best kids to Smith and Romenesko. Shortly before midnight, after a brief discussion, they handed contracts to three of them.

“Boom, boom, boom,” Garcia said. “Three more Padres.”

A typically Latin story, but one that pales beside the stories scouts tell about the one who came before them, the one who started the Padre rush here, the much-celebrated “Americano,” Luis Rosa.

He now works for the Cubs, having parted ways with the Padres in 1985 in a dispute over his methods, but Rosa may one day sneak through the back door into a Padre Hall of Fame. He signed Benito Santiago. He signed the Alomar brothers. He signed Candy Sierra. He signed Carlos Baerga.

Rosa is short and chubby, with a physically enormous mouth that grows even larger when he talks about himself. He runs around in sweat pants and T-shirts and baseball caps, but mostly, he wears ego.

“Latin American baseball was dead until I started working here,” proclaimed the Puerto Rican native, who spent just enough time as a kid in New York City to learn the meaning of the words “self promotion.” Rosa used to be a coach with McKeon and then was hired as the Padres’ top Latin scout as soon as McKeon became general manager.

“He was the best, and the bottom line was, he got the job done,” McKeon said.

This is a man who can best be described by a scouting mission to unfriendly Columbia, on which his rental car broke down in the middle of the jungle. He phoned the police and told them, quite honestly, that he was a Padre.

“In Columbia, that word means ‘priest,’ and within 10 minutes I had six guys trying to help me,” he said.

Turning in expense budgets of more than $50,000 some years, about four times the normal expenses for the normal Padre scouts, and pulling enough funny tricks and admitted scams to cost them much more in worry, he finally drove the Padres to find someone else.

But not before:

--He took Benito Santiago from his home in Jauca 1 year before Santiago was eligible to sign. Rosa moved him 2 hours north to San Juan, where Santiago lived in a hotel and played for Rosa’s American Legion team. At the time, in 1981, Santiago was 15.

“When I tell people I grow up fast,” Santiago said, “I mean, I grow up fast. “

--He was so worried about getting Roberto Alomar, he signed him 3 days before Alomar was eligible, post-dating the contract to his 17th birthday. Unfortunately, that birthday fell on the Sunday that could have been the final game of the Juvenile League championships. If Alomar’s team didn’t clinch the title beforehand, he would have been ineligible for the championship.

“So on Saturday, when they had to win to cinch, I was sweating for 2 straight hours,” Rosa said. “Can you imagine if a team’s best player couldn’t play for them in the biggest game of the year because he was already a Padre? I would have been killed. I would have left the island in a box.”

Thanks to Alomar, though, they mounted a fifth-inning rally on Saturday and won and clinched. The next afternoon, he was signed and delivered.

“I lived,” Rosa said.

Just another day in paradise.

PADRES FROM PUERTO RICO

Name Pos. Status with Padres Carmelo Martinez OF Big league roster Dickie Thon SS Big league roster Roberto Alomar 2B Big league roster Sandy Alomar Jr. C Big league roster Benito Santiago C Big league roster Carlos Baerga 3B Big league roster Rickey Bones P Big league roster Joey Cora 2B Big league roster Omar Olivares P Riverside (Class A) Rafael Chavez P Riverside (Class A) Osvaldo Sanchez OF Charleston (Class A) Jose Valentin INF Charleston (Class A) Jose LeBron P Spokane (Rookie League) Luis Lopez 2B Spokane (Rookie League) Pedro Lopez C Scottsdale (Rookie League) Alexis Figuero P Scottsdale (Rookie League) Jose Borgas P Recently signed Luis Galindes OF Recently signed Adam Ayala C Recently signed