COMMENTARY : Latin Baseball Players Are Still Facing Major-League Barriers

For many baseball executives, the ideal player is a white farm boy from Iowa. Many baseball executives were once, not coincidentally, someone very much like that themselves. They threw balls against a barn one day and were in the big leagues the next. Either that, or they played eight years in the Three-I League, scratching and spitting and otherwise trying to be the American ideal.

None of them grew up in the Dominican Republic. Or wore heavy gold chains. Or spoke Spanish as a first language. Or was dumped at age 16 in a foreign country where he couldn’t even order dinner. In Pedro Guerrero’s first year in America, he ordered chicken every night, that being the only food word he knew. He would also cry himself to sleep, an experience he shares with virtually every other Latin player who makes his way to the United States, where all the fields are fields of dreams.

Jose Bautista, raised in a Dominican family of 16 children, arrived at Kingsport, Tenn., a farm club of the New York Mets, at age 16. He knew a little English, having spent some of his childhood in New York, living with an aunt. But he didn’t know much else, except that he was scared and lonely and couldn’t figure how he was possibly going to make it.

“Sure, I cried,” he says now. “I cry every night. I want to go home, to be with my mother. I was very, very lonely.”

He stayed, as many Latins do, because baseball is the most visible route out of the poverty that afflicts the Caribbean nations and much of Central America. And now, nine years later, Bautista is struggling to find a place in the Baltimore Orioles’ starting rotation, hoping to be a success story.

But that’s hardly the entire story. Here’s another part: There was the baseball executive who once confided to me that Dominicans were stubborn and uncoachable, if not outright dangerous. Then there was a rival general manager, in the 1987 season, who said that the Toronto Blue Jays would inevitably fold in the stretch because they fielded too many Latin players.

And this, too: Bautista takes aside younger Latin players and warns them against speaking Spanish too loudly in the clubhouse. “Some players get mad,” he says. “They think these guys talking Spanish are talking about them. They yell, ‘Speak English. Speak English.”’

Latin players are different. Ask anyone. Name your five favorite head cases, and I’ll bet four of them are Latinos. Who are the hot dogs? Who are the malcontents? Who doesn’t quite fit in?

“The problem in baseball is that we don’t take the time to understand the Latin player,” Orioles Manager Frank Robinson says. “We typecast them because that’s the easy thing to do. There are cultural differences that we don’t take into account. Latin culture is different from American culture. The language is different. A Latin player might be flashier or more flamboyant, but that might be part of his culture. We need to understand that.”

Bautista has the look. You can’t help but notice that. He has a certain swagger and wears a certain cut of clothes. Add the gold chains and the designer shades and you have a style that was once called machismo. He pitches that way, too, or so it’s popularly understood. He pitches with a swagger, trying to fire fastballs past batters who, instead, too often hit them out of the park. Last year, he bombed out after some early promise to take his place in Rochester. He had a bad back, he says, that he didn’t tell anyone about, and he had a blistered finger no one could stop from bleeding. No one could staunch the bleeding from the mound either. And now, he faces a crossroads.

Is Bautista too stubborn to learn? Or is there a language problem that gets in the way of the kinds of nuance that make good coaching meaningful? And how can you tell the difference?

“For many Latin players, language is the big problem,” Robinson said. “They can’t read a paper. They can’t order from a menu. They can’t watch TV. And on the field, you don’t know how much you’re saying is being understood. Even with Bautista, who speaks pretty good English, you don’t know exactly how much he understands. A young player is not going to stop you in the middle of explaining something and ask you to slow down. If you ask him if he understands, he just nods.

“We’re asking too much of that player, to be away from home, to speak another language when we don’t bother to learn his, and then to play baseball, too. It’s amazing to me how many do make it.”

Many do, of course. Just check the rosters. Bautista hopes to be the right kind of statistic, and says that after nine years the language problems don’t amount for much in his case. But he says, too, that he translates English into his head into Spanish and then answers questions in his head in Spanish and translates them back to English. He says it makes him tired sometimes.

He was tired Thursday, but only from running. In the off-season, he pitched winter ball, as usual, and worked on straightening out his forkball. He thinks he can be a better pitcher this year and is ready to start, relieve or do whatever he can to make the club. He isn’t worried about not getting a fair shake.

“All the players here are treated the same,” he says.

They all should be, with Robinson as manager. He understands prejudice, of course, having dealt with it. He understands stereotyping, having dealt with that, too. In Robinson’s day, it was often the black player who didn’t fit in, who was the hothead, who was the hot dog. And Robinson knows, too, about dealing with cultural differences. Once when he was managing in the off-season in a small town in Mexico, he left because he couldn’t deal with being the only person who spoke English.

“Baseball must address this situation,” Robinson said. “It wouldn’t be that difficult. In our organization, we should have someone in every town to help the Latin players, someone they can turn to when they’ve got a problem. We should have English classes for them, not so they won’t speak Spanish, but just so they can do the simple things to get along. And why can’t managers be required to take Spanish classes? We expect them to come over here and adjust to us, and we don’t make any effort to adjust to them.”

Bautista and others try to take in the younger Latin players. They teach them how to order from a menu, how to shop at the mall, how to get along with the coaches and managers. They talk to them in Spanish about coping in a place where they speak English, and they talk to them quietly, just so no one misunderstands.