A Country Makes Baseball Comeback : Nicaragua: Once the game was played well there, but war and politics intervened. With the war over, the nation and the game are rebuilding.

Several years ago, at the height of the Nicaraguan contra war, a story began making the rounds in Managua about a clash between government troops and U.S.-backed rebels. Seems that, during one of the infrequent breaks in the fighting, a Sandinista army patrol surprised a group of guerrillas.

With a cease-fire in effect, the two armies marked off an open field and decided to settle their differences by playing baseball.

The story is probably apocryphal, but that many believed it demonstrates the importance Nicaraguans put on baseball. In a divided country, where emotions often run as high as the temperature, baseball is a common denominator.

“Baseball unifies Nicaragua,” said Emmett Lang, president of the country’s amateur baseball federation and a former director of Nicaragua’s Institute of Sport. “Baseball is the passion of the people. They love to play baseball; they love to watch baseball.”

Yet, as the decade-long contra war drained the country of resources and manpower, and the U.S. economic embargo cut the nation off from its primary source of baseball equipment, the level of play in Nicaragua dropped dramatically. Now, however, the country may be poised for a turnaround.

In the wake of last February’s national elections, which brought an end to 10 years of Sandinista rule, the U.S. has ended both the contra war and the embargo, and baseball appears to be among the first of the beneficiaries. In May, the San Francisco Giants signed two players and, a day later, the Montreal Expos signed three more--the first Nicaraguans permitted to sign professional contracts in more than 11 years.

In addition, the Giants, as part of a joint venture with the municipal government of Leon, are researching plans to build a baseball academy in Nicaragua. Rough blueprints have been drawn, and a delegation of front-office people from the Giant organization are expected to make an on-site inspection later this year.

“There’s a lot of raw material, good raw material, in Nicaragua, but they don’t have the right trainers,” said Santos Soto, a Nicaraguan businessman based in San Francisco. Soto, along with Julio Gonzales, the Giants’ Nicaraguan-born radio announcer, helped the team make contacts in Nicaragua.

“If this thing goes forward, baseball in Nicaragua will go forward,” Soto said.

But the development of Nicaraguan players will not come cheaply for major league teams. After watching foreign interests harvest from its rain forests and gold mines for decades, Nicaragua isn’t about to let another treasured natural resource--its baseball players--go for nothing.

“What Nicaragua doesn’t want is for a team to go in there, take a player away and not give anything in return,” Soto said. “Nicaragua is going to benefit if the Giants go forward with the academy. They (the Giants) are going to develop the players, and they are going to develop the trainers.”

In the 1950s and ‘60s, big league teams played a major role in developing Nicaragua’s baseball talent. The Nicaraguan First Division was a popular alternative to the Caribbean winter leagues, and U.S. players such as Marv Throneberry and Steve Boros played there, honing their skills and teaching the Nicaraguans.

But in the late ‘60s, the bottom fell out of the international cotton market, devastating one of Nicaragua’s major export crops. The economic crunch prompted the government to withdraw its funding for baseball, and, as a result, the Nicaraguan Winter League died. U.S. major leagues sent their players to Venezuela, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic.

Amateur baseball, however, thrived in Nicaragua, and in 1972, La Seleccion Nacional, the country’s national team, won the world championship. Before the end of the decade, four players had signed with major league organizations. Outfielder David Green joined St. Louis and pitchers Dennis Martinez, Al Williams and Porfirio Altamirano signed with Baltimore, Minnesota and Philadelphia, respectively.

But the overthrow of the Somoza government in 1979 changed Nicaraguan society--including baseball--radically. Officials appointed under the new government, such as Lang and Carlos Cuadra, a former director of Nicaraguan baseball, turned the national baseball program in a new direction, diverting resources from the national team.

Cuadra, 33, thought the old approach elitist, because it concentrated on only about 30 players at a time.

“Once those boys got older, who came along to replace them? No one,” Cuadra said. Instead, he hoped to make baseball a mass-participation sport.

As a result, the Institute of Sport, a cabinet-level ministry under the Sandinistas, began stressing quantity over quality, with mixed results. Lang points with pride to the nearly 300 organized teams for farmers and youngsters as one effect of the revolution. Another, however, has been a dismal record in international competition, including a 19-2 loss to Japan in the 1984 Olympics and an 18-0 drubbing by the United States in the 1987 Pan-American Games.

And by 1988, the 10-team Nicaraguan First Division, once compared favorably to triple-A ball in the U.S., had sunk to Class A level.

“The truth is that the Sandinistas just did not want any professional players,” Soto said. “There was no secret about that. They abolished professional boxing, too.”

So major league baseball stayed away. At one point, the Toronto Blue Jays smuggled a player out, but Brant Jose Alyea never advanced beyond the minors and reportedly wound up in the Mexican League.

“From what I heard, they just wouldn’t let the players out,” said Scott Asher of the Giants’ minor league operation.

Yet for every hurdle erected by the Sandinistas, there was another built by the major league teams themselves.

“I told my people not to go into Nicaragua . . . . when there were problems. I just told my people to stay out of danger,” Frank Wren of the Expos said. “I don’t know of any roadblocks other than the ones we set up ourselves.”

Added Terry Reynolds, assistant director of scouting for the Dodgers: “My feeling is that the time just wasn’t right in the last few years,”

Now the Sandinistas are out of power. And although the new government has stripped the Institute of Sport (IDN) of its cabinet-level status, it is hoping to reinvigorate the national program with new funding and new thinking. Although Lang remains head of the Nicaragua Olympic Committee and intends to fulfill the final three years of his term as president of the Nicaraguan Amateur Baseball Federation, federation founder Carlos Garcia, who spent five years in a Sandinista jail, has returned to take a high-level position with the IDN.

That’s almost certain to hasten the return of professional baseball in some form, and it’s clear the Nicaraguans are counting on massive support from major league organizations to make that happen.

The Giants’ signing of brothers Harold and Donald Herdocia last May might have been the first step toward normalizing relations between Nicaragua and major league baseball. Harold, 19 last month , is considered the better prospect. A first baseman, he was Nicaragua’s First Division rookie of the year last winter and is the nephew of Julio Medina, recently voted the country’s player of the decade for the 1980s.

The day after the Herdocias signed, the Expos signed pitcher Felix Moya and two other players from the English-speaking Caribbean side of the country, the region that produced Stanley Cayaso and Eduardo Green, regarded as the best players in Nicaraguan history.

But for Lang, 42, a former Sandinista official who directed the air force before moving into the IDN, the signings amounted to a small-scale invasion.

“Three of the best players in the country signed, and now they’re gone and we have nothing,” he said. “A player is like the product of a society. The society sacrifices and works to produce a player, then the people can’t enjoy this player’s performance because he’s no longer in the country.”

Still, Lang supports the Giants’ proposed baseball academy, which will be modeled after major league facilities in the Dominican Republic. Lang has visited the Dodgers’ Dominican facility in Campo Las Palmas, which was carved out of a sugar plantation, and was impressed. But more important, he came away convinced that the facility served the community as well as the Dodgers.

It’s that kind of reciprocity he hopes to see from the Giants.

“If they give something back, then it’s OK,” Lang said with a shrug.

But unlike the Dominican Republic, the talent level in Nicaragua is limited and, for most clubs, that would seem to make the construction of elaborate facilities a losing proposition.

“I don’t think (Nicaragua) is the next horizon by any means,” said Montreal’s Wren. “It’s a very limited market. In places like Panama or Nicaragua, if you get one player every five years, that’s about all you can hope to get out of there.”

Partly because of that, the Giants are not likely to limit enrollment at their academy to Nicaraguans. Major league teams are limited to 23 “visa slots” each year, meaning they can bring 23 foreign-born players not on their 40-man roster to the United States for training and development. Some clubs, such as the Giants, save the majority of their visa slots for Puerto Rican and Dominican players who come to Arizona for spring training, then return to developmental leagues in the Caribbean.

The Herdocia brothers, for example, were assigned to Ingenio Provernir, a team that plays in the San Pedro de Macoris Division of the Dominican league.

The opening of another training and development facility in Latin America, along with access to the Nicaraguan First Division, would allow the Giants to sign more players from Mexico and Central America without overcrowding their Dominican operation or violating the visa slot agreement.

“We have an interest in researching the prospect of setting up something in Nicaragua similar to what we have in the Dominican,” Asher said.

Reynolds, whose Dodgers recently completed an agreement to open a development facility in Australia, sees value in the Giants’ expansion--especially if the Cold War thaw spreads to Cuba.

“All baseball is looking and hoping that will happen, and you do need a place, a base of operations, where you send players and evaluate them without using up one of your slots,” he said.

Added Asher: “If that country opened up, you would see people fighting hand over fist to get in.”