Life at Baseball’s Border : Delahoya Sets Sights on Taiwan After Receiving Fourth Pink Slip

When the phone rang in Javier Delahoya’s room at the Hotel Madrid here, his heart skipped a beat. After seven injury-plagued seasons in the U.S. minor leagues, Delahoya had come to Mexico to strengthen his arm and to prove to big league scouts that he deserved another shot at the major leagues. This, he hoped, was the call he was waiting for.

He picked up the receiver. “I have some news for you,” the voice on the other end said. But it wasn’t a scout. The call came from Delahoya’s newlywed wife, and she wasn’t offering a job. She was asking for a divorce.

Life, it seemed, had dealt Delahoya another bad hand. Though just 26, he already has been released four times, injured once and suffered the ignominy of having to ask for a job in the Mexican League, baseball’s version of the French Foreign Legion. And once here he had to deal with long bus rides, tiny clubhouses, late paychecks and cheap hotel rooms.

But he had never figured on divorce being part of that package.

“I kind of think back,” he said. “If I didn’t go there, maybe none of this would have happened.”

The sense of regret passes quickly, however. After returning to the Valley from Mexico late last month, Delahoya hooked up with the Bend (Ore.) Bandits of the independent Western League. But that tryout proved frustrating and Delahoya, hampered by arm problems and distracted by his personal troubles, he pitched poorly and was dropped from the team after just a couple of weeks.

“I’ve got to go on with my life,” he said. “And this [baseball] is what I like to do.”

In fact, it’s just about all he’s ever even thought of doing. As a youngster growing up in North Hollywood, Delahoya imagined himself pitching for the Dodgers. And he actually came close to living that dream: Four years after being drafted out of Grant High--where he won 10 of 11 decisions his senior year--Delahoya was pitching for the Dodgers’ double-A farm club in San Antonio.

But after the season, the Dodgers shuffled their minor-league rosters and placed Delahoya on waivers, never expecting him to be claimed. The Florida Marlins called their bluff, however, grabbing Delahoya and assigning him to their double-A club in the Eastern League.

“At first I was kind of excited,” he said. “But then I wished I would have stayed with the Dodgers.”

If his rise had been rapid, Delahoya’s fall was supersonic. In his first season in the Marlins’ organization, he lost all seven of his decisions and posted a 6.48 earned-run average before hurting his shoulder and being demoted to the Class A Florida State League for rehabilitation. A year later, he had surgery at the start of the season and finished the year in the bullpen at Class A Brevard County.

After the season, he was placed on waivers again, only this time no one claimed him and he became a free agent. The Mets invited him to training camp last spring, but his stay was a short one.

“Because of the surgery, I had no arm strength,” he said. “The ball was not getting there.”

So he was released again and by mid-April, when former minor-league teammates Mike Piazza, Raul Mondesi and Todd Hollandsworth were pulling on their uniforms in the clubhouse at Dodger Stadium, Delahoya was resting his pitching arm on a rickety wooden table in the claustrophobic locker room of the Minatitlan Potros, waiting patiently as the trainer tried to coax a tiny ultrasound machine to life.

A 16-team league stretching from Nuevo Laredo in the north to Cancun in the south, the Beisbol Liga Mexicana is, on some nights, the equal of triple-A ball, the top rung of the U.S. minor-league system.

Off the field, however, life in the Mexican summer league pales in comparison to many college programs. The country is suffering through the worst economic crisis in its history and baseball has not gone unscathed.

The minimum wage for those Mexicans lucky enough to find work is less than $3.50 a day, hardly enough to provide a family with food and shelter, never mind buying baseball tickets.

As a result only one Mexican League club averaged more than 4,000 fans a game last year. Team owners have instituted a number of measures to keep the league solvent, lopping two weeks off the schedule to reduce the season to 116 games and limiting travel, among other things.

“It’s a lot different down here,” said Delahoya, who was born in Durango and moved to North Hollywood at age 2. “The clubhouses are real small. We have no lockers. You just pick up a chair and get dressed. I think the shortest bus ride we have is eight hours.

“Just the way they treat people down here is a lot different. You know, the way they treat players. It’s a lot worse. I’m getting tired of this. But I gotta do what I gotta do.”

One look at Minatitlan and it’s obvious Delahoya didn’t come here for a vacation. The dusty city is hot and humid, and the giant Pemex oil refinery blankets the area with a thick pall of black smoke. Oil is king in this part of Veracruz, dominating the local economy and culture.

Even the city’s 6,000-seat ballpark--Estadio de Beisbol 18 de Marzo de 1938--is linked to the oil industry, taking its name from the day former president Lazaro Cardenas nationalized Mexico’s oil companies.

The five-year-old stadium is spacious and clean and would compare favorably with many minor-league parks in the United States. But for most games it’s also empty as few fans appear willing to spend three hours outside in Minatitlan’s sauna-like conditions. And the fact that the Potros, or Colts, were the second-worst team in the league this season didn’t help attendance.

“When the fans are out there, you get more motivated,” Delahoya said. “But when you look up in the stands and you see nobody’s up there, you’re just going [to go through the motions]. It’s hard.”

On a sunny Sunday afternoon in June, however, Delahoya made it look easy. In what may have been his best effort of the season, he held Saltillo to two hits through seven innings, striking out six.

Slender at 6 feet 2 and 160 pounds, and with his weathered blue Potro cap pulled down tight over his eyes, Delahoya looks much younger than 26 when he’s on the mound. After some first-inning problems finding the strike zone, he took control, frustrating a lineup that included such obscure former big-leaguers as George Wright, Juan Guerrero and Houston Jimenez.

“It’s good competition. You learn a lot down here,” Delahoya said. “You have to step it up a little bit because it’s not the same conditions down here. You just have to go to another level, [but] it’s going to make you stronger.”

Despite the education and the competition, Delahoya came to Mexico mainly in search of work. After pitching just 133 innings in two seasons, he was hoping to regain the arm strength that he’d shown in 1994, his last season in the Dodger organization, when he struck out 107 batters in 125 1/3 innings, both career highs.

And though he left Mexico with a week left in the season, Delahoya managed to squeeze in 12 starts and 67 innings around time spent on the disabled list because of an elbow problem.

“I was having a pretty good season until I got hurt,” said Delahoya, who had trouble convincing team officials he was in too much pain to pitch.

“The trainers . . . really aren’t very good,” he said. “If you get hurt, they really don’t know what to do. They send you to this rehab place and the rehab place says you’re OK and they want you to pitch the next day. I had to tell them that it doesn’t work that way.”

It’s no surprise, then, that Delahoya isn’t planning to return to Mexico next summer. At Bend, he pitched only 5 1/3 innings and posted a 6.75 ERA in his short stay.

That won’t earn him an invitation to spring training next year but he has other options, such as trying to hook on in the six-team professional league in Taiwan.

The only promise he makes is that, come next April, he’ll be playing baseball somewhere.

“I’m going to try until I can’t do it anymore,” he said. “It’s very tough to give it up.”