STEPPING UP TO THE PLATA : Mexican Baseball Tries to Hit Out of an Economic Slump When the Padres and Mets Play Series in Monterrey

It’s the home opener of Mexico’s world series.

A no-name tenor is belting out the Mexican national anthem through a scratchy loudspeaker. A phone company executive is preparing to throw out the first ball. An army of bookies is working the stands, bleating out the odds on the first pitch. And the Mexico City Red Devils--a team whose average salary is $12,000 a year--are about to take the field for the Mexican League championship.

Their final series against the Monterrey Sultans is the most important of the year in the world’s oldest professional baseball league outside the majors. But less than half of the 23,000 battered seats at Mexico City’s aging Social Security Stadium are filled.

“Not good. Not good at all,” says Marco Almaraz, who has covered the visiting Sultans for Monterrey’s newspaper El Norte for nearly a decade. Shaking his head in the little press booth behind home plate, Almaraz concludes that the paltry attendance is just another sign of the bad times for Mexican baseball.

Thirty years ago, the Red Devils packed this place for the playoffs. In 1966, the summer season drew nearly half a million fans at a time when Mexico City’s population was 6 million. Last weekend, with a potential market of more than 20 million in the metropolitan area, the Devils couldn’t even sell out the bleachers at 14 cents a seat.

Enter the San Diego Padres.

In an experiment that Mexican baseball owners and officials hope will breathe new life into the sport south of the border, the first-place Padres start a three-game “home” series Friday against the New York Mets in the most unlikely of locales--Monterrey, Mexico.

The Padres and Major League Baseball are hyping it as the first regular-season series to be played on Mexican soil. The Padres have been promoting it for weeks, raffling free tickets and trips to the Mexican industrial capital and hawking souvenir T-shirts to mark the historic event.

But Mexico’s recent championship series, which brought in a mere 50,000 fans and $100,000 in ticket sales in five games, showed there’s more than history at stake this weekend in Monterrey Stadium.

In a word, it’s marketing.

For Larry Lucchino, Padre president and chief executive officer, the series is a golden opportunity to project a new presence in what he sees as the team’s most important potential new market.

“It has a lot of strategic importance to us,” Lucchino said. “We’re trying to regionalize the franchise. We’ve got to expand the definition of what our market is.”

With an ocean to the west, desert to the east and the Dodgers to the north, the team’s new ownership is looking south for growth. This weekend’s series is part of a campaign that includes bus service from Tijuana to San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium and other programs reaching out to communities on both sides of the border.

Mexican baseball experts say the Padres couldn’t have picked a better place.

Monterrey is an exception to the declining trend in Mexican baseball. It is home to the Mexican League’s Hall of Fame and a state-of-the-art baseball academy that opened last March. It’s closer to the border than Mexico City, and its Little League tradition has stood the test of time better than in the rest of the country.

In addition, Monterrey’s industrial economy has weathered Mexico’s worst recession in memory far better than has the capital. Two weeks ago, about 80% of the tickets for the Met-Padre series were already sold. And with Fernando Valenzuela--a Mexican League product from nearby Sonora--scheduled to be on the mound for the Padres in the opener against the Mets, Monterrey Stadium is a sure sellout, local baseball writers say.

Not that the Monterrey series started out that way. The idea for it began almost a year ago with an eviction notice.

Lucchino said organizers of the Republican National Convention were planning to use Jack Murphy Stadium for a closing ceremony that would interfere with a Padre weekend home series. The Republicans abandoned their plans in January, but “we were already pretty far down the road” with plans for the experimental series, Lucchino said. And the games would coincide with the 400th anniversary of the northern city.

Besides, the plan dovetailed “almost poetically” with Lucchino’s vision of the Padres’ future. “It sends a message that we have an affinity for, a comfort with and a desire to work with Mexico and with things Mexican,” he said. “We’d love to become the major league baseball team of Mexico.”

For Mexican League President Pedro Treto Cisneros, the series presents a different golden opportunity: survival. He said in a recent interview that he hopes the Padre-Met series will be a nationwide shot in the arm for a Mexican league that has produced about 70 ballplayers for America’s major leagues since it started here in 1925.

Baseball’s fall from grace here was documented in a poll last month of 400 Mexico City youngsters aged 10-14 by the capital’s newspaper Reforma. Asked to name their favorite sport, 50% of respondents said soccer, 28% basketball, 8% American football, 5% volleyball, 3% swimming and 2% “none.” Less than 1% said baseball, and only 2% could name a player on Mexico City’s Red Devils (but when asked to name a player on the Chicago Bulls, 69% offered up Michael Jordan and 19% said Scottie Pippen).

Treto and others offered a roster-length list of reasons for baseball’s decline in a nation that filled its ballparks beyond capacity in the 1950s and 1960s.

The Mexican League is virtually locked out of national commercial television. Both networks here air a few major league games each week but favor Mexican soccer, boxing, bullfighting, biking and other sports.

Predictably, there’s little money to back the sport. League players here are paid, on average, less than $1,000 a month; even top players peak at $10,000 monthly. Travel means bumpy buses, cheap hotels and occasional dysentery. Uniform shirt backs are emblazoned not with players’ names but with ads that help keep the privately owned teams afloat.

Also lacking is early initiation for fans and prospective recruits. Virtually every Mexican village has a basketball court. Many have soccer pitches. But a baseball diamond is a rarity in rural Mexico.

Finally, there are the Mexican League facilities themselves. Monterrey’s stadium, the nation’s newest, is an exception; Mexico City’s Social Security Stadium was built 40 years ago by the government agency for which it is named.

When it was dedicated on March 13, 1955, the tin, gun-metal and concrete stadium was a showcase. Today, it’s downright dangerous--not the least of the hazards being the city’s notoriously corrupt police. Fans’ cars, valet-parked blocks away, routinely are chopped up, stolen or ticketed during the game. A Pittsburgh Pirate scout was beaten and robbed by police nearby while on a recruiting trip earlier this year.

And inside the stadium, well, the scoreboard sound system treats fans to nine innings of recorded sounds meant to rattle the visiting team, punctuating their at-bats with the noise of crying babies, mooing cows, cuckooing clocks, quacking ducks, boing-ing springs and Three Stooges routines.

Bookies abound: Bets can be placed on every pitch. Men far outnumber women and children. And the $1.10 hot dogs stay with you all night.

Moreover, the quality of the play is nearing rock-bottom.

The top of the first in the Red Devils’ home opener against the Sultans last Saturday lasted half an hour, complete with two errors, a wild pitch and a seemingly endless string of singles. The Devils went on to lose the best-of-seven series in Game 5 Monday night.

Still, Treto remains optimistic. His league has produced such Mexican legends as Valenzuela and Colorado Rocky star Vinny Castilla, and he added that he hopes baseball will boom back when the Mexican economy turns the corner.

Treto said he even hopes that the interest generated by this weekend’s series will persuade Major League Baseball to look favorably on Monterrey Sultan owner Jose Maiz’s pending application for a big league franchise.

Already, the Mexican League has detailed plans for a new, 45,000-seat baseball stadium with full amenities in the Mexican capital. The only problem, Treto said, is the cost: $28 million.

When asked where the money will come from, the league president looked toward the sky. “If God believes in baseball, I’ll get it.”