Growing a sport in Venezuela

If you know nothing about Andres Reiner -- and chances are you don’t -- know this: Without him, the best left-handed pitcher in baseball today would probably still be hidden high in the Venezuelan Andes.

Which is why Johan Santana, the pitcher in question, thanks Reiner every chance he gets.

“He was the one that made it happen,” says Santana, who in February signed a record $137.5-million contract with the New York Mets. “To me, it changed my whole life.”

There are dozens of other Venezuelan players who can make the same claim. Because while Venezuela has a long and storied baseball history, it was Reiner -- a small, stooped 72-year-old Hungarian immigrant with a balding pate and wire-rimmed glasses -- who forced open the country’s pipeline to the major leagues.

More than three-quarters of the 215 Venezuelans who have played big league baseball made their debuts after Reiner and the Houston Astros established their developmental academy there in 1989. Thousands more have played in the minor leagues, many in the Venezuelan Summer League that Reiner founded.

It’s appropriate, then, that Milton H. Jamail’s long-overdue study, “Venezuelan Bust, Baseball Boom: Andres Reiner and Scouting on the New Frontier,” has Reiner not only in its title but at its core as well.

Reiner had little to do with inspiring the most important event in the growth of Venezuelan baseball -- though he certainly took advantage of it.

During the 1970s and early ‘80s, oil-rich Venezuela was the wealthiest country in Latin America. More than 75% of the population was middle class and rising, thanks in part to a government that spent lavishly, sending thousands of students abroad to study.

As a result, baseball was considered a game, not a career, and parents weren’t beyond hiding a son’s glove should he ever get the two confused. The major leagues paid the country little notice.

Then came Black Friday, Feb. 18, 1983 -- the bust in the book’s subtitle -- when a steep drop in oil prices led to a devaluation of the bolivar. Before long, more than half of all Venezuelans were considered poor and baseball suddenly was seen as a way to escape poverty, just as it is in the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Cuba and elsewhere in Latin America.

Timing was on Reiner’s side then when, less than a year later, the longtime Venezuelan resident approached the Astros, San Francisco Giants and Pittsburgh Pirates with his idea of a Dominican-style training academy, where Venezuelan prospects could be scouted, signed and developed.

All three turned him down.

Reiner was undeterred, telling everyone that Venezuela could produce as many major leaguers in the next five years as it had in the last 40.

He was wrong, of course. It took eight years.

During that period, Reiner had persuaded new Houston General Manager Bill Wood to spend $60,000 to fund his proposed academy, and in August 1989 the Astros’ Venezuelan facility opened in Valencia. And Reiner wasted little time proving his seemingly preposterous projections right: Eight of the first 14 players he signed went on to play in the majors, a ridiculously high success rate.

Few of them became stars with the Astros, though. Melvin Mora made his big-league debut with the Mets and became a two-time All-Star with the Orioles. Bobby Abreu played 74 games with Houston before becoming a two-time All-Star with the Phillies. And then there’s Santana. The Astros didn’t even want to fund Reiner’s 20-hour round-trip drive into the Andes to sign him.

Reiner went anyway, eventually persuading the skinny center fielder to come to the academy, then converting him into a pitcher.

Three All-Star games, two Cy Young Awards, two ERA crowns and three strikeout titles later, Santana has established himself as the most dominant left-hander in baseball. But he did all that for the Minnesota Twins because the Astros gave up on him after three minor league seasons.

Eventually Reiner began to see the Astros’ lack of faith in his prospects as an indictment of his program, so three years ago he resigned, moving briefly to the Cincinnati Reds and eventually the Tampa Bay Rays, where, as a special assistant, he’s opened training centers in Venezuela, Colombia and the Dominican Republic and sent scouts -- including Jamail, who retired from the faculty at the University of Texas at Austin last year to become an international player relations consult with the Rays -- to Nicaragua and Argentina. (Jamail researched this book for 15 years and finished the manuscript before joining Reiner’s new staff in Tampa.)

More than a dozen other teams have established academies in Venezuela since Reiner opened the door, helping the country surpass Puerto Rico as the second-leading offshore producer of big league talent, behind the Dominican Republic. And Reiner insists that’s just the beginning.

“This is not even close,” he told me when I visited him in Venezuela just before he left the Astros. “Five years from now, Venezuela will be producing more major leaguers than the Dominican [Republic].”

It wouldn’t be wise to doubt him.

--

kevin.baxter@latimes.com