A Baseball Academy in a Talent-Poor Part of Mexico
Jennifer Kho for The New York Times
None of the academy's approximately 45 students come from Oaxaca.
By MATT KRUPNICK
Published: May 25, 2013
SAN BARTOLO COYOTEPEC, Mexico — In this tiny town just south of Oaxaca’s state capital, some of Mexico’s most talented young baseball players are taking their first real steps toward the big leagues.
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Jennifer Kho for The New York Times
A baseball academy that opened in 2009 has seven fields, a weight room, trainers, dormitories and even custom local art.
Pitchers practice their motions step by step as a coach yells: “Uno! Dos! Tres! Cuatro!” Typical baseball sounds — bats hitting balls, balls hitting leather — compete with the drone of cicadas.
The billionaire Alfredo Harp Helú opened this baseball academy, La Academia de Béisbol Alfredo Harp Helú, in 2009, and the sparkling school has seven baseball fields, a weight room, trainers, dormitories, even custom-made artwork by local potters. Harp’s plan, in part, was to prepare Oaxacan boys for major league careers.
But this school in the heart of Oaxaca, bordered by cornfields and wilderness, is missing one glaring element: Oaxacans. Of the 45 or so students, none are from this mountainous, impoverished state.
Only two Oaxacans, Vinny Castilla and Geronimo Gil, had made it to the big leagues before the academy opened. Most of the teenage boys from this state have failed to meet the academy’s talent requirements.
“Yes, that’s why we put it here,” said Eduardo de la Cerda, the school’s director, while boys sprinted down the right-field line of a field behind him. “But they need to have certain qualities.”
Nearly two-thirds of the school’s athletes are from the northern states of Sinaloa and Sonora, baseball hotbeds that also account for 60 percent of the players in the Mexican League, the country’s primary professional circuit. In contrast, the league has only four Oaxacan players this season, less than 1 percent of the total. Oaxaca’s 3.8 million residents account for about 3 percent of the country’s population.
“Oaxaca never was a place for baseball,” said Castilla, a former third baseman who grew up in Oaxaca, the capital. “The schools never had baseball teams. If you wanted to play baseball, you had to go through a league outside of school.”
Castilla hit 320 home runs during a 15-plus-year career in the majors and works in the Colorado Rockies’ front office. Gil, who spent six years as a major league catcher, plays for Harp’s Mexico City team. Other Oaxacans tended to show little interest in their major league careers when they would return home during the off-season, Gil said.
The atmosphere here is far different from the one most of the academy’s boys grew up in. Ernesto Alonzo Cazarez Arias, for one, endured a 24-hour bus ride to go to the academy.
Cazarez, a 17-year-old left-hander from Sinaloa, hopes to pitch for his favorite team, the Boston Red Sox. He said he would have made sure Oaxacans knew about their state’s major league accomplishments if he had grown up here.
“I think people don’t see the things Vinny Castilla did and aren’t that interested,” said Cazarez, who has a long scar on his throwing elbow, a result of surgery that sidelined him for two years. “If I was from here, I’d see this and tell other people who he is. He did amazing things in the major leagues.”
The sprawling state of Oaxaca is known for its spiced chocolate, spectacular beaches and colorful Day of the Dead celebrations. With one of Mexico’s largest indigenous populations, Oaxaca’s populace is relatively short in stature, which has perhaps contributed to residents’ lack of success in baseball and other sports.
Harp, who made his fortune in 2001 when Citigroup bought his bank, Banamex, has single-handedly shoehorned baseball into the Oaxacan consciousness. He brought Oaxaca a professional team, the Guerreros, in 1996. The team won the Mexican League championship in 1998 and attracts about 12,000 fans a week to its downtown stadium.
He also owns Mexico City’s Diablos Rojos, the country’s most successful baseball team, and part of the San Diego Padres. Harp, whose cousin Carlos Slim Helú holds a minority stake in The New York Times Company, said that he attends about 50 baseball games a year. He said having the academy near his Oaxaca home allowed him to deal with the off-season more easily.
“I like to stay involved in baseball all year,” Harp, 69, said during an interview in the restored 400-year-old convent that houses his foundation’s office in downtown Oaxaca. “Out of season, I go to the academy.”
It may be impossible to overstate Harp’s enthusiasm for baseball. His stamp museum in the city of Oaxaca opened a baseball-related exhibition in May, with stamps borrowed from Peter O’Malley, also a Padres owner and a former Los Angeles Dodgers owner.
Harp’s face lit up as he recalled checking box scores in the newspaper each morning as a child and seeing Mickey Mantle and Sandy Koufax play in a Mexico City exhibition game in the 1960s. He rattled off names of his favorite players: Mantle, Joe Morgan and Josh Gibson, the Negro Leagues slugger who also played in Mexico.
The academy mixes Harp’s love of baseball and his affinity for Oaxaca. Its two-story building is decorated with the black pottery specific to this town. Agaves and cactuses dot the campus, or at least those parts not covered by baseball fields.
The school sends players primarily to Harp’s two Mexican teams and the Mexican League’s academy near Monterrey, but major league teams have taken note. One alumnus, Roberto Osuna, is a pitching prospect in the Toronto Blue Jays’ organization, and several others are training at major league academies in the Dominican Republic.
“I think what he has built there is the No. 1 academy in Latin America,” Omar Minaya, a senior vice president with the Padres, said of Harp. “Traditionally, Oaxaca has not been a hotbed of baseball activity. I think it’s going to improve the level of baseball kids play in Oaxaca.”
So far, however, that improvement has not translated into Oaxacan baseball success. Many blame the sport’s lack of television exposure for its failure to catch on in Mexico’s southern regions and nationally, as soccer has; others say Oaxaca’s youth leagues are not instilling enough of a work ethic in their players.
Oaxacan boys “can do it, but they need discipline,” said Guillermo Spindola, general manager of the Guerreros, whose only local player, Jaime Brena, is sometimes announced as El Oaxaqueño when he comes to bat.
The academy scouts about 2,000 players a year throughout Mexico, Harp said. It is rare for a boy to enroll without being recruited, but a handful of Oaxacans try out every year. None of them have ever gained a coveted spot, said de la Cerda, the academy’s director.
Students, who live in the dormitories and pay nothing, can choose to take high school classes in the afternoons. But most bet it all on baseball, splitting their time among the weight room, the baseball diamonds and the batting cages or bullpens.
The experience has been more fun than expected for José Orlando Garza, a 17-year-old pitcher from Monterrey who was recruited by an academy scout last year.
“Before, I practiced very little,” said Garza, a 6-foot-3 right-hander. “I was more about Facebook and going out with my friends. But now I’m very focused.”
Harp and the academy’s leaders dream of a day when Oaxaca produces talented baseball players, but they appear far from concerned.
“I knew it would be difficult to find players from Oaxaca who meet the requirements,” de la Cerda said. “But if that were the main reason for the academy, we would have put it in Sinaloa or Sonora.”
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