Sports
Sportsmen

The Illusion of Traveler's Expertise (1990)

John Krich's El Béisbol (Prentice-Hall,1989) purports to be an impressionistic critical examination of Latin American baseball. As a veteran visitor to Puerto Rico (and a fanático of the baseball there), I opened it to chapters about a world I know. The first gross mistake to strike my eye appears on page 43 in the reference to "Hiram Bluthorn Stadium, the home of the [San Juan] Metros, named after the first Puerto Rican to sneak through the big leagues' color barrier." However, the player's last name was Bithorn. My suspicion was that Krich was confusing the Puerto Rican pitcher with the Charles Bluhdorn, the late financier who put together the Gulf & Western conglomerate that owned, among other properties, Prentice-Hall, this book's publisher. What confirmed this hunch was the reference on p. 121 to "Gulf + Western Corporation chairman Hiram Bluthorn," which, all would agree, is a helluva promotion for a Hispanic ballplayer breaking an employment barrier decades before. (No, I'm not making this up. Would it be that such mistakes could be blamed wholly on copyeditors' cooping, to use the New York police term for sleeping on the job.)

Krich doesn't mention that the Bithorn Stadium also houses my own favorite Winter League team, the Santurce Crabbers, Santurce being the larger city surrounding Old San Juan. One convention peculiar to the Bithorn Stadium is that Santurce playing at home occupies the third-base dugout, whose roof is emblazoned "Santurce," just as the top of the first-base dugout has "San Juan" in large type. Krich also doesn't mention the statue of Bithorn, his left foot raised, his facial features visibly Caucasian. Since 1942 was Bithorn's rookie year, whatever barrier he might have broken was not racial.

Indeed, the question Krich should have addressed, given his critical tone, is why no Puerto Rican player got to the majors before Bithorn. Cubans had entered thirty years before, in 1912 with Miguel "Mike" Gonzalez, who played for twenty years before becoming a coach and even an interim manager in 1938 and 1940, a full two years before Bithorn arrived. One of Krich's deepest prejudices, you see, is that the only Puerto Rican baseball players worth noticing are as dark as Roberto Clemente or Vic Power, thereby excluding any mention, say, of Dickie Thon, perhaps the best Puerto Rican major leaguer in the early 1980s; or Thon's father, a Puerto Rican star and manager who didn't become a major leaguer; or such current stars as, say, Hector Villaneuva. The truth visible to anyone watching Puerto Rican baseball is that the teams, like Puerto Rico itself, represent a polychromic coalition.

Another problem is that like the journalism-school graduate (he may or may not be) Krich believes in the epistemology of the interview as preferable to firsthand experience. So the Puerto Rican chapters have extended quotations from Rubén Gomez, Vic Power, Mrs. Roberto Clemente, and a scout named Nino Escalera. Perhaps because Krich arrived just before New Year's Day, after the conclusion of the regular Winter League season (but before the beginning of the playoffs), there is no evidence of him actually attending a professional game in Puerto Rico. Indeed, there are symptoms to the contrary. He deprecates the Bithorn stadium food, whereas I'm prepared to testify that the piña colada (at two bucks without rum; more with), fresh out of the blender with crushed ice, ranks among the best in all San Juan. The meat empenádas at a buck apiece are preferable to any mainland hot dogs eaten by me.

Though Krich speaks of the San Juan fanáticos as unruly, consider this contrast: At Yankee Stadium, which I patronize regularly, a security man inspects your bags as you enter, confiscating anything that might be thrown, while beer is sold only in paper cups. At the Bithorn Stadium, there is no security person at the entranceway, while the beer vendor gives you the can along with the paper cup. (There is also a guy with a roving cart containing the fixings for mixed drinks. Such a civilized amenity would presumably be unthinkable in the Bronx.)

As a lefty journalist, Krich is predisposed to like Nicaraguan ball, even at the risk of ignorant slander of other Latins: "The backstop netting [in Leon, Nicaragua] functions as protection from foul balls--not, as in other Latin countries, to shield the players from projectiles hurled by the disgruntled rabble." Well, at Bithorn, there isn't enough backstop netting to fulfill Krich's purported protective function, and there is no equivalent of the Yankee Stadium net that runs from the top of the backstop to the mezzanine. Krich rhapsodizes further about Nicaragua: "It takes a nation in its birth throes to show how our national pastime might have looked in the days before computerized scoreboards or press releases, Astroturf or covert operations." However, that's exactly how baseball looked at Hiram Bithorn Stadium (until an artificial turf was installed a few years later), where, as I said, Krich may not have experienced a game.

On p. 49, Krich speaks of receiving during "the seventh-inning stretch" at Bithorn an invitation to spend New Year's Eve with Escalera's family in Ponce, which is on the other side of the island, a few hours away from San Juan. Krich then describes how he is driven out and back on the same night, wholly without incident. The obvious incongruities with this story are, first, that there is no seventh-inning stretch at Bithorn (and no national or commonwealth anthem either--a detail a lefty writer might have noticed, were he there) and, then, that a visitor to San Juan is advised to stay indoors on New Year's Eve, especially after midnight. Some Puerto Ricans celebrate the New Year, you see, by firing guns into the air, and every year innocent bystanders get hit by a stray bullet. My recollection on a New Year's Eve only three years later you could hear the bullets well into the night.

It is indicative El Béisbol has no interviews with current players in Puerto Rico, whether native born or from the mainland; no interviews with mainland stars recently playing there (Don Mattingly won the batting title just before his debut with the Yankees); no notice of the advertising logos on the backs of the players' uniforms (as a mainlander you'd think that all the Arecibo players were named "Bud Light"); nothing about the Major League alumni who continue to play here (e.g. in 1990-91, Ivan de Jesus, Juan Beniquez); no appreciation of the quality of play (high minor league); no observation of the informality that allows players to talk to fans during the game; no comment upon the regular schedule that differs from those on the mainland in having nearly continuous travel from day to day (no home stands, no extended road trips); no history (that might have included the scandal of Bithorn's premature death--shot as a suspected wetback by a border official while trying to reenter the U.S on New Year's Day, 1952); nothing about the Puerto Rican minor leagues that play every Sunday in local parks. I could go on.

Krich also makes generalizations that, with more experience of his subject, he could have modified. For instance, on page 20, he thinks the Texas Rangers are called Llaneros. Well, that might be true elsewhere in Latin America, but the principal Puerto Rican paper, El Nuevo Dia, calls them the Vigilantes. Here again, only people who have experienced Puerto Rico and its baseball could begin to discover what might be wrong with Krich's purported reporting. He seems to think as long as his heart is "politically correct" he can write whatever he wants. About the other sections I cannot speak; but based upon what I know, it is fair to say that, for all of its superficial gringo plausibility, El Beisbol is written out of ignorance, only for those who are even more ignorant.