Venezuelan Bust, Baseball Boom: Andres Reiner and Scouting on the New Frontier

8. Maracuchos y Gochos: Scouting in Maracaibo and the Andes

107 Orlando Fernández made the six-hour drive from his home in San Cristóbal, on the Colombian border, to pick me up in Maracaibo in July 2001. I tagged along as he visited his baseball contacts in Maracaibo , and then went on a scouting trip with him through the Andes. Earlier in the year, Fernández had taken an early retirement from his job as sports instructor and was hired as a full-time scout by the Astros to cover the western Venezuelan states of Barinas, Mérida, Táchira, Trujillo, and Zulia. It’s not easy to discover baseball players in a region where soccer is the dominant sport. But it was nothing new for Fernández who was brought on-board by Andrés after the two met in 1990 at a baseball tournament in Anaco, on the other side of the country in the oil fields of eastern Venezuela. Andrés was there looking for players and trying to set up his scouting network, while Fernandez had gone as the manager of a team of seventeenand eighteen-year-old players from Táchira. Andrés offered Fernández , now in his early fifties, a position as an unpaid associate scout to cover the Táchira area. He accepted, and spent eleven years doing basically the same job he now has except without a salary. While Fernández has been involved with baseball most of his life, he is one of the few Astros scouts or instructors who did not play baseball professionally. Fifteen years after my first trip to Venezuela, I finally made it to Maracaibo, a huge city with a population of more than 3 million, spread out for miles on the western shore of Lake Maracaibo. Tell a Venezuelan from anywhere else in the country that you are going to Maracuchos y Gochos Scouting in Maracaibo and the Andes 8 108 Maracuchos y Gochos Maracaibo, and most will say that it is hot and not worth visiting. It is indeed hot, but it also a fascinating area of Venezuela and, for a person interested in baseball, well worth taking the time to explore. Marabinos—or more commonly—maracuchos, are generally very outgoing , friendly, proud and have a great sense of humor.1 The state of Zulia where Maracaibo is located not only has enormous petroleum resources—it produces over one million barrels of oil each day—but also is a rich farming and ranching area. Some in Zulia half-jokingly talk about becoming an independent republic separate from the rest of Venezuela. Upon return from his studies in the United States, Juan Besson introduced baseball to Maracaibo in 1897, only two years after the first game in Caracas. Besson also formed two teams, but after three years, baseball languished, and no games are reported being played after 1900.2 The game in Maracaibo was reinvigorated through the efforts of William H. Phelps, an immigrant entrepreneur from the United States, who sold baseball equipment in his store and organized three teams in 1912. U.S.–based petroleum companies also contributed to the spread and popularity of baseball in the Maracaibo region from the 1920s onward. Maracuchos are proud of the young men from the area who have been successful in baseball at every level. They closely follow the progress of players in the United States at both the minor and major league levels, and the local sports pages give extensive coverage to baseball in the United States, and in winter to the local Zulia team. And they are glued to their television sets when a local team is playing in the Little League World Series in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. On two occasions, in 1994 and 2000, teams from the metropolitan area of Maracaibo won the Little League championship. To gain a better understanding for this love of and appreciation for baseball in Maracaibo, I wanted to go to the roots: the neighborhoods where kids play in organized games. I arrived in Maracaibo a day ahead of Fernández and took the opportunity to call the parents of Astros prospect Estéban Avila. Rafael Avila and his wife, Ligia de Avila, took me to lunch and then on a 109 Maracuchos y Gochos tour of Coquivacoa field, the home of the 1994 Little League World Championship team that included their son. I had met Mrs. Avila three years earlier in 1998 at the academy...