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

11. Foreigners at Their Own Game: Welcome to the Astros' Minor League System

161 Every player at the Venezuelan academy is delighted when told he will travel to the United States. But for those making the trip to Kissimmee , Florida, for the first time, excitement is tempered with fear of the unknown. “When they take the flight to come to the States, they understand that they are leaving everything behind, and they know that everything will be different when they get off the plane,” explained Andrés. And the anticipation of what will follow is so traumatic, that Andr és can’t recognize some of the players. “They look like they were changed during the flight.” The phenomenon he witnessed is nothing new: it has occurred as long as players from Latin America have pursued their major league dream in the United States. “We are strangers. I need a passport to come here,” wrote Felipe Alou, a San Francisco Giants outfielder from the Dominican Republic in 1963. “Most Latin players feel they are outsiders,” added Alou, who later managed the Giants, in his groundbreaking article, “Latin American ballplayers need a Bill of Rights” in Sport magazine in November 1963.1 Two years earlier, Dámaso Blanco, a nineteen-year-old middle-in- field prospect from Caracas, signed with San Francisco and was sent to the Class D El Paso team in the Sophomore League that included franchises in West Texas and eastern New Mexico. “We were playing in Hobbs, New Mexico, a very small town, and because I was black, I was not allowed to eat in the same restaurant Foreigners at Their Own Game Welcome to the Astros’ Minor League System 11 162 Foreigners at Their Own Game with the white guys. It was a cultural shock for me; in Venezuela we were able go wherever we pleased,” recalled Blanco, now a baseball radio and television commentator in Venezuela. “The owner of one restaurant said to our manager, George Genovese , ‘If I let your black guys come and eat, I’m going to lose all my white customers’ business.’ So they had an agreement: any time one of us black guys was going to eat, we would have to be in the company of one of the white players,” recalled Blanco. When Blanco was hungry, he had to convince his white roommate, fellow Venezuelan Luis Peñalver, to go with him. “But Peñalver was trying to save money and he didn’t want to eat, so I had to be begging him all time so I could go eat in that place in Hobbs.” Because Hobbs only drew 15,482 fans for sixty home games in 1961, more people probably remember Blanco from the diner than from the ballpark. He survived that humiliating experience and spent twelve years in the San Francisco minor league system before he made his debut with the Giants on May 26, 1972, becoming the twenty-first Venezuelan to reach the major leagues. There is no doubt that racism affected the performance of the Latin players in the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s and accounted for the failure of many to play up to their potential. But there are no statistics in the Baseball Encyclopedia on Latin players who returned home broken by racism. While discrimination based on skin color hasn’t disappeared, it is now subtler and presents nowhere near the obstacle it did for the early migrant players. The problems that Latin players face today are mainly those of misunderstanding and insensitivity: the coach who angrily yells, “Look me in the eye,” when the young player’s cultural upbringing won’t permit it; the prospect whose shoes are too tight, but who refuses to ask for a new pair for fear of being labeled a problem player; the beat writer who gets his information—or misinformation —about a player from another beat writer. Latin players today often confront stereotypes that portray them as childlike, hot tempered, ignorant because they are not fluent in English, or somehow less than serious about baseball. Players from Latin America, whether by design or neglect, have had to struggle a bit harder than native-born players to attain their 163 Foreigners at Their Own Game dream. There is no question that physical skills are what draw U.S. scouts to Latin America, but it is the player’s ability to adjust mentally to adverse situations that allows him to survive, to bounce back from a poor performance, to...