Article about the Sox and their Latin Connections

[greasywheels121]

Very good article.

 

http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/latinosrise/...tory?id=2332945

 

Teams are teaching players more than just English

By Kevin Baxter

Special to ESPN.com

 

SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic -- When the late Chico Carrasquel left Venezuela to join the Chicago White Sox in the spring of 1950, he knew just two words in English: ham and eggs. That made conversation, if not menu planning, difficult so he staved off loneliness by talking to himself in the hotel mirror each day.

 

"I had to talk to someone," he often related. "And that someone was me."

 

Fast forward 5½ decades. Another Venezuelan shortstop is in Chicago; only Ozzie Guillen is managing the White Sox. And language is once again an issue.

 

But this time, it is the English-speaking players who might feel tempted to talk to themselves. Under Guillen, the clubhouse TV is just as likely to be tuned to a Spanish-language soap opera as it is to SportsCenter. And the manager is just as likely to be bantering in Spanish with the half of his pitching staff born in Latin America as he is to be talking in English with the half born in the United States.

 

Clearly, baseball has come a long way from the days when Latin players ordered meals by pointing to pictures on the menu or played hurt because they couldn't adequately describe their injuries. Not that the game really had a choice, since nearly a quarter of the players on last year's Opening Day rosters and more than 40 percent of those in the minor leagues came from Latin America.

 

"Where are the baseball players coming from?" Rafael Perez, director of international development for the New York Mets, asks from his office at the team's new Dominican training academy. "They're coming from here."

 

And now clubs such as the Mets, White Sox and Indians are pushing the envelope even further, doing a lot more to help their Latin players make the transition from the Third World to the World Series than simply teaching them how to say yo la tengo! (I got it!) in English.

 

In the case of the Indians and Mets, for example, they're teaching them earth science, literature and chemistry as well.

 

"The Indians said they wanted to teach more than English," says Lynette Nadal, a professor at Northwood University in West Palm Beach, Fla., and an educational coordinator for the Indians for eight years. "Because if they make it to the big leagues, [Cleveland] wanted educated players to be in front of the media. We wanted educated players to be wiser about making life choices for themselves."

 

So last spring, the Indians began sending every player in its Dominican program back to school, busing them from the baseball field to a classroom three to five nights a week for as many as 3½ hours of study. By the end of that first year, three players had graduated from grammar school, and five more earned high school diplomas -- quite an accomplishment in a country where just 40 percent of eligible students even bother to attend high school, much less finish it.

 

"I never thought for even one minute that I'd finish high school. I thought when I signed I'd just go play ball," says Luis Polonia Jr., son of the former big-league outfielder and, like many Dominican prospects, someone who dropped out of school to practice baseball. "But I was able to finish thanks to Cleveland. We're very fortunate."

 

Now, if a player gets hurt or released, he has the option of studying for another career, something he wouldn't have had before, because a high school diploma is a prerequisite for college on the island. In fact, one player, Angel Franco, enrolled at a local university just weeks after Cleveland cut him last year while another, shortstop Janel Arias, is thinking of giving up baseball to study medicine.

 

"It's a nice byproduct that we graduate Dominicans from high school, but our focus is to make more complete baseball players," says Ross Atkins, Cleveland's director of Latin American operations. "Their ability to learn is crucial in their development as a baseball player. And a secondary benefit is that they have something in life beyond baseball should baseball not work out."

 

The idea has been such a hit the Mets copied it this winter, enrolling their Dominican prospects in the same classes at Colegio Instituto Escuela, a modest private school hidden in a leafy upper-middle-class neighborhood not far from Santo Domingo's historic port. There, the players study basic subjects such as civics, geography, algebra and world history as well as learning French and basic computer skills.

 

Valoree Valdez de Lebrón, daughter of a former U.S. consular officer and director of the only school in the Dominican accredited to teach the kind of classes the Indians and Mets wanted, says at least two other teams have also inquired about the program. Both were put off by the cost -- nearly $800 a student for nine months of classes, about what the teams spend at their academies to teach the players baseball. But once the Mets and Indians' graduates start making an impact at the big-league level, Nadal and others expect the number of teams involved will expand

 

"In baseball you have leaders and you have followers," admits the Mets' Perez. "Cleveland is a visionary. The education part comes because it will help develop players. A better-educated player will … have a better chance of making it to the big leagues.

 

"But at the same time, it's the right thing to do. To me, there has to be a social conscience."

 

And it might be the most revolutionary social program baseball has undertaken since Nadal began offering spring training ESL classes for the Atlanta Braves and Montreal Expos 16 years ago. Those classes, which went beyond baseball to include dinner etiquette as well as field trips to grocery stores, banks and the post office, are now mandatory for all big-league teams.

 

"The theme is baseball and teaching life skills in America through dialogue, various educational activities, vocabulary training, role assimilation, all in one little package," Nadal says. "Some of the older guys from the 1950s and '60s, those guys learned by sink or swim. They were just thrown out and they had to learn to speak English or they wouldn't survive.

 

"But I question how many other players didn't make it."

 

Baltimore Orioles pitcher Bruce Chen, a Panamanian, said he would have been one of those who washed out. Signed by the Braves two weeks after his 16th birthday, he was so shy and homesick he once broke down and cried in Nadal's class.

 

Five years later, he made the dean's list at Georgia Tech, where he's pursuing a degree in civil engineering. And last year, he was second on the Orioles staff with 13 wins and led the rotation with a 3.83 ERA.

 

"The last thing you want to do is be asking questions," Chen remembers of his first days in the U.S. "It makes you seem like you don't know anything. We were too embarrassed to acknowledge that."

 

The language and cultural gap has manifested itself in other ways, too. The Minnesota Twins' Luis Castillo, for example, once set off a fire alarm at a team hotel when he pulled what he thought was a shampoo dispenser in a bathroom. And last spring, a group of Cardinal minor leaguers were repeatedly late to team functions because they refused to get dressed beneath the security cameras in their hotel rooms -- cameras that turned out to be smoke detectors.

 

Food, however, remains the biggest problem. Not only did Carrasquel exist solely on ham and eggs early in his All-Star career, but Chen remembers eating nothing but take-out pizza during his first minor league season because his Spanish-speaking teammates couldn't order anything else.

 

But at least he knew what he was getting.

 

"In A ball we'd go to McDonald's, and all the Latins all said the same thing when they ordered," remembers the Red Sox's Mike Lowell. "They didn't know whether they were ordering chicken or hamburger."

 

And in some ways, it probably wouldn't have mattered, says Perez of the Mets, a team that, under the direction of Dominican-born general manager Omar Minaya, has left no stone unturned in its efforts to make its Latin prospects more comfortable. So when Perez noticed the Mets were serving little more than hamburgers and chicken at their Florida spring training facility, he sent the cooks to a local Dominican restaurant to learn how to prepare yucca and plantains.

 

"We're not treating them better than the Americans. We just have to understand their background," Perez says of the Latin players. "If 30 percent of the players are Latin, your meal should reflect that, and 30 percent of it should be geared toward Latins.

 

"And it's great for the Americans too. They need to be exposed to it."

 

That desire for cross-cultural exposure is also why the Mets send up to five of their top U.S. prospects to the Dominican each fall, where they train at the team's Latin academy -- sleeping, eating and drilling next to players who might be their teammates someday. It's been an eye-opening experiment for players on both sides.

 

"The mentality that you're coming to the states -- you need to do this, you need to do that, and I don't give a flip about it -- that's the way it's always been. That has to change," says Perez, a Dominican native who played baseball at South Alabama, where he roomed with future All-Star Luis Gonzalez.

 

"Dealing with [Latin] players, when they see you make an effort of knowing a little more about them, they will open up to you. They believe you have a better understanding, so they're going to feel more comfortable. That's just normal."

 

Consequently, now Perez is hoping to expand the idea by giving cultural diversity classes to minor league coaches and managers.

 

"All along we're trying to bring the educational level of the Latin players higher and higher, but we're not doing anything to help the coaches understand our culture," says Perez, who once worked as a global project manager for a software company in an office with people from a half-dozen nations. "When you're developing talent, if you're a teacher, it's all about understanding the background of that individual. You have to understand what motivates that individual."

 

But while the Indians and Mets are clearly breaking new ground with the way they develop their Latin American prospects, the White Sox are challenging the way things have long been done at the major league level. Not only did Chicago have, in Guillen, one of baseball's two Latin-born managers, but the White Sox also had a Venezuelan and a Puerto Rican on their coaching staff, and as many as three translators in the clubhouse every day.

 

That created an environment in which sensitive players such as Jose Contreras, Juan Uribe and Timo Perez -- all of whom struggled elsewhere -- thrived. And that paid off in Chicago's first World Series title in 88 years, the first ever for a Latin-born manager.

 

"It's very different," Contreras said. "We know Ozzie as the manager. But we also know him as a person; we know his wife, we know his kids. That's been part of the success of the team, but especially the success of the Latins. The relationship he has with us and the confidence he shows in us on the field, it's much better."

 

That's not to say the American-born manager, or even the American-born player, is an endangered species. Although the number of foreign players in the majors has nearly doubled since the sport started keeping track a dozen years ago, more than 70 percent of the players on Opening Day rosters last spring were born in the United States.

 

Still, there have been some changes that every Latin player who ever ordered dinner by pointing to a snapshot on a menu could appreciate.

 

Just two months ago, for example, a few traffic lights removed from the quiet neighborhood where Mets and Indians prospects were preparing for their transition to the U.S., Florida Marlins outfielder Eric Reed was spending most of his time hiding in a hotel room, too unsure of both his Spanish and his grip on local custom to venture any further than the winter league ballparks where he played.

 

"It's not bad," he said with a shrug. "If I go to the store, I just point at what I want."

 

So there you have it: Baseball's decades-long cultural evolution has pushed over so many barriers that Latin players now find an accommodating clubhouse in Chicago and yucca and plantains on the menu with the Mets, even as English-speaking players still are left to fend for themselves in winter ball. And sure, all that's good for the players. But it's also good for the teams.

 

Need proof? Just ask the White Sox.

[maggsmaggs]

good read. Sox are going to get some very good latin american signees in the future because of stuff like this.

[rventura23]

good read.  Sox are going to get some very good latin american signees in the future because of stuff like this.

i hope so

[LosMediasBlancas]

Yucca and plantains, mmmmmm.

The fire alarm mistaken for a shampoo dispenser is hilarious.