A short history of baseball in Guatemala

One of the romantic notions I had about traveling to Guatemala, a place I could never possibly comprehend, involved taking an extra suitcase or duffle bag filled with old baseball gloves and baseballs. I had heard of this kind of thing before. We were going to be visiting an orphanage, and I imagined there would be several young shortstops, future stars, who were just waiting for a chance to gobble up grounders on the hardscrabbled dirt. 

            I abandoned that notion due to practical constraints.

At the airport in Guatemala City, I immediately wished I would have taken more Spanish instead of wasting all those years in French class. I followed a crowd through the terminal, and we deposited ourselves as a group onto the street. It was mass chaos. Luckily, for the first time in my life, I was tall enough to see over almost everyone. Feeling grateful, I located my colleagues who were waiting for me, and we were off to Antigua.

Antigua is an old Catholic city that is flanked by volcanoes. It is ancient, beautiful, and exotic. It is also in dire need of sanitation services and dog catchers. Funky passenger buses painted in psychedelic colors – Chicken Buses -- roar through the streets. There are no traffic signals or stop signs to obey. The dwellings, too, are painted in absurdly bright colors. Rich families own the coffee plantations, but it is common to have your own orange tree. Graffiti-like images of dark-skinned Jesuses are everywhere. The courtyards are lined with laundry and ringed, ominously, with barbed wire left over from the civil war. It is, indeed, a place filled with magic intertwined with realism.

Like most Latin American countries, Guatemala is stuck between the past and present, with the dead living in the midst. There is little regard for the future. The infant mortality rate in Guatemala is sky high. If you survive the water through childhood, you have a good chance at immunity. As for us, the Gringos, we couldn’t stomach the water. We couldn’t even brush our teeth with it.

Everywhere I went, I had three things on my mind for people who spoke English. Were there snakes here? (Not here, thank God.) Is there good fishing somewhere? (The water is very polluted.) Do you like baseball…?

Turns out, there has never been a major league player from Guatemala. Not even a single shortstop.

Soccer is pretty much the only real sport here, as it is in most of Central America and South America. Almost every patch of flattened ground in the highland jungle of Guatemala that isn’t used for some kind of agriculture is used by kids who want to kick the ball around. People are, of course, passionate about soccer in the way they are passionate about baseball in places like the Dominican Republic and Cuba.

Compared to other parts of Latin America, Central America as a whole has not produced many baseball prospects who made it big. The small countries of Costa Rica and El Salvador aren’t represented. According to Baseball Almanac, Honduras can claim one major leaguer in its history and Nicaragua boasts 13. Panama is the leading Central American country with 49 big leaguers, including the biggest name, Mariano Rivera.

Bordering Guatemala to the north (in North America), Mexico has sent 114 future Major League Baseball players to the U.S., most notably Fernando Valenzuela. The largest exporter of MLB players in South America has been Venezuela with an impressive number of 321. Elsewhere, again according to Baseball Almanac, 183 Cubans have escaped Castro’s island in the Caribbean and made their way to The Show. The Dominican Republic has produced 618 major leaguers, a lot of them All-Stars, far and away the most of any Spanish-speaking country.

But not one lousy player from Guatemala? They do have a professional baseball league in Guatemala City and there is a small, organized Little League program, though organization means something totally different in Latin America than it does in the U.S. But what kinds of things set Guatemala apart from other countries in the region?

While Guatemalans are generally very poor, economic conditions in many Latin countries, often war torn, are desperate. The biggest reason for Guatemala’s inability to groom baseball players, in addition to the overriding interest in soccer, might be that these people are short. Really short.

In Guatemala, when you sit down in a chair, you feel like you have just plopped your adult self down awkwardly in an elementary school classroom. You are suddenly the big Gringo in the room. On average, Guatemalan adults are eight inches shorter than American adults.

Maybe it’s the water. Maybe it’s the altitude. At any rate, professional scouts mostly don’t bother going to Guatemala.

Still, if 5-foot-6 Jose Altuve (from Venezuela) can become an impact player in the states, surely there are others. Indeed, the Orioles recently signed Juan Diego Montes, a Guatemalan, to a minor league deal. Montes only hit .236 in the Gulf Coast League with no power; he is a long way from ever playing in Camden Yards. But Montes is listed at 6-foot-2! For the purposes of this essay, we will consider him a really big anomaly.

Anyway, I stubbornly decide to scout the orphanage, which, thanks to a well installed by members of our party on a previous trip, has clean water.

We drive through mountains and clouds for hours. In one town, a heavily armed, jockey-sized man stands guard on top of a Pepsi truck while, nearby, prostitutes loiter. In one mountain pass, there has been a mudslide as a result of heavy rain or seismic activity. Locals who don’t ask why work slowly with shovels. They will finish the task at some point in the future, which is something they don’t think much about. They are used to this.

We finally reach the orphanage. I play a version of kickball with some of the kids; their English is a lot better than my Spanish. A few of the kids, despite their tiny statures, show some athletic promise. As for me, I can’t promise that I will ever return to Guatemala. Who knows? But if I do go back, I decide I might bring a few of those gloves with me.