More Little League

The photo…I love this man. There are two Zapotec campesinos (farmers) at the baseball field where we sometimes play. Here he is making the lines for a Dragones game. He uses a coffee can, with a screen on the bottom. It is fastened to a stick and contains the “cal” or “lime”. He puts a string connected to a nail at home plate and stretches it all the way past first into right field to get a straight shot at the baseline. He does similarly for the third base line. Then he walks with his can on a stick and shakes out the lime all the way into the outfield. You see him here making the batter's box. When there is no game to be played, he and his buddy trim the grass, weed, sweep and pick up trash.

Some aspects of Mexican life are so precious to me, I have a difficulty expressing my feelings about them. The campesino, silently doing his job while the boys played catch (not pictured), and he walks around them, never saying a word…not even a “con permiso” (excuse me), that is precious. He symbolizes so much that is beautiful about Mexico, the ingenuity, the simplicity, the quiet and joyful work that the workers perform to keep this country (and ours, across the border) going. I hardly know how to write about it.

What I do know how to write about…little league drama. It’s been a while since I’ve posted about little league, but the drama continues. About 3 weeks ago, the multiple losses our team had experienced caused parental uproar. Mumblings from those in the bleachers, meetings in the dugout during practice…all this was happening under my nose and I was happily ignoring the tension, reading my novel, or putting on my mitt and practicing with the team. Our parents were fed up with the Dragones’ trainer, a 20-something-ball player named Marco.

Every little league team in Oaxaca has a trainer and a coach. Our coach is Gabriel. He has a son named (of course) Gabriel who plays on our team. As an aside, every father we have met here, who has a son, (the first born son) bears his father’s name. This makes life easier for us because we have to remember fewer names. No one seemed to be complaining about Gabriel. Maybe he isn't paid, though I'm not sure about that. For some reason, the blame fell on Marco.

Marco was our trainer and as I learned later, he was a paid employee of the parents. We pay a fee every two weeks for Gabe to play on the Dragones. (In US, though coaches are all volunteer, we do pay a fee, a one-time registration fee.) In Oaxaca, our little league money pays umpires, field usage and trainer. Our trainer Marco, whom we Jensens liked quite a bit, was not appreciated by the other parents. They felt he was not motivating the boys well enough, so they fired him.

We hired a new trainer, Jorge Martinez Blancas.

Blancas is an interesting old cat. He is about 65…came to Oaxaca in his 20s as a “draftee” of sorts. He was brought from his state of Jalisco to Oaxaca to play for the ball team. He never left. He did play baseball for a few years. Back then, the teams were like minor league or farm teams. Now they’re a bit closer to professional, though the money pros are paid in Mexico is still well below the US standard…

So…Jorge (everyone calls him Blancas) is one of these guys who always has his coaching voice switched on. So far we’ve seen him in three settings. Coaching, of course, then we get to ride with him in his car to games. He has generously offered this to us, since he lives across the street. When he drives us to a game, he talks/yells in that same pitch and voice in casual conversation as he uses when he’s encouraging the boys and girl on the field…(Did know we have a girl on our team? Her name is Adela. She’s a great player, our first baseperson.)

The third setting we’ve seen him in is in his house. We arrived at his doorstep (on time) to get a ride to the game one Saturday and he was still eating his breakfast. His wife was there, serving him, literally, serving him. He was ordering her around in the same coaching voice…generational and machismo all in the same moment. It made me a little crazy, but the wife seemed to take it all in stride. They have something like six kids and twenty grandkids together. So, Blancas is a character and he is our new trainer.

Marco is long gone. I’m still growing used to the idea that parents care fire a coach. In the end, I feel badly that they fired Marco, but it could be good for us to have Blancas kicking our collective butt.

More on Blancas in a later post…