Spain baseball team has Caribbean accent

Updated: September 19, 2009, 4:49 AM ET
Associated Press

MADRID, Spain -- Spain has reached the second round of the Baseball World Cup. In a country where the game is seldom played or watched, this may come as a shock -- until you listen to the accents of Spain's players.

Most speak with Spanish accents from the Caribbean, which is logical since 21 of the 24 players on the team are from Latin America. There are 15 from Venezuela, and three each from Cuba and the Dominican Republic. Only three are from Spain, and the coach is an Italian, Mauro Mazzotti.

"I know that for fans it might seem strange," said Remigio Leal, a 45-year-old pitcher who was born in Cuba. "But we're giving it our all and we're into it. In the locker room we don't think about where we are from."

Spain is not going to reach the semifinals of the tournament which ends on Sept. 27 and is being played is seven countries across Europe. It has two second-round games remaining against Britain and South Korea.

Spain lost to Nicaragua 9-5 on Friday, leaving it with only one victory in five second-round games. Still, making the second round was monumental in a country where baseball has a meager profile. The only baseball league in the country has 10 teams, and it's semiprofessional.

The tournament highlight for Spain was an 8-1 victory over Venezuela. Granted, most of the best Venezuelan players are absent, tied up with clubs in Major League Baseball as the tournament is missing much of the world's top talent.

Still, for Spain to beat Venezuela in any baseball game might be compared to the United States beating Australia in rugby.

"We know we can't compete on the world stage, but we can be respectable," said Javier Mateu, an official with Spain's baseball and softball federation. "We're never going to beat teams like the United States, Japan or Cuba."

Mateu said the makeup of the team reflects the changing demographics of Spain, where about half of the 4.5 million legal immigrants are from Latin America. Many, of course, have roots in Spain, and some are related to Spaniards who fled the Iberian Peninsula during the 1936-39 Spanish Civil War.

Some members of the baseball team received Spanish passports because of their family roots in Spain. Other have married Spanish women, and others qualified after being long-term residents of the country.

"The foreigners that play in Spain are people well integrated in the community," Mateu said. "They've been here for a long time."

Manuel Oliveira, a pitcher, is one of the three native-born Spaniards on the team. At 31, he has watched the changing face of Spanish baseball.

"I have lived through the whole change in the makeup of the team," he said. "We've gone from having every player born in Spain, and now we have only three. I see it as pretty normal and I accept it. The foreign-born players are as much Spaniards as we are."


Copyright 2009 by The Associated Press

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