Baseball Diplomacy

"Let's forget what is happening out there and celebrate this," Martinez said. None of the questions from the Nicaraguan media touched on politics. Instead, the dean of Nicaraguan baseball reporters, Edgar Tijerino, set the tone when he asked Ripken to remember his 444th game, when he injured his ankle and kept playing. Did he have Gehrig's record of 2,130 consecutive games in mind?

Ripken, who spoke in English, began by saying, "At moments like this, I wish I had paid more attention in Spanish class." His mission here, he said, "is to share, to be nice, to show people we can be together and have fun. And to spread maybe a little goodwill through baseball."

In an interview afterward, Tijerino said, "with so much polarization in our politics now," the Ripken visit "will help maybe a little, but not much. Even Babe Ruth, if he returned from the grave, couldn't divert us from our political situation."

At a cocktail reception for Ripken at the ambassador's residence Thursday night, Ripken talked baseball with his guests while five feet away, a former comandante and now economic adviser for the Sandinistas, Bayardo Arce, and a leader of the opposition in the national assembly and former contra commander, Maximinio Rodríguez, argued election results.

But it is also telling that both men were there to meet Ripken. "Cal Ripken is here to help run baseball clinics for our youth, and I support that effort," Arce said. Nicaragua, like Cuba and the Dominican Republic, is obsessed with baseball. There is a baseball diamond at the Ortega compound, which doubles as the presidential offices and Sandinista party headquarters. Young people play in fields and vacant lots. According to the Nica Times, 89,000 players are registered throughout the country, from youth leagues to professional ball.

On Friday, Ripken and Martinez traveled to the city of Granada, where they spent the morning in the sun, first teaching batting and pitching techniques to coaches, and then working with children from poor neighborhoods. Ripken pitched foam balls to 6-year-olds and awarded them extra points if they could hit him. They scored repeatedly. "How do you say 'extra points' and 'bald head'?" he asked his interpreter.

In the afternoon, the two men worked with 9- to 13-year-olds, who used real balls and swung aluminum bats. "How do you say 'Be careful'?" he asked.

While the TV crews and photographers following Ripken around retreated into the shade of a tent, Ripken kept at the drills all afternoon, way out in left field. "Excellent, nice, great," he kept saying. "Watch this kid swing!" Mario Chávez, 11, said he had never heard of Cal Ripken until Friday, but appeared impressed. "I think he is a great teacher," Chávez said.

At the end of the day, Ripken and Martinez toured the rural slum where many of the children he coached that day lived. The streets were rutted dirt, running with scummy water; the homes were improvised shacks. Some of children are so poor, they had never ridden in a bus before their trip to the Granada ball stadium. "So we brought extra trash bags," said Kathy Adams, founder of Empowerment International, which tutors the children. "They all got motion sickness."

The young players gave Ripken a baseball they had signed. He said he was honored to have played ball with them. "Stay in school," he told them. "Keep playing baseball."

Later, in the van driving back to Managua, with a police escort waving the traffic away, Ripken and Martinez cracked a cold beer. Asked his thoughts on the day, Ripken said: "There were some pretty good ball players. There were some kids with talent. You could see the enthusiasm for the game. How do you keep that going?"

He couldn't really solve that problem.

But Abraham Lowenthal, a professor of international relations at the University of Southern California who was in Managua on Saturday meeting with officials and talking about the elections, was upbeat about the power of baseball diplomacy.

"It is a way to show shared interests even when the politics are very complicated and very hostile," he said. "Can it help? To have a ballplayer come and throw a few balls with kids? It couldn't hurt."