Have Glove, Will Travel_ Adventures of a Baseball Vagabond - Bill Lee [24]
When Pam and I walked the streets at night after visiting the local bistros, our eyes continually glanced upward. We were not looking for the moon or constellations, but at the fruit bats with their two-foot wing spans who regularly swooped out of the trees in aerial assaults. These miniature stealth bombers would splatter unsuspecting passersby with payloads of guano. We also kept watch for the feral dog packs that silently glided through the neighborhood every evening. Women and children ran indoors at their arrival unless men were around to chase away the strays.
We had to walk up six flights to reach our place; the building’s elevator ran only on Thursdays. Gates and bars covered the doors and windows of every apartment. These barriers let in any cooling breezes drifting off the water while keeping out the bandits and revolutionaries. I wondered about the effectiveness of those protective measures. Sure, the bars looked sturdy enough to stop most large objects. But they could not stop small-caliber bullets.
Caracas was a city of guns. You could not help noticing that when driving into town. We saw soldiers hefting assault rifles or machine guns on practically every corner. SWAT teams made no attempt to disguise their presence in front of banks, corporate high-rises, federal buildings, and other structures the government deemed important. Well-dressed young bloods partied in restaurants at night with bulges under their jackets. Politicos and the wealthier businesspeople rarely traveled anywhere without their armed bodyguards.
Politics provided the primary reason for so many people to tote so many guns throughout Caracas in 1983. There was a national election scheduled for the end of the year. The economy had grown shaky, and the ruling elitists expected trouble. I saw evidence of how high tensions had risen when our team returned from a road trip to Valencia. The bus pulled into the parking lot at the side of our ballpark around 2 a.m. While waiting for the driver to open the baggage compartment, we heard someone softly moaning in the shadows. My teammates found a naked man, his back crisscrossed with whip marks, strung to the ballpark fence with thick rope. Someone identified him as a political organizer and dissident. Whoever had inflicted this punishment had left the victim in this public place as a warning to others.
Despite that incident and all the guns, I never felt threatened walking the Caracas streets. The locals we met were friendly people, slow to take offense and quick to party. Many of the nightclubs in the area never closed, and hardly a day passed without someone inviting us into their home. The baseball fans were passionate yet restrained, nothing like the soccer zealots we read about who started riots anytime their favorite team lost a match.
The Tiburones—Spanish for “sharks”—played their home games in an oval concrete stadium that we shared with the Caracas Leones. The ballpark seated thirty thousand. Management reserved one small section of the stands for a salsa orchestra composed entirely of any fans who arrived at the stadium carrying instruments. On some nights there could be as many as thirty musicians in this hodgepodge band, and their rousing, audacious improvisations kept the joint jumping from the first inning on.
That nonstop carnival atmosphere took a little getting used to. In North America, major-league baseball fans applaud and shout encouragement throughout a game, but they generally wait for crucial moments to rise from their seats and get thoroughly engaged. When an American home team is down by five or more runs, you often see its supporters sitting on their hands.
The people who attended our games would rise to their feet screaming and clapping before the umpire called, “Play ball!” As soon as the opposing players took the field, our fans serenaded