photo: Baseball in Mexico may not be as popular as in the early 20th century, but still draws big crowds in modern stadia. (Diablos Rojos/Cuartoscuro)

by Leigh Thelmadatter

On April 29, I made the mistake of taking Line 9 of the Mexico City Metro just as fans from a game between the San Diego Padres and San Francisco Giants left the Alfredo Helú Harp Stadium. Although I had seen advertisements for the game, I never took Mexico for a baseball country.

We may have to rethink that at some point.

Without a doubt, soccer is king here, but baseball does have an important presence.

Several cities in the country claim to be the site of the first baseball game in Mexico: Guaymas, Sonora, Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, Cadereyta Jiménez, Nuevo León and even the port of Veracruz. All are good candidates since they had significant contact with the United States, either through railroad construction or “visits” from the U.S. military. Another early introduction was in the Yucatán Peninsula, though this was via fans from Cuba.

By the early 20th century, baseball had become Mexico’s most popular sport, with Mexican teams regularly playing those from the U.S. and Cuba. In 1925, Ernesto Carmona established the Mexican League of Baseball, which is still Mexico’s most important league.

Mexican baseball’s golden age extended from the 1920s to the early 1950s in no small part due to the efforts of brothers Bernardo and Jorge Pasquel. In the 1940s into the 1950s, they raised the status of the sport, regularly recruiting players from Cuba, U.S. Negro leagues and occasionally from the “white” Major Leagues as well.

However, after World War II, they were unable to match the rising salaries in the U.S and in the post-Pasquel decades, the game experienced slower growth here, with 20 professional teams at its height.

These days, Mexican professional players are clearly focused on getting lucrative contracts in the United States, especially after the “Fernandomania” of Mexican pitcher Fernando Valenzuela during the 1970s and 1980s.

Mexican leagues have also struggled with the wild popularity of soccer and, at times, boxing. There are several theories why this is so.

Baseball’s appeal was always concentrated in certain sections of the country. As much as the U.S. influences Mexico’s culture, Europe is a major influence as well, and the sport there is soccer.

The shift in baseball players going off to play for U.S. teams certainly had an effect on baseball here as well. This talent drain hasn’t happened quite so much in professional soccer, where Mexican players divide their time playing for foreign and domestic teams, as well as represent Mexico in international tournaments.

But the work of the Pasquel brothers is important because it established a connection between baseball and Mexico’s industrial enterprises. For decades, Mexican companies have been essential in conserving and reviving the sport here.

The Cuauhtemoc Brewery established the Mexican Baseball Hall of Fame in 1973 in Monterrey, Nuevo León. Years later, the Alfredo Harp Helú Foundation (created by one of billionaire Carlos Slim’s relatives) moved it to its current building in the massive Fundidora Park, also in Monterrey.

The Slim/Helú family has been at the forefront of Mexican baseball for several decades now, promoting it both in Mexico and the United States. Their passion for the sport comes from their childhoods — some are old enough to remember the tail end of Mexican baseball’s “golden age.”

In 2011, Carlos Slim gave a rare interview with Puro Beisbol Magazine during the Red Sox/Yankee World Series, where he declared himself a “…fan of the Diablos Rojos [the Mexico City team], of the Yankees and of Babe Ruth.”

The family’s efforts consist of dominating professional baseball in Mexico and getting a foothold in the MLB. Harp Helú, opened the Alfred Harp Helú Stadium in Mexico City — home of the Diablos Rojos — and in 2009, Slim’s foundation built the Telmex Bicentennial Sport Center in Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl, México state, on a reclaimed landfill. A multisport center for use by the community, it includes baseball fields.

More importantly, the family has established baseball institutions to encourage an interest in baseball among the young and support their careers, such as the Alfredo Harp Helú Academy in the city of Oaxaca, and the Telmex-Telcel Baseball League, aimed at promoting baseball for kids aged 13–15 all over Mexico through tournaments in which locally organized teams can register to participate. According to the league’s website, it has served as feeder source for teams at the national level.

The purpose of these institutions is to find promising young talent and offer them academic and athletic scholarships. Students pay no tuition, but costs for educating them — covered by corporate benefactors — run around 30,000 pesos per student, per month. The Oaxaca academy has been quite successful, placing about 20% of its graduates into professional teams in Mexico and the United States.

Other industrialists and professional teams have followed suit, not only seeing a way to develop talent but improve community relations. They include the Pastejé Academy, founded by the industrial group of the same name, located in northern México state; the academy of the Charros de Jalisco professional baseball team in Guadalajara, owned by the Gonzalez-Iñigo family, behind seed industrial giant Sesajal; and the Tigers Academy in Quintana Roo. The Tigers team were bought in 2017 by none other than Fernando Valenzuela, with the help of a group of business owners.

Harp Helú bought Mexico City’s Diablos Rojos in the 1990s, and a stake in the San Diego Padres in 2012. There is no doubt that the long term goal is to integrate Mexican baseball at a much higher level internationally, something that just might be of benefit on both sides of the border.

Over in the U.S., the MLB has had its own issues with losing market share to (American) football, and since the 2010s, has been working to broaden the sport’s appeal internationally, especially in Europe and Latin America.

The Giants vs. Padres game I ran into was part of these efforts in collaboration with the Slim/Helú family. The game brought in an impressive number of live fans and was broadcast internationally — and turned out to be an insane 27-run classic.

Without a doubt, there is big money backing the sport in Mexico, but it remains to be seen if slow-paced baseball can make a comeback in a fast-paced world, or whether it will remain a sport with a niche following both in Mexico and the United States.

Leigh Thelmadatter arrived in Mexico over 20 years ago and fell in love with the land and the culture in particular its handcrafts and art. She is the author of Mexican Cartonería: Paper, Paste and Fiesta (Schiffer 2019). Her culture column appears regularly on Mexico News Daily.

NOTE: This article originally misstated the owner of the Mexico City baseball team Los Diablos Rojos. The owner is Alfredo Harp Helú. 

by Truth Press

A federal court in Texas has issued a stinging rebuke of the Biden administration’s so-called “equity agenda.”

“In a lawsuit challenging the Minority Business Development Agency (MBDA) — a new federal agency dedicated to helping only certain preferred racial groups — a federal judge ruled that the Biden administration cannot discriminate based on race,” Fox News reported on Thursday.

U.S. District Judge Mark Pittman, a Trump appointee, essentially gave the administration a lesson in civics in his ruling, noting: “The Constitution demands equal treatment under the law.”

Fox News noted:

While such a statement should be obvious to any American, this was quite a painful blow to the administration. On his first day in office, President Biden declared a “whole of government” approach to racial equity, requiring all his agencies to “affirmatively advance[e] equity.” In practice, the equity agenda resulted in a bevy of programs open to some races, but not others. Farmers, restaurant owners, homeowners, small business owners and federal contractors all got billions in federal tax dollars, so long as they belonged to certain racial groups.

The MBDA (Minority Business Development Agency) is the central element of the equity agenda. Established as a permanent federal agency under the Infrastructure Act in November 2021, the MBDA aims to support specific minority business owners by providing grants, training, consulting, government contracts, and other advantages to enhance their financial performance. As Under Secretary of Commerce Donald Cravins stated, “If you are a minority entrepreneur, MBDA is your agency.”

According to Pittman’s ruling, the MBDA does not extend its assistance to business owners with ancestral ties to the Middle East, North Africa, or North Asia. Furthermore, the MBDA excludes all minority business owners who own less than 51% of their businesses from receiving its support.

Consequently, when Biden mentioned “building community wealth” for “underserved communities” as part of his equity agenda, he expressly referred to preferred racial groups such as blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans, and certain Southeast Asians. Most non-white groups are actually excluded from taking part in the program, Pittman noted.

The administration’s questionable efforts to categorize individuals based on race, such as the inclusion of Pakistani Americans while excluding Afghani Americans, are indicative of a deeper issue. As Chief Justice John Roberts once expressed, “divvying us up by race” is a “sordid business.”

Attorney Daniel Lennington noted in his Fox News column: “Enter Greg Nuziard, Christian Bruckner and Matt Piper. These three White small business owners from Texas, Florida and Wisconsin, sued the Biden administration, alleging that the MBDA is an unconstitutional agency. Represented by the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, where I serve as deputy counsel, all three men attempted to get help from the MBDA but couldn’t because of the color of their skin.”

“In an email from the MBDA Office in Orlando, Florida, the MBDA told Christian Bruckner that because he was White, they couldn’t help him, but they would be happy to ‘refer you to our strategic partner… for assistance.’ Separate but equal, literally,” he added.

During the court proceedings, attorneys representing the Biden administration staunchly defended the race-based agency, asserting that such race discrimination was warranted as it aimed to address the lingering consequences of historical inequities resulting from racial prejudice. According to that argument, Lennington noted, past practices like redlining, Jim Crow laws, and the denial of benefits from the G.I. Bill provide contemporary policymakers with a basis to prioritize certain racial groups over Whites and other non-preferred racial groups.

“If this sounds familiar, it should. This is the theory of systemic racism, a modern-day progressive religion, which declares that all present-day racial disparities are caused by past race discrimination, despite clear evidence to the contrary (documented aptly by academics like Thomas Sowell),” he noted further.

“Pittman was not persuaded. In ruling against the Biden administration, he explained that the Constitution forbids race discrimination and that the government cannot justify a racial preference merely by pointing to statistical disparities. Allowing this type of justification for a race-based program would give ‘governments license to create a patchwork of racial preferences based on statistical generalizations about any particular field of endeavor,’” Lennington concluded.