BBM EXTRA: Marking 15 year of covering Mexican baseball

Hard to believe, but it's been over 15 years since I started writing about professional baseball in Mexico. Back in 2005, I was "between jobs" as a radio announcer and wanting to do a little creative writing about sports while looking for a new gig. I wanted to write about something different, even exotic, and something that didn't get a lot of exposure in America's sports media.

After contacting Paul Reeths, who runs the outstanding OurSportsCentral.com website dedicated to minor league sports, we kicked around the idea. I'd covered the Pacific Coast League for OSC in 2001, so Paul and I already knew each other. After discussing whether I should write about cricket (no pro league in the USA) or Japanese baseball (not an American league), we settled on the Mexican League, which snuck in on the basis of being a AAA member of Minor League Baseball, albeit outside the USA. The Mexican League was about to start so I banged out a season preview, titled it Pelotero (which simply means "Ballplayer") and sent it to Paul, who posted it on March 18, 2005. Here's a link to an archived version of that first edition of Pelotero. Later that year, Craig Tomarkin of BaseballGuru.com picked up the column (by then called Viva Beisbol) and, like Paul, is still posting my ramblings in 2020. I greataly appreciate both of them for giving me a platform before I even thought of starting a blog.

Fifteen years later, here we are. What began as something to do for one Mexican League season has now outlasted my radio career by eight years, which says something. There've been a couple of name changes (first to Viva Beisbol less than a month after Pelotero debuted and then to Baseball Mexico in 2009) and interruptions along the way, while the frequency of posts has changed until I settled on this three-stories-per-Monday format a couple years ago. Monday has always been a travel day in Mexican baseball and it's been a traditional posting day for Pelotero/VB/BBM since the beginning. It seems to work. By the way, about that BBM acronym: I wanted a short name for Baseball Mexico but BM seemed a little too scatalogical so I decided on BBM (for BaseBall Mexico, a quasi 19th century touch) as a compromise.

Mucho kudos to Suzann Lankford, a graphic artist I met when she played baseball in Seattle, for designing the Baseball Mexico logo. I wanted to base it on the Mexican flag with the eagle holding a baseball bat instead of a snake and Suzann did a great job making sure there's no doubt that BBM is about baseball in Mexico. Special thanks are also due to a couple more people: Carlos Fragoso of Mexico City was the original "Latin Insider" on BaseballGuru.com and was hugely helpful in the earliest days of Viva Beisbol at a time when information on Mexican baseball was hard to find on the internet; Tanya Sullivan of California was extremely supportive of my efforts and sent me step-by-step instructions on how to build a blog, specifically the one you're now reading.

Rontrez Johnson, first player mentioned in Pelotero

I got into this because of my love of writing, my love of baseball and my love of Mexico and that all remains and while it would be nice to get some money for the 4-6 hours it takes to put one of these columns together every week, it's not the point. At one time, Viva Beisbol could be read via seven websites on both sides of the border and was even included on the Mexican Pacific League's website for a while (many thanks to former LMP public relations director Jose Carlos Campos for that). 

I always try to get my stories right and it drives me crazy when I don't because this is the only English-language coverage these players get and they deserve accuracy, not always easily determined when I'm not able to read Spanish beyond a few words and have to use Google translations, which often need translating themselves. I HAVE always tried to be honest and while my opinions sometimes leak through, the most important thing to me is getting the whole story out there and sometimes that means digging a little deeper than my Mexican sources go. It occasionally makes for a longer read (and definitely more time to write), but I think the extra work has been worth it.

Anyway, all this is a long way of getting around to saying "Thank you" personally for reading this blog, especially the few who've been reading these stories since the earliest days...the only person I know for sure who fits that category is a man (and now a friend) named Jim McCurdy, who I also call El Profe, a former semipro ballplayer who spent a lot of time playing in Mexico before becoming a college instructor near the Texas border. There may be others but no matter how long you've been reading this, I've always been glad you were there, especially the many people in Mexico who've "Liked" the BBM Facebook page, which is little more than a tease to this one. The vast majority of FB Likers have been from south of the border and it's an honor to have people with several other very good Mexican websites written en espanol to choose from (they're in the right margin), yet you come here too. BBM passed 700,000 all-time pageviews earlier this month, but so many of those have been bots from places like Russia, France and more recently that baseball hotbed of Turkmenistan, you can take that number with the entire box of salt, let alone a grain of it. 

I plan to continue writing about Mexican baseball because even though the teams and leagues I cover studiously ignore BBM, this isn't for them. It's always been about the men who have played in Mexico and always will be. Like it or not, you're stuck with me.

But, damn, I'd really like to go back to that Pelotero name. It just SOUNDS cool.

Bruce