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     Baseball Mexico is returning to its roots in 2021. 

     Back when BBM debuted in 2005 under the name Pelotero, we offered readers free direct email subscriptions in which they received newsletters for every column concerning Mexican baseball the day it posted on the internet. It was quite popular 16 years ago, so why not do it again?

     This time, if you contact us at BaseballMexico@live.com and let us know you'd like BBM sent to your inbox, you'll get a free newsletter every Monday BEFORE the text is posted on this blog. We'll be notifying past subscribers to ask if they'd like to be added to the new mailing list but if you're one of those folks, it makes sense to remove all doubt and sign up as though you're a newbie.

     On a related note, BBM will cease posting notifications with headlines of our weekly posts on Facebook and Twitter. Neither platform has led to an increase of traffic on the BBM site and that's the reason for posting on those sites. Facebook in particular has restricted our posts from news feeds without answering repeated requests for an explanation as to why.  

     There WILL be a BBM group on MeWe in the near future because readers won't be censored, assaulted by advertising or tracked by that platform while being able to interact with each other. More on that when it happens.

     Anyway, be sure to sign up for our FREE email newsletter by emailing us at BaseballMexico@live.com. We'll put you on the mailing list and you'll start getting your weekly update on Mexican baseball next Monday.

     As always, thanks for reading. We definitely don't do this for the money (if anything, Baseball America still owes us $75 for a past entry to one of their Almanacs), it's for the love of both baseball and Mexico. It's amazing that Baseball Mexico is still the only English-language source of news on baseball south of the border, but that only adds importance to the need for accuracy in what you read here. You'll still get an occasional opinion tossed in, but this has always primarily been a news site and that role is taken seriously.

Yours in Beisbol,
Bruce Baskin

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

1,000th BBM post coming Monday: A look back

Sometimes stream-of-consciousness writing goes sideways, especially when you go into it without an exit strategy.  That’s what happened when I first wrote this story on Friday and ended up with over 1,500 words.  Too much, so I’m rewriting the piece using the self-imposed, 800-word limit Rick Reilly employed writing for Sports Illustrated and ESPN.  What better example than (IMHO) the best American sports columnist of our generation?

This was just going to be a “between-jobs” creative outlet in 2005, something exotic (to me) to write about for the OurSports Central site while looking for radio work.  Instead, in 2017, I’m five years removed from my last radio gig while after a pair of time-outs (one for 3+ years), I’m committed to Baseball Mexico for the long haul.  While composing a column sitting next to my mother in a hospital bed the night she died, I knew that writing about Mexican baseball was something I wasn’t going to let go of even as I was struggling with having to let Mom go, a struggle that continues.  My mistake in 2012 when we thought we were going to lose Mom was dropping Baseball America instead of seeing it as the oasis it is.

Monday will mark Baseball Mexico’s thousandth post since 2009, when it was revived and renamed from Viva Beisbol (itself renamed from Pelotero after two or three weeks in 2005...Pelotero is still my favorite name but least-understood by Anglos like me).  It’s all been quite a ride, with lots of excitement interspersed with disappointment along the way.  Even though there’ve been decisions that haven’t worked out and I’ve made less than $1,000 total over twelve years, I don’t regret the decision to cover baseball south of the border in the first place, even though it wasn’t my first choice at the time.

I’d written for OSC before, including covering the Pacific Coast League’s 2001 season, but wanted to write about something different in 2005 after losing a radio job in Washington state.  After first floating the idea of covering cricket and then pitching Japanese baseball (both were turned down by OSC editor/webmaster Paul Reeths in Wisconsin), we settled on the Mexican League because it is an official Class AAA baseball circuit.  I figured the LMB season would run into August, by which time I should have a new radio job to concentrate on.  I did land a radio job, but I also discovered something about Mexican baseball: I was fascinated by it and didn’t want to stop writing about it.

If you’ve read BBM for any real length of time, you know that baseball in Mexico is not the same as baseball in the United States.  Even though the Mexican League is indeed a AAA league, there is no other loop in Minor League Baseball with the Liga’s autonomy.  It’s a different world down there, sort of like the minors were before Branch Rickey invented the farm system.  The results are often confounding but rarely boring, and the fact baseball is played year-round between the LMB and the Mexican Pacific League (which has become a juggernaut in recent winters) means there’s almost always a game going on.  Mexico is Baseball Heaven.

As mentioned, there’ve been disappointments over the years, but two individuals have done more than anyone to keep my flame burning when it’s flickered.  Jim McCurdy is a retired college professor in Texas who played semipro ball in Mexico and has always been a source of encouragement.  Everyone needs an El Profe in their life and I’ve been blessed to have Jim in mine since VB's earliest days.  Then there’s Carlos Fragoso in Mexico City.  

Sometimes I think Carlos knows everyone in Mexican baseball and maybe he really does.  When Craig Tomarkin added Viva Beisbol to his Baseball Guru website, Carlos was the Guru’s “Latin Insider” who reported on Mexican baseball.  Far from being resentful of a gringo invading his territory, Carlos was supportive from the start and his personal kindness over the years would take up an entire column.  I can’t describe how much these two guys have meant to both me and VB/BBM...it’s very possible I wouldn’t be here without them.

By the way, Carlos is running for president of the Olmeca Little League in Mexico City, the largest LL in Mexico.  The election is Sunday and while I try to keep BBM as politics-free as possible (don’t we sometimes turn on a ballgame for three hours WITHOUT politics?), I will wholeheartedly endorse Carlos Fragoso for that job.  So does Tomas “Tommy al Bat” Morales, who’s still writing about baseball after more than 65 years and is a national treasure as well as a full member of the Mexican Baseball Hall of Fame.  If Carlos is good enough for Tommy…

Finally, thanks to you for reading BBM.  I hope that my love for writing, baseball and Mexico shows through.  We should always follow our passions, and I get to follow three. Even though this has been an awful year personally, I’m so lucky that I can do this and that someone like you actually reads it.  Monday may be BBM’s thousandth post, but it’ll be far from the last.

BASEBALL MEXICO TO DEBUT IN AUGUST

A brand-new radio program dedicated to Mexican professional baseball will make its debut on Radio Miami International in August.

"Baseball Mexico" will air every Sunday on WRMI at 10:30AM Eastern time, beginning August 2. The program can be heard at 9955 kHz on the shortwave dial, or online via WRMI's live stream at the station's website (http://www.wrmi.net/). WRMI is a 50,000-watt station based in South Florida, with a strong signal in the Eastern United States and Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean (although it has been heard regularly throughout the world).

BBM brings exclusive English-language radio coverage of the Mexican League, Mexican Pacific League, the Mexican National Team, and Mexican players in Major League Baseball. Each week, listeners will hear the top stories in Mexican baseball, in-depth coverage of Mexico's 24 pro baseball teams, and ongoing series related to the game south of the border.

The producer and host of Baseball Mexico is Bruce Baskin, a veteran sportswriter and broadcaster who wrote the popular "Viva Beisbol" online column between 2005 and 2007 (and more recently produced the "World Baseball Today" program on WRMI from November 2007 and July 2009).

For a free subscription to the weekly Baseball Mexico newsletter (which will include elements not available on the radio broadcast), send an email to BaseballMexico@live.com.