Guam -- Baseball Diamond in the Rough

* SPORTS
* MAY 14, 2009


By SKIP ROZIN

Guam

Don't bother looking for Guam baseball on your nightly sports report.

With foreign-born players flooding America's major leagues and teams from Venezuela, Puerto Rico and Mexico beating our own professional all-stars during two versions of the World Baseball Classic, this Micronesian island remains virtually invisible on the international baseball scene. No Guamanian player is on any major-league roster, and teams from Guam don't play at a high enough level for the World Classic.

It's puzzling given Guam's American ties -- it is a U.S. territory, host to a Naval and an Air Force base -- and its conditions ideal for baseball: perpetual summer and residents who crave the outdoors. Yet despite the fact that Guam has been playing baseball for more than a century, most locals instead choose to pursue outrigger-canoe racing, soccer, and diving in the crystal-clear Pacific waters, or relaxing at day-long barbecues.

Baseball in Guam started after the Americans took possession in 1898 during the Spanish-American War. Guampedia -- the island's online reference site -- describes a league comprising military players and the local Chamorro population. The three-year Japanese occupation during World War II brought more baseball, which continued after Americans retook the island in 1944.

Guam has enjoyed success, especially in rivalries with neighboring Palau and Saipan. Its national team won gold in the South Pacific Games of 2003, but it has faired less well against powerful Japan, Taiwan and South Korea in the biennial Asian Baseball Championships, its best showing a fourth-place finish in 1987.

Players come from the island's Budweiser Baseball League (BBL). Its unpaid athletes are from the University of Guam, the two military bases and the local population. The current season started Jan. 20 and ends with two rounds of playoffs, which are now into the finals.

Players take pride in their game, but more than miles separates them from Korea and Japan. Something is holding their sport back.

Guam baseball has the appearance of a family outing, more recreational than hotly contested. At a recent game toward the end of the regular season, barely 100 fans occupied the 5,000-seat Paseo Stadium, where all games are played, though it costs just $2 for adults and $1 for seniors and kids to get in. The atmosphere was laid-back, with mothers cuddling their infants, toddlers running up and down the aisles and attractive young women -- presumably friends of the players -- talking on cell phones during the action.

While the level of excitement amped up the following week when the four-team playoffs began and crowds swelled to close to 500, there was none of the passion of a Yankee-Red Sox clash on the field or in the stands.

"The great thing about Guam baseball is that it's fun," said John Hattig, an acknowledged local star. "When you play in the States, it's for the love of the game and to get to the next level. When you come back, it's more to be with your friends."

Mr. Hattig would know. He's the only player from Guam to reach the major leagues. Drafted in 1998 by Boston, he spent seven years in the minors before joining the Toronto Blue Jays in 2006. After the 2007 season he was released. He then played a season in the independent Golden Baseball League before returning to Guam this March, in time for the end of the season and the playoffs.

That he stands alone in Guam's baseball history does not signify an absence of talent; the island's Little League teams have made it to the Little League World Series in Williamsport, Pa., five times since 2001, most recently in 2008. It is, rather, an absence of urgency about the game itself.

"The problem we've always had is there's not a lot of commitment to daily playing," says Ray Brown, baseball development officer for the Pacific region called Oceania, part of the International Baseball Federation, the sport's governing body. "You could play year 'round, but they don't."

High schools on Guam play only 12 regular-season games, compared with a typical school on the mainland that plays between 20 and 35 games. Even the BBL regular season is only 15 games long. (Midlevel minor league seasons in the U.S. are about 140 games; the majors, 162.)

"They don't seem to understand that to play the game better you've got to work every day," says Mr. Brown. It's a harsh assessment, but Mr. Hattig agrees.

"I tell the other guys in the BBL that everybody's got skills, but that isn't enough -- you've got to make sacrifices," he said days before the playoffs began. "It kills us that we don't play a longer season, and guys don't want to go away. They go away to play in college but they get homesick and come back. I understand, yeah; this is paradise. But the game suffers."

There was no quaver in his voice, no question of whether this was a good thing or bad. He knows about sacrifice, his education gained during his 10-year career, most of it played out between long bus rides over roads 9,000 miles from his beloved island.

"It was OK," he said. "I was living my dream." Without that outside perspective, there seems to be little motivation to leave Guam.

"This isn't some Third World developing country where sports offers a way out," says Bob Steffy, BBL president and secretary general/treasurer of the Guam Olympic Committee. "Guys don't want to go to a place they've never been and leave their friends and family."

For better or worse, life on Guam is pretty good, and few feel a need to leave for something better. At least for baseball on the island, that's a problem.

Mr. Rozin writes about sports for the Journal.