“Maybe we’re more thick than they are, but size-wise and height-wise we’re the same.”
He was right. On average, the Pennsylvania players stood just under five feet, four inches and weighed just over 115 pounds. Hawaii players stood, on average, five feet, two and a third inches and weighed just under 113 pounds.
More thick.
For decades, boys and girls have gathered at the Original Little League Field to try out for the new season.
All-stars from the Pabou Little League of Curaçao listen for instructions from their manager, Vernon Isabella.
CHAPTER 5
Little League Dynasty in the Caribbean
MOST DAYS AT FRANK CURIEL FIELD IN WILLEMSTAD, on the Caribbean island of Curaçao, boys play baseball. Even when school is in session, boys gather at the field for practice.
The field is the home of the Pabou Little League, the winner of the 2004 Little League World Series and a favorite to win again in 2005.
As Little League complexes go, it’s not much. The field itself is a jagged plain of dirt, with rocks and pebbles mixed into the dry soil everywhere. In the rainy season—the off-season for baseball—dampness holds down the soil. The rest of the year, the dirt kicks up any time a player or ball bounds across the ground.
The organizers of the Pabou Little League—which has sent all-star teams to the Little League World Series four times—plan to cover the infield with an artificial surface. But the rocky terrain of the infield has always helped to train young players. Every ground ball on the dirt surface bounces differently, and the kids learn to field even the strangest hops with ease. Good reflexes are made, not born.
Behind the plate, a cinderblock structure painted sea blue serves three purposes. Right behind home plate, a booth provides a perch for official scorers. Behind that booth, a small kitchen provides space for cooking barbeque chicken and pork and for storing concessions. On the second floor is the home of Frank Curiel, the founder of the Pabou Little League—potentially the biggest dynasty in Little League since Taiwan dominated play in the 1970s and 1980s.
Nearby, on the wall of the equipment shed and bathrooms, a poster exhorts the youngsters to play hard: “With the Lord’s blessing, we will achieve our GOAL.” The author of that message is Yurendell De Caster, a Curaçaoan who was once a prospect in the Pittsburgh Pirates organization.
Curaçao, one of the five islands of the Netherlands Antilles in the Caribbean Sea, might be the perfect place for Little League baseball to thrive. Warm climate? Check. Social stability? Check. Disciplined players? Check. Parents committed to winning? Check. A passion for the game? Check. Role models who set high goals? Check.
The 171-square-mile island that the Pabou Little League all-stars call home—not much more than a few piles of prehistoric volcanic ash spewed from the northern coast of South America—is one of the more obscure places in the world.
Curaçao has no resources to speak of. It doesn’t have the great expanses of white-sand beaches of Aruba or other Caribbean havens. There’s no land worthy of agriculture. The only real city, the capital of Willemstad, is small. But the island’s location at the intersection between Europe and the Americas has fostered a culture of trade and diversity. Its openness to outside influences has always given it a small but meaningful place in world affairs.
In 1776, when Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations, he praised Curaçao’s virtues as a place of open trade. Centuries before NAFTA and CAFTA, Curaçao created wealth by taking goods made elsewhere and transporting them to someplace new—a radical idea in those days. “This freedom, in the midst of better colonies whose ports are open to those of one nation only,” Smith wrote, “has been the great cause of the prosperity.”
By opening itself to the world, an island with no great natural resources became a major center of commerce between the new and old worlds.
Colonial powers didn’t see much worthwhile in Curaçao. Inhabited for centuries by tribes called the Arawaks, the Spanish colonized the island in 1499. They left after a generation because they couldn’t find any raw materials—no precious metals, timber, agriculture, nothing. The Dutch West Indies Company—dedicated to colonization, slavery, and trade— took over and installed Peter Stuyvessant as governor. And in 1675, the capital city of Willemstad was declared a free port. The island used its strategic location to serve as an intermediary for trade. The goods to be traded included slaves, oil, financial assets, art, and booze.
Trade brought a dazzling range of people to the island. The Dutch arrived from the Netherlands to tend to public affairs and business. Jews came starting in 1649 and established businesses from street peddlers to bankers. Africans arrived, in steerage, to be sold as slaves. Latinos and Europeans moved on and off the island while doing business with each other.
The city’s architecture and street rhythms, schools and arts, reflect its mixed heritage. The capital city of Willemstad presents a jaunty parade of gingerbread architecture painted in vivid pastels. Music and food come from Africans. The legal and educational systems have a European cast. Curaçaoans speak two, three, four, even five languages. Dutch is the official language, but English, Spanish, and Portuguese are spoken there, too. Some speak French. And almost everyone speaks Papiamentu, a Creole language originally developed as a secret way for slaves to communicate freely.
Over its history, this obscure and complexly beautiful isle has operated—usually—above the poverty and strife and militarism that often characterize other nations in Latin America. Curaçao’s history contains its share of inhumane and exploitive moments. But mostly, the place provided a laboratory for diversity. Operating with the strong European ideals of the Dutch, people from all over the world found ways to live together like almost no other place on earth.
“The Dutch influence is so strong,” says Randy Wiel, one of the island’s great athletes. Wiel left the island to play basketball for Coach Dean Smith at the University of North Carolina in 1974. He’s been to the Pan-Am games and the Olympics in track and field. When I talked with Wiel, he was coaching a Dutch basketball team called the Eiffel Towers. We talked on the phone as he caught up with sports news on ESPN.
“You don’t have discrimination there the way you do other places. People never talk about race, if you’re black or white. If there’s prejudice, it’s about class and education. People care about education. If you don’t graduate, people look down on you, like you’re a dummy.”
Early in the twentieth century, after the discovery of vast oil reserves in Venezuela, Curaçao built refineries that provided the island’s main employment for generations. Like other extractive industries—Williamsport’s timber industry, for example—oil took the edge off the creative and competitive spirit that Adam Smith celebrated. Getting a job in the refineries reduced the incentive to seek out niche industries and seek an education. But it also provided stability, a rarity in Latin America.
Shell Oil sold its refineries to the Dutch government in 1985. Venezuelans now run them. The refineries still hum, but other parts of the economy are getting bigger. Industry makes up about 15 percent of the economy, services the other 85 percent. Drug trafficking and money laundering make up the economy’s underbelly but do not dominate the island like they do in, say, Colombia.
Now, the Pabou Little League plays a small role in the island’s economy. With its victory in the Little League World Series in 2004, international attention on the island increased dramatically. People who never heard of Curaçao wanted to take vacations there. The island’s tourist bureau is doing everything it can to leverage Little League into a new tourist boom.
The godfather of Little League in Curaçao, Frank Curiel, has lived all his sixty-two years in the neighborhood of Santa Maria in the capital city of Willemstad.
Curiel is a strong man made soft by the years. His brown skin is topped by close-cropped gray hair. He moves slowly, especially in the evening. But he talks with animation. He gestures the way he teaches kids to hit a baseba
ll, with short, strong movements. He tailors his words and gestures to connect with whoever he’s talking with—the women who sell refreshments, the five-foot infielder, the twenty-three-year-old manager, the thirty-year old parent.
Growing up, Curiel played soccer, tending goal. He eventually took up baseball. At the age of seventeen, he organized a team. Occasionally watching games on TV, he became a passionate fan of Roberto Clemente, the graceful right fielder for the Pittsburgh Pirates. So he named his team the Santa Maria Pirates. In 1969, Clemente organized a baseball clinic in Puerto Rico. Curiel went. The event changed his life— and baseball in Curaçao.
“That’s when I decided there needed to be a Little League for boys,” Curiel told me as we watched a game from the field’s aluminum stands in the middle of December. “He gave me the feeling to go back to my country to start a league for little players. We started with four teams in 1970.” The league did not succeed right away, but “we came back in 1974 and had six teams.”
Over time, the league developed into one of the most successful anywhere. The Pabou League first won a spot in the Little League World Series in 1980, when Curiel was the coach. Pabou also sent teams to Williamsport in 2003, 2004, and 2005. The rival Pariba League—the only other Little League on the island—participated in the Williamsport tournaments in 2001 and 2002.
Curiel spent his career working for SEDREKO, Curaçao’s sports and recreation agency. That job allowed him to build Little League throughout the year. The field that bears his name was once a junkyard. He organized families to help him clean it up, level the ground, mark out the field dimensions, build the fences, and install the lighting. “I pay the light bill for this park,” he said. I asked other people about that and they rolled their eyes. No, sponsors and government grants pay to put the beams on at night. But allow the old man his pride.
On a warm evening during my visit in December 2005, the stands filled with about 200 fans. A tar-like stench from a nearby oil refinery soaked the still air. A PA announcer called the play-by-play. The fans screamed loudly, shouting advice and criticism of the manager’s field strategy. It’s the kind of noise you don’t hear in the U.S. until a district championship.
Curiel sat on the aluminum stands for a while, and then walked around to greet people. He watched the game for a while with the men perched on folding chairs near the scorer’s booth. Then he drifted over to a table where women sell candy and chips. As the game progressed, fireworks twice filled the sky a half-mile away.
Children ran up to Curiel to ask for money to buy candy. In return, he asked them to get him a can of Red Bull energy drink and a plastic cup filled with ice. From that he makes his own cocktail. “I mix it with Dewar’s,” he tells me. “Want a cup?” Curiel mixed new drinks during the game as he made the rounds in the ball park.
Everyone associated with Little League in Curaçao says Frank Curiel is the wisest and most important figure, still, in the island’s baseball life.
Curiel takes a special interest in players whom he thinks could grow into Little League all-stars or coaches. He knows every kid who plays in the league, and his mind constantly sorts the players by age and position and strength. When he saw Rayshelon Carolina play in a game for Marchena Hardware one day, he decided that the small child needed a new approach to hitting. He took the four-seven, seventy-five-pounder aside and taught him how Ichiro Suzuki swings—as the pitcher delivers, take a shuffle-step forward, drop the bat on the ball, and start running to first base at the same time.
About fifteen years ago, Curiel saw a lanky kid in practice and took a liking to him. He was an infielder and he wanted to stay at the park all afternoon, into the dusk when he couldn’t see the ball anymore. And then he stopped coming for a month. Curiel found out his name and where he lived—it turns out that he came from a broken family and he lived with his grandmother—and went to his house to find out why he didn’t come to the park anymore.
Curiel talked with the kid’s grandmother to find out if she had any problem with him playing baseball. She said no. Then he talked to the kid alone, and told him he wanted to see him playing at the park again.
That kid was Vernon Isabella, who is now the twenty-three-year-old manager of the all-stars from Pabou Little League.
After that, “I didn’t want to ever leave the park,” Isabella says.
Curiel helped guide Isabella through a long career as a Little Leaguer and then to an internship as a gym teacher with SEDREKO. He gave him the position as manager of the Pabou League’s premier team, the Refineria Isla.
Most of the boys who play baseball on this tiny island—and their parents—dream of becoming the next Andruw Jones. The graceful centerfielder for the Atlanta Braves is the island’s great success story. Images of Jones look beneficently from billboards, telling players: “Ku esfuerso i determinashon bo tambe por” (“With effort and determination, you can too”). Every player on Curaçao’s team lists Jones as his favorite player. Jones has emerged as one of the handful of premier players in all of baseball.
But when Frank Curiel walks around the baseball field that bears his name, in the shadow of the short cinder block structure where he sleeps at night, he’s not thinking about finding another Andruw Jones.
He’s always looking for the next Vernie Isabella. Or the next Jonathan Schoop. Or the next Jurickson or Juremi Profar or Darren Seferina. These are the child stars of Curaçao.
When I was in Curaçao, I asked my guide, a Little League father named Vico Rojer, to show me as many of the fields and neighborhoods as possible. We passed through Brievengat, the neighborhood where Andruw Jones grew up. (Brievengat means letterbox, which refers to the hiding places for pirates’ notes in the island’s early years.) I asked to see Andruw Jones Field, which the major league star has paid to fix up. The field was still a mess, overgrown. It was the off-season, so no one was playing baseball.
But across the street, at the Sentro Deportivo Korsou, hundreds of kids and adults were on hand for swimming and soccer. This was a modern facility, filled with kids of all ages. It’s active all year long. Maybe baseball has become the most visible sport in Curaçao because of the Pabou Little League’s 2004 championship. But it’s still just one of many sports on the island.
Like the rest of Latin America—and the rest of the world—soccer has always been the favorite sport in Curaçao. But because Curaçao has no professional sports leagues and its culture is dominated by the Netherlands, most kids don’t gravitate toward only one or two sports. Kids sample a wide range of sports—baseball, soccer, basketball, swimming, gymnastics, and track and field.
To understand how baseball developed in Curaçao, I called Darren Van Tassell, the technical commissioner of the International Baseball Association. Van Tassell works with amateur and professional leagues outside the U.S. to develop training programs, league organizations, rules, and protocols. He also teaches at Georgia Southern University.
Van Tassell first went to Curaçao in 1991 to teach in a clinic sponsored by SEDREKO, the national sports agency. Andruw Jones was one of the players in the clinic. What he remembers most was the quickness of the players.
Christopher Garia bears down in a game against Saudi Arabia.
“Great infielders is what I remember,” he says. “The playing surface was so difficult, they had to be quick. There were rocks all over the field, so the ball always took bad hops. I saw them practice with a bouncy rubber ball.”
Back then, he says, baseball was not a central part of Curaçao’s sports culture—but it is today.
“It’s no longer something they’re borrowing,” he says. “They’ve made it their own. It’s like many things there, a blend of Caribbean and French and Dutch and American. Almost every night of the week, there are games being played. Baseball is usually only big where there’s a big enough population, so you can have [a critical mass for both] soccer and baseball—places like Venezuela and Mexico. But even though Curaçao is small and soccer is still popular, basebal
l has become part of the culture.”
Randy Wiel returns to the island frequently to put on baseball clinics. He says Little League has separated itself from other sports in one important way. In most sports, he says, “There is a great sense of discipline. Kids listen to what their coaches tell them to do. But we have a problem with punctuality. There’s always an excuse. That’s a problem they don’t have with baseball. One of the reasons is the baseball coaches are adults. In soccer and other sports, the coaches are often the players’ friends.” Kids don’t dare to show up late for practice or games in baseball, because they feel a keen sense of competition and know that someone might take their place on the field.
Despite the island’s enthusiasm for Little League and Andruw Jones, Curaçaoans still place school ahead of sports.
“The last time I was in Willemstad, a lady came up to me and asked me if Andruw Jones finished his education,” Wiel says. “I told her that he got to the Braves awful fast, that he was very successful as a baseball player, that he makes millions of dollars. She said, ‘Yeah, but why didn’t he finish school first?’ In Curaçao, if I don’t graduate, people think I’m a dumbo. That comes from the Dutch. Education is big, big, big there. You can’t say you’re going to be a professional athlete.”
That attitude melts a little bit every season as Andruw Jones excels in the major leagues and the Willemstad Little Leaguers make appearances in Williamsport. But the schools remain the center of children’s lives outside the family.
If the United States is a vast melting pot, a great cauldron that brings together people from all over the world and makes them American, Curaçao offers a different model of culture-building. It’s more like a smorgasbord in which the foods can be mixed together or taken separately.
Little League, Big Dreams Page 11