Little League Baseball in Haiti

By Dan Robson in Port-au-Prince (SportsNet)

White light invades the dark of Wilson Izidor’s one room home – the morning sun reflecting off the tin siding of a neighbour’s house a metre away. A rooster crows. The slum is busy with life. Wilson is late. He climbs out of the bed he shares with his mother and three-year-old brother and dresses quickly, pulling on his favourite aqua-coloured pants, blue basketball jersey and green plaid button-up. He grabs a grey Tabarre Tigers T-shirt and pushes through the swinging doors. Dirt crunches beneath his black-and-white high-tops as he turns a narrow corner in this winding shantytown in northwest Port-au-Prince. “Are you ready yet for baseball?” the 15-year-old shouts in English through a half-opened wooden door, walled in by grey USAID tarps hung upside down. “Jayson, let’s go.”

Sleepy-eyed Jayson Fortine ties his green Converse sneakers and neatly cuffs his skinny jeans. He takes two chomps of a hotdog bun and swigs water from a large metal mug.

“Fast, fast, fast, man,” Wilson says. “Jayson, let’s go. Let’s go-oh.”

The truck is a 20-minute hike away. Wilson still has another dozen friends to collect in this labyrinth of tin, tarp and cinder block. Jayson clanks the mug down, stretches his arms wide, yawns and rubs his hands together.

He pulls his Tigers T-shirt over his white one.One by one, the boys of Tabarre 41 come together, forming a pack of adolescent clichés. Jayson wears a scowl but sings Justin Bieber songs. (“I have the CD,” he shrugs.) Jackson is the best rapper in the group, but also the most bashful (he fell into a four-foot hole playing catch the previous evening, biting his tongue as his friends took joy in the tumble). Jackie is the talker, an unyielding source of commentary and instruction. (“That’s cow s–t man,” he informs a guest about a pile on the ground. “That’s not donkey s–t. I know cow s–t.”) Wilson is a man of style. He’s the kind of kid who changes into his baseball gear at the diamond and wears big black shades when he bats. He strums a guitar coolly in his Facebook profile picture; a disproportionate number of his Facebook friends are girls. Wilson is smooth.

The boys joke with each other in a mix of Creole and broken English, shoving and kicking and laughing as they hike past the barbed-wire walls of a UN camp and take a shortcut around the U.S. Embassy. Wilson prods them on: “Marche, Marche!”

They arrive at the Operation Blessing head office, where another group of kids is waiting. They all hop on the back of the NGO’s blue flatbed truck and cling to it as it sways and dips along the broken streets of Port-au-Prince like a dinghy in the ocean. They arrive at a white gate with big blue writing: “Byen Vini Nan Teren Jen Baseball Ayiti.” “Welcome to Haiti’s youth baseball field”—the only known diamond on this side of Hispaniola.

Despite sharing an island and a 200-km border with the Dominican Republic, the largest producer of major league players outside the U.S., baseball is a foreign sport in Haiti. Drive through the mountainous interior of the country, and you’ll find Haitians crowding around red-clay soccer pitches, rooting wildly. But you won’t find kids running bases. This truckload of boys, aged seven to 18, are the only regular players among the 10 million people who live here. Few of them could name a major league player; they might be able to name a team. Until three years ago, they’d never swung a bat or caught a ball with a glove. But Haiti does have a history with the game. For two decades, this country was the world’s largest manufacturer of baseballs. Every memorable major-league moment in the ’70s and ’80s started with the cotton and yarn wound around a small rubber core in Port-au-Prince factories. Catch a Reggie Jackson foul ball? Get Nolan Ryan’s autograph? That ball on your mantle was born here.

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