TIJUANA, BC, MEXICO — Just when you figured that the baseball situation in this city was stable — even if nothing else lately seems to be — there was this little bulletin released today by La Liga Mexicana de Beisbol in Hermosillo:
“The president of LMB, p.c. Pliny Escalante Bolio, accompanied by the Lic. Pablo Suinaga, who (brought forth) the controversy over the ownership of the Colts of Tijuana club, disclosed the agreement in which the league rights of the Tijuana Club are suspended, inasmuch as (it is not clear) legally who is the owner of the team.”
How to you say “Here we go again!” en Español?…
The league described this move as “temporary”. That same announcement also stated that the team would remain in Tijuana and that no other club had exressed any desire to move, which meant the city of Reynosa “would have to wait for another opportunity” to join the league.
Two possibilities come to mind:
Either way, somebody is eyeing the Tijuana market and its baseball team like a shark circling a wounded tuna.
Escalante’s announcement is the equivalent of smacking Reynosa across the nose with a rolled–up newspaper:
“Down, boy, down, down!”
How long the newspaper stays rolled up is anyone’s guess. What’s actually going on behind the scenes? Who the hell knows?
But we have been down this road before.
You have to go back to 1991, when the Potros, then a Double–A club in la Liga Mexicana del Pacifico, folded. That was not long after being stripped of their title in the Serie del Caribe for some under–the–table shennanigans involving payments to players.
Fast–forward to 2004, when a Triple–A club, los Tecolotes de los Laredos, moved off the Texas border to become the Toros de Tijuana.
Playing in the old stadium at Cerro Colorado, where the Potros used to hang out, the Toros made the playoffs in their debut season and left their new fans with a lot to look forward to for 2005.
And la Liga? They were so impressed with this debut season…that they stripped the Toros owner of his plaza, his franchise, and gave it to someone else, who promptly renamed the club…the Potros.
It gets better.
The new owner had the plaza, but thanks to the mysteries of Mexican civil laws and contracts, the old owner retained the rights to the Toros name and virtually everything associated with it — including the players. He promptly announced his intention to jump to a small summer league in California, but keep the team in Tijuana…in the same stadium where the “new” Potros planned to play.
So for a time, Tijuana had one baseball owner with a team but no franchise, and another with a franchise but no team, and both determined to play in the same venue at the same time.
There was no way that was going to work.
Without any stadium to call home, the Toros eventually bit the dust, as their back–room enemies apparently intended all along. The Potros, once again, were the only game in town — at least where beisbol is concerned.
And now this. It’s Groundhog Day at Estadio Calimax.
The Liga announcement didn’t say who the warring parties were, only that they were suspending the team’s league rights and were not taking sides, which represents a different approach from the one they took four years ago.
This is how it’s been here since the early 1990s, one controversy after another. If baseball generated this much drama on la cancha, Estadio Calimax would sell out every game.
Mexican soap operas, known as "novelas,” have one important difference from their American counterparts: They don’t go on forever. They have a beginning, a middle and an end.
Tijuana baseball would appear to be the exception. This is one novela that never seems to end.
The one saving grace in all this is that the LMB is a summer league, which means all sides have until the start of the 2009 summer season to figure a way out of this mess.
Naturally, there is absolutely no guarantee that they will.