Baseball medal has a mix between professional amateurs – 10/27/2023 – Sport

The surprising campaign of the Brazilian baseball team is shaping up to be one of the great stories of the Pan American Games being held in Santiago, Chile. With a team made up, in part, of amateur athletes, who play on the weekends, Brazil qualified for the final and has already secured an unprecedented medal in the sport.

Without an organized professional league, Brazilian players face the challenge of not being able to make a living from sport alone in the country. As a result, athletes and managers need to pursue other professional activities, continuing in the sport as an amateur.

“In fact, we have no support. The athletes are essentially amateurs”, says Márcio Roberto Irikura, head of the Brazilian baseball delegation at the Pan-American Games. He played on amateur teams in Brazil and works as a dentist at a dental clinic in the capital of São Paulo.

“We have a dentist, a bricklayer, a hat maker, an IT analyst, a physical educator in the group. There are several professionals who, on the weekends, get together at their clubs to train for the championships”, says Irikura.

In Brazil, teams only have two nationwide events per year, organized by the CBSS (Brazilian Baseball and Softball Confederation).

The first on the calendar is the Brasileiro Interclubes, in August, which this year saw Marília’s team become three-time champions. Seven players from the selection play for the team, which is located in a region marked by the presence of the Asian colony, one of the biggest responsible for the dissemination of the sport in Brazil.

Historian at the University of Minnesota, in the United States, and specialized in Japanese immigration to Brazil at the beginning of the 20th century, Andre Kobayashi says that baseball in the country was being taken to the interior of the country, especially to the south and southeast, according to Japanese immigrant families arrived on the coast of São Paulo and moved to the interior to work in agriculture.

In addition to the predominance of Japanese descendants in the team, three players were born in the eastern country: pitchers Enzo Sawayama, Douglas Naoki Takano and Daniel Missaki.

There is also the Taça Brasil on the calendar, in December, which brings together the five best-ranked teams in the Brazilian Championship. In the 2023 edition, Marília, Atibaia, Nippon Blue Jays, Medicina USP and Ibiúna will be in the competition. The games will be at the Mie Nishi municipal baseball stadium, in the Bom Retiro neighborhood, in São Paulo. The stadium was opened in 1958, in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the beginning of Japanese immigration.

Kobayashi notes that the sport has developed in Brazil in recent years. In 2000, a baseball training center aimed at young talent was opened in Ibiuna, sponsored by Yakult.

However, to play professionally, you have to leave the country, which is what most of the players defending Brazil in Santiago did.

Of the Pan-American squad, five play in the United States, Canada, Japan and France. Eric Pardinho and Gabriel Barbosa are signed by MLB (Major League Baseball) teams, the main professional league in the United States, but they are not on the main roster, they compete in smaller competitions.

The most prominent players in the Brazilian formation are defender Paulo Orlando, the first Brazilian champion of the MLB World Series (annual major league decision), with the Kansas City Royals, in 2015, and André Rienzo, the first Brazilian pitcher in the American league, with stints with the Chicago White Sox and Miami Marlins.

Today, Orlando plays for the Anhanguera Nikkei Clube team, which hosts games in Santana do Parnaíba, while Rienzo plays for the USP Medicine baseball team.

The majority of those selected, however, played in smaller leagues, such as MiLB (Minor League Baseball), in the United States, and SILP (Shikoku Island League Plus), in Japan.

“All the athletes shone at the Pan. We managed to combine veteran players with newcomers and the mix worked”, says Jorge Otsuka, president of CBBS. “Brazil has already secured the silver medal, but we are looking for the gold medal”, adds the director.

Brazil’s fight for unprecedented gold will take place on Saturday (28), at 3pm, against Colombia. Before the start of the tournament, the Brazilian team was not among the favorites. But, from the first game, it showed signs that it could be one of the big surprises. In their debut against the Venezuelan team – where sport is a national passion –, ranked sixth in the world, Brazil, 24th, won 3-1.

The team surprised again by winning three consecutive victories against teams with more tradition in the sport. Colombia (8 to 7), Cuba (4 to 2) and Panama (5 to 3) were left on the way. The three are above Brazil in the ranking (15th, 8th and 12th, respectively), but they did not have maximum strength, without the presence of players who play in the MLB.

This Friday, Brazil had its first defeat at the Pan, 5-1, to Mexico, in a protocol game that did not jeopardize its presence in the final, with reserves that had not yet played joining the team.

The best result that the Brazilian team had achieved so far in the Pan American Games was fifth place, in the São Paulo-1963 and Santo Domingo-2003 editions. Brazil’s last participation was in the Rio edition, in 2007, when it finished seventh. Brazil has also never participated in the Olympics in this modality, which will return to the sporting event in 2028.

Kobayashi states that Brazil has the talent and human resources to be a presence at the Los Angeles Games. To achieve this, however, it is necessary to overcome barriers such as the popularity of the sport in the country and the lack of fields in large cities. “The Pan could represent an opportunity for the development of sport in the country”, says the historian.