The Secret Tales of Two Disappeared Ballparks

I still remember my first time at a ballpark. It was late October, 1971. My beloved Navegantes del Magallanes visited the Tiburones de La Guaira at the stadium of the Universidad Central de Venezuela in Caracas. My dad couldn’t come, so Uncle Rubén took me.

I marveled at the light towers from the highway. We went into the stadium through the third base entrance. The first 10 or 12 rows from the dugout up to the stands were filled with benches. There we took a seat. I was paralyzed. There it was — all that green grass, the light blue outfield bleachers and, the monster scoreboard. The game stayed scoreless for a long time. The church silence of the bottom of the eighth inning was broken only when a dog ran out into right field. Any time I have gone back to that ballpark, I remember the crowd shouting during the ninth inning, the sound rebounding from the mountain beyond the stadium. I remember crying because Uncle Rubén decided to leave before the game was over.

That archaeology — that sentimental chemistry — felt by any baseball fan about the places they met the game for the first time, remains intact. You can always go back to it, even if the place where you found it is gone.

La Guaira was beating Magallanes 1-0 in the eighth inning, a pitchers duel between Jorge Lauzerique for Magallanes and Aurelio Monteagudo for La Guaira. As the game got to the final innings, I started to listen to a rusty voice, from a middle-aged man who talked about one game he had watched from the center field bleachers of that stadium.

His recollection went something like this:

“Maybe there are some other unforgettable games that I’ve seen at this stadium but that one of December 7, 1968, will remain forever as the most unbelievable game I’ve experienced in this ballpark. Magallanes played as home club against its hated rival the Leones del Caracas. The game was tied 2-2 in the bottom of the 13th inning. Cito Gaston came to bat against Bob Lee, who at the moment was undefeated with an 8-0 record. On the first pitch, Gaston smacked a big line drive. It landed in the middle of the center field bleachers and I had to run away to avoid being rolled by a wave of jumps, shouts, and pushing to get the ball.

“Any time I’ve gone back to this stadium, the first thing I do is to watch the spot where that walk-off home run ball hit the bleachers. The Magallanes fans got euphoric and ran to home plate, all of them wanted to congratulate Gaston for that fantastic homer.”

***

The way that man moved his hands, the excitement reflected in his eyes, reminded me of my fifth-grade PE teacher. Back at the beginning of the 1970s, there was a kind of educational exchange between Venezuelan and U.S. elementary schools. We had the opportunity to have some volleyball classes with an American teacher. At first, it was hard to follow him, maybe because we didn’t understand his Spanish, maybe because we didn’t know anything about volleyball. The teacher understood many of the boys liked baseball a lot. He made a deal with us: He would tell us some stories about baseball on the condition that we tried our best at learning to play volleyball. And so we learned how to play volleyball, and from then on, the teacher told us a new baseball story before each practice.

“Do you know about the flag on Memorial Stadium parking lot? It‘s about a home run Frank Robinson, one of the two Orioles’ Robinsons, hit a long time ago. It cleared the left-field bleachers, very high over spectators and landed in the parking lot beyond. It was the only home run anyone ever hit out of Memorial Stadium. Someone had the idea of marking the place where the ball landed. The flag was orange with black letters spelling ‘HERE.’ The flag stood from a pole beyond the bleachers for the next 25 years.

“The legend says that on May 8, 1966, Robinson hit a ball off Luis Tiant, the Cuban pitcher of the Cleveland Indians. He had hurled three consecutive shutouts before this Sunday start at Baltimore. It was the first inning of the second game of a double-header. The pitch was a fastball, low and inside. Robinson made contact and the ball traveled 541 feet before rolling to a stop. There were 50,000 fans that day at Memorial Stadium, and they gave Robinson a standing ovation that lasted an entire minute.”

***

As I remembered the volleyball teacher’s tales, the middle-aged man in the stands looked to a woman making gestures and shouting. He said he hadn’t attended a single game in that stadium when he didn’t see that woman supporting the La Guaira team. “She’s even more passionate than Pepe El Gritón. He runs through the whole stand when La Guaira is threatening to tie the score, or one of the players makes an outstanding defensive play. But this woman is like a furious bull! She stays shouting at the umpires, hollering to the players, even when La Guaira is losing by more than seven runs in the eighth or ninth inning. Now she’s shouting at Monteagudo to keep battling, to hide the ball, to put more rosin powder on the ball. She looks as if she were another manager.”

Now when I think of that woman at the stadium of the UCV in Caracas, it’s impossible not to think about an article I recently read on the internet, about a woman who was the most passionate Orioles fan you could imagine–who scheduled her life around Orioles games, who continued to watch every day even when she broke her hip. That woman eventually threw out the first pitch at an Orioles game, a reward for her decades of devotion.

I don’t know which one of the two women was more passionate for her respective baseball team. Because the La Guaira fan even talked to Enzo Hernández, José Herrera, Angel Bravo, Remigio Hermoso, each time an inning ended and the players got back to the dugout. It seemed like if she was a suspended manager who was watching the game from the stands.

***

When Uncle Rubén decided to leave the early stadium at the top of the ninth inning, I really had two pangs of sadness to deal with. I couldn’t watch if Magallanes could come from behind to beat the Tiburones de La Guaira. And I couldn’t ask the man with the rusty voice if he talked to Cito Gaston that night or finally determined the exact stair where that homer landed.

We left the ballpark behind that night. It is a ballpark that no longer stands. But the memory of the evening never left me. It never will.

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this article contained material from Thomas Scanlon’s Phantasm 42. The material has been removed.

References & Resources

Egan, Pete B. “My Baseball Heaven.” The Story Hall, December 15, 2018.

Rodricks, Dan. “Frank Robinson and the Legend of the Orioles’ HERE flag.” The Baltimore Sun, February 8, 2019.

Rowe, Peggy. “The Baltimore Orioles Stepped Up to the Plate for This Longtime Fan.” Guideposts, Angels on Earth. December 6, 2018.