SPORTS | Striving for excellence
25 November 2008
Baseball’s Cal Ripken Jr. and Dennis Martinez Visit Nicaragua
Former teammates hold baseball clinics, teach life lessons
Washington — American Public Diplomacy Envoy Cal Ripken Jr. was joined by his former Baltimore Orioles teammate, Nicaragua’s own Dennis Martinez, on a trip to Managua and Martinez’s hometown of Granada. The U.S. baseball stars worked with coaches and players on improving their abilities.
In the United States, Ripken is known as the Ironman for playing in a record 2,632 consecutive major league games spanning 16 seasons. Nicknamed El Presidente, Martinez is the first Latin America-born pitcher to pitch a “perfect” game — no hits, no walks, no errors — and holds the record for the most wins by a Latin American pitcher.
PASSION FOR BASEBALL IN NICARAGUA
Baseball is hugely popular in Nicaragua, and Ripken, who blogged about his experience while there, wrote about Nicaraguans’ “passion for baseball and the skill of the players. … The kids in Nicaragua all play the game and there are many talented kids here.”
Ripken also described the baseball clinic in Managua where he and his staff worked with 120 young Nicaraguan players on hitting, pitching, and infield and outfield play. He even recruited the U.S. ambassador to Nicaragua, Robert J. Callahan, to help with training. Callahan “loves baseball and did a great job with the kids,” Ripken wrote.
After the clinics ended, baseball equipment was donated to local youth baseball leagues and a charity called Empowerment International. Kathy Adams, a U.S. citizen based in Granada and director of Empowerment International, runs a stay-in-school program for more than 100 kids in the Villa Esperanza neighborhood of Granada.
A 90-kilogram (200-pound) bag of school supplies, given by students from Fallston High School in Maryland, near where Ripken grew up, was also donated.
“We were, and still are, honored to have been able to participate in such an event, and the kids will have lasting memories for years to come,” Adams wrote on the group’s Web site.
Martinez said he was very proud to be part of the clinics in Nicaragua. “It was the most exciting thing that I’ve been associated with,” he said. “It is amazing how big of an impact this was for the Nicaraguan people, for the kids especially, to have a player of Cal Ripken’s caliber.”
“Every time he was talking to the kids it was coming from his heart,” Martinez said.
Ripken wrote that he’s always admired Martinez but “came away with an even greater appreciation for him, his passion, his ability to teach and his overall desire to grow the game in his native land. … I hope we can help him achieve that dream.”
Ripken was not the only State Department sports envoy to travel to Latin America this month. Retired Major League Baseball player Barry Larkin visited Colombian cities Bogota, Cartagena and Barranquilla in early November as part of the U.S. Embassy’s sports diplomacy program.
Larkin played shortstop for the Cincinnati Reds from 1986 to 2004 and was one of the pivotal players on the Reds' 1990 World Series championship team. While in Colombia, Larkin conducted seven baseball clinics for more than 700 Colombian children and coaches.
Baseball teaches many lessons, said Larkin, the State Department’s newest sports envoy. “The message is that you learn a lot of lessons through sports: teamwork, self-esteem. … Everywhere we went we talked about education and sports. … I’ve had conversations with kids about knowing what the right play was to make, but also knowing what the right thing to do [is] once they left the ballpark.”
The importance of education, of making the right choices in life and being a role model to your peers, are lessons that sports envoys like Ripken and Larkin are also teaching through baseball.
At the end of his trip, Ripken wrote that he hopes to return to Nicaragua in the future to work with Martinez and “help more kids follow and develop their passion for baseball.”
“It seems that baseball connects people and supersedes any language barriers that might exist,” Ripken wrote. “We don’t want to just make one journey to a country and simply leave.”
For more information, see Cal Ripken’s Nicaragua trip blog.
