Fall 1982, Issue 1

The readers ask for it:
Italian baseball team facing trouble

Hardly a day goes by when we don't receive a letter from UCSD Italian Baseball fans. "How come you never print anything about Italian Baseball?" the letters ask. So we decided to silence the mail.

Here it is:

Is has been a stormy year for the BMW-sponsored Vanti baseball team and their future is in grave doubt. The Castenaso-based member of the Italian Baseball Federation is at the bottom of the major league As of late June, they bad won no games since May 16, when they edged out Pesaro.

Poor relations between Italian and North American players have made for low morale. At mid-season Italian coaches pressed team owners to fire some U.S. personnel. This was refused, no doubt because the investment in imported players on the part of wealthy owners was felt to be too great. The Vanti head coach, an Italian, quit in disgust. The assistant coach Tim Hickerson from Berkeley, CA, took his place.

Will Vanti survive as a major league team? Can it return to the minor league from which it was plucked last year as a top ranked squad? Or will team owners quietly drop the team?

Italian baseball was born soon after World War II when Allied soldiers a superficial U.S. imprint on the war ravaged country. At the major league level are eight teams in such cities as Parma, Rimini, Bologna, Grosseto (north of Rome), and Turin. Partisan feeling often runs high, and wives and girlfriends of players were not allowed to make a trip with the team to Nettuno in Southern Italy in June because of the possible hostility of home team fans.

One game is televised nationally each week. The All baseball Softball Weekly keeps fans current with news, photos, standings, and stories about U.S. major leagues.

From the beginning of the Italian baseball leagues, North and South Americans have been imported to manage, coach, and play under a quota system. A percentage of U.S. citizens with Italian surnames (called Oriundos) are hired. A smaller quota allows for non Italian Americans. Far the most part, U.S. personnel consists of ex-college and former minor league and farm team players.

Compared to many Italian players who receive no pay at all, conditions for imported players are good. They receive free round-trip plane tickets, free apartments and cars, and $10,000 to $15,000 dollars for the five month season. Lire at 1350 to the dollar makes this much more lucrative than playing for a U.S. bush league team.

Few U.S. players speak Italian - not even Oriundos. This fact, combined with pay inequities and an ill-concealed and chauvinistic contempt on the part of many North Americans for Italian baseball and ability makes for poor morale on a team just promoted from the minor league.

Coach Hickerson, a former member of the Chicago Cub organization, who played for San Giovanni in Persiceto a couple of seasons ago, currently makes his home in that city.

Fluent in Italian, Hickerson feels strong rapport with the Italian players and hopes to be able to influence the correction of inequities. He also has plans for improving the quality of major league play which now most closely approximates a first rate U.S. high school team.

The most ambitious of these plans is to bring teams to the U.S. for spring training. At the least, Italian players could watch video tapes of U.S. ball games since they do not have the opportunity to watch baseball on TV from an early age or participate in tightly organized and carefully graded youth leagues as U.S. players do.

High on the priority list is a more judicious selection of U.S. personnel to weed out cynical attitudes and ensure better adjustment to cultural differences. Pre-service orientation with strict behavioral guidelines for U.S players would also aid international player cooperation and morale. The survival of BMW Vanti depends on it.

- Italian Fan

This article reprinted by permission of People's World publications.