Path to the States?

Ghanaian players show zest for baseball, determination to overcome obstacles that makes imprint on major-league delegation

TEMA, Ghana -- Many staples of life are in short supply in West Africa, but not sunny, clear days. Like poverty and a hope that at times defies understanding, they exist in abundance, at least in the part of the year considered the dry season.

On a clear day along Africa's Gold Coast, you can imagine as much as your mind can process. It was on such a Saturday morning in early February that 19-year-old Daniel "Iron" Atiemo caught the eye of Omar Minaya, the general manager of the New York Mets.
Playing shortstop on a crude dirt field used most often for soccer, Ghana's national sport, Atiemo ranged to his right and left to field ground balls. Once he had gloved them, he fired the ball across the infield to first base, displaying arm strength worthy of a professional infielder.

Minaya, who long ago spotted Sammy Sosa at a tryout in the Dominican Republic, was drawn to Atiemo's quick hands and feet. Then Atiemo took his turn at bat.

The first pitch he saw was a fastball, over the plate. From the right-handed batter's box, Atiemo drove it high and far. The ball kept going and going, like the dreams of these first Ghanaians to embrace baseball. It landed far beyond the orange cones positioned in the open field to represent the outfield boundary.

"How old is that guy?" Minaya asked, beginning an immediate background check.

Atiemo floated around the bases, wearing one of the biggest smiles of his life. He said later he was "not often a home-run hitter," making it even more remarkable that he had seized the moment and made it his own in the most important at-bat of his life.

"That felt great," Atiemo said.

Spreading the news

Along with Minaya, the crowd applauding Atiemo included Hall of Famer Dave Winfield, a vice president with the San Diego Padres; Dusty Baker, former Cubs and San Francisco Giants manager; Bob Watson, Major League Baseball's vice president of on-field operations; and former big-leaguers Reggie Smith and Al Jackson.

They were part of a 22-person delegation on a goodwill trip to nearby Accra, Ghana's capital city. The mission was organized by the New York-based African Development Foundation and blessed by MLB and Little League Baseball, with the goal of helping baseball gain a true foothold on a fifth continent.

Baseball has spread from North America to Asia, Europe, Australia and parts of South America. Teams from Mexico, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Venezuela and Curacao have beaten Americans to win Little League titles, and Japan defeated Cuba in the World Baseball Classic last March. The favored Americans watched from the sidelines after being eliminated in a preliminary round.

But in Africa there are few baseball diamonds outside South Africa, a country markedly different from others on the continent because of its mineral wealth and immigration from Europe. A passion for the game lives in unlikely places.

This quickly became evident as the Americans watched teams of Little Leaguers and older players compete. Their skills were a revelation to the visitors.

"This is so exciting,"' Atiemo said. "It is great for Ghana. I've been waiting for this day my whole life. . . . It is a true blessing from God."

There are great athletes in West Africa. Michael Essien, a midfielder with Chelsea in England's FA Premier League, helped lead Ghana's Black Stars to the round of 16 in soccer's 2006 World Cup. Ignatius Gaisah won a gold medal in the long jump at last year's world indoor track championships. Maggie Simpson was ranked third in the world in the heptathlon before taking 2006 off to have a baby.

Samuel Kuffour, then 15, became the youngest player to win a medal on an Olympic soccer team when Ghana took bronze at Barcelona in 1992. Clement Quartey and Eddie Blay won Olympic medals in boxing in the 1960s.

Minaya and others in MLB regard Africa as an untapped resource for producing baseball talent.

"We know there are athletes here, great athletes," Minaya said. "We want to help them grow as baseball players. There is a passion here, but they don't have a way to express it. They need equipment. They need fields. They need coaching.

"I don't know when it's going to happen, but there is going to be a first person from here to go to the [United] States and play baseball, and then there will be a second and a third, then a lot more. I don't have any doubt about that."Still in infancy

Baseball is known to have been played in Ghana only since the 1970s, when it was the exclusive property of Americans working at the U.S. Embassy in Accra. It spread slowly, almost by word of mouth, from Brynn Park into the neighborhoods around the capital over the next 30 years, weaving a rich history that at times reads like a Shakespearean tragedy. Partly through the efforts of Albert Frimpong, a Ghanaian who first saw baseball while stationed in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a baseball association was started in Ghana in 1992. But the association never has had the funding to provide bats and gloves to players.

Through Tomonari Shinya, a Japanese citizen working in Ghana in the late 1990s, a baseball pipeline of sorts began between the Far East and West Africa.

Upon returning to Japan, Shinya formed the Association for Friends of African Baseball, which provided Ghana with some bats and gloves and some outdated uniforms from the Yokohama BayStars of the Japanese Central League. Those were the uniforms Atiemo and his friends were wearing in the game they played for Minaya and the American visitors.

With Shinya's encouragement and some funding from the Ghanaian government, a national baseball team was started in 1999, with the dream of sending a team to Sydney for the 2000 Olympics. National uniforms were created for the occasion--red jerseys emblazoned with the name "Rising Stars."

Joshua "Stone" Amponsah, the shortstop and an occasional pitcher, was the star of that team. He and his teammates, including cleanup-hitting catcher Paul Manome and George Mawuli Adjanor, traveled to Johannesburg, South Africa, for the All-Africa Games, which would serve as the Olympic qualifier.

There was little doubt South Africa would win the gold medal--baseball has been played there for almost a century, and there is organized competition at the high school level. There are South Africans playing in the U.S., though not yet in the major leagues. But the Rising Stars provided a major surprise, winning a bronze medal.

Amponsah had a two-homer game to help Ghana advance through its pool. The Rising Stars scored three runs in their loss to South Africa in the knockout round, the only runs the South Africans allowed in the tournament.

"We were so happy after that tournament," said Adjanor, who is now 25 and a coach as well as a player. "We lost to South Africa, but they knew we were there."

Amponsah, Manome and Adjanor were eager for another chance in 2003. This time they were taking along some younger players they had helped train, including Atiemo and pitcher Emmanuel Boafo. If they could upset South Africa, they would go to Greece for the Olympics.

The Rising Stars played in an All-Africa qualifier, winning enough games to earn their spot in the field. But when it came time for the tournament in Abuja, Nigeria, they were not invited to travel with Ghana's delegation of boxers, runners and soccer players. They were told that the Sports Ministry did not have enough money to send them.

Twenty-three players and coaches made the two-day drive from Accra to Abuja believing they could play if they got themselves there. But tournament officials sent them home, saying Ghana had forfeited its spot because it had not paid the entrance fee.

Frustrating moment

Almost four years later, Adjanor can barely speak of the disappointment. Atiemo reminds himself of it by looking at a wide, horizontal scar on his right shin.

"I did that to him in a community game when we had returned from Abuja," Adjanor said, sounding apologetic. "I was so angry. I was playing with my anger. There was a tag play at second base. Iron had the ball, but I slid into him like I wanted to hurt him. I did not want to hurt him--he is my friend. But I was mad at baseball, and I was playing with madness."

Atiemo understood.

"We were all so disappointed when we couldn't play in Nigeria," he said. "Many of our players, some very good players, gave up baseball. They said there is no future in baseball."

Since that All-Africa qualifier in 2003, Atiemo and his teammates have had few occasions to wear their red Rising Stars uniforms. One was for Amponsah's funeral.

He died of a bleeding ulcer at 25 in November 2005, about 14 months after he and Manome had spent two weeks in Japan training with the Hiroshima Toyo Carp on a visit arranged by Shinya. "He is the player I want to be like," Atiemo said of Amponsah. "Every game I play, I dedicate to him. We want to honor him, to play the game to the credit of him."

The greatest play Adjanor has ever seen is a triple play Amponsah started with a throw from shortstop to first base and ended with a tag at third base.Taking to the game

Understand this about the Ghanaian players: While the undersized Boafo says Randy Johnson is his role model--quite a statement for a right-handed pitcher who stands perhaps 5 feet 7 inches and throws about 80 m.p.h.--few have ever seen a nine-inning game from the U.S., not even on television.

Atiemo says it has been his dream to play baseball since he was 7, after he saw the sport "on the telly." He was watching game highlights, not a real game, but it was enough for him to decide that he wanted to swim upstream.

"I play football (soccer) for stamina, but I love baseball," the 5-8, 170-pound Atiemo said. "That's my goal. It is my dream to play in professional leagues, maybe to be a coach, maybe to represent Ghana."

In both games played for the benefit of Minaya's entourage on the dirt field just outside Accra, one for preteens and one for older players, the level of play was in line with midlevel development leagues in the U.S.

Players stepped into the batter's box as if they had been watching big-leaguers do it all their lives. In the field, they did a good job catching the ball and generally threw it to the right bases.

"This has been a real treat for me," said Reggie Smith, a former Los Angeles Dodgers and Boston Red Sox slugger who runs two baseball academies and helped MLB design and equip its new academy for inner-city youngsters in Compton, Calif.

"I've been very pleasantly surprised at the athleticism, the instinctual ability of these kids, especially the younger kids.

"It says a lot for the universal nature of the game. . . . These kids are learning on their own. That's the beauty of the thing. It tells us that we just have to put the bats and the balls out there, and they'll figure out what to do with them."

MLB helped lay the groundwork for this trip by sending longtime minor-league manager Tony Torchia to Ghana in the fall of 2006. He delivered equipment and conducted clinics at some schools. (Education is provided only through 6th grade by the government; students wanting to attend the equivalent of junior or senior high school must pay for tuition, uniforms and books, which is not possible for most.)

But it was men like Frimpong and Shinya who planted the earliest seeds.

Providing the tools

It is the hope of men like Minaya and George Ntim, a Ghanaian who runs the African Development Foundation, that the pace of progress is about to pick up.

With the Mets and other teams providing equipment, elementary schools will begin teaching baseball as part of their physical education programs. Little League Baseball, which sanctioned teams in Ghana for the first time in 2006, expects an increase in participation in 2007 with a chance for international competition.

Dan Velte, the director of league development for Little League Baseball, was with the American delegation to Ghana. He foresees an African champion participating in qualifying rounds for this year's Little League World Series, with champions from the leagues in Uganda and Ghana meeting to see which country will join the European qualifier scheduled for Poland.

The University of Ghana, a school of about 24,000 students just outside Accra, has donated land to build a baseball stadium that will be a joint project of Ghana's baseball association and the African Development Foundation. Major League Baseball might participate as well. At a ceremony to formalize the school's commitment, one of the Ghanaian players asked Minaya when the field would be ready for play.

"These things take time," Minaya said. "We wish it would be tomorrow, but we know that's not how it works. It will take a lot of work and some time, but the important thing is that you will have a field, the right kind of field, to play baseball." Minaya admires the potential of some of Ghana's current players, Atiemo and Boafo in particular. But time is not on the side of those who are already in their prime. It slows for no one.

Already the 2007 All-Africa Games approach. They're scheduled for July in Algiers, the capital of Algeria, and the Rising Stars do not know if Ghana's Ministry of Sport will make the arrangements for them to participate. Efforts of groups like the ADF could make a difference. Ntim has made tentative plans to hold a fundraising dinner for Ghanaian baseball June 16 in New York, after one of the Mets-Yankees interleague games. He believes this will be a significant event, in part because of the testimony of men like Winfield.

"When you have been here and seen these people, these kids, you will do everything you can to help them," Winfield said. "They have the skills and the desire to produce good baseball players, great baseball players. You can see their hunger. You can almost taste their hunger. Great things will happen here."

While the men playing the game now dream of opportunity, they understand that their passion may benefit future generations more than this one. Many among them are in their late teens or early 20s but already spend more time coaching the game than playing it.

"There are many really good players among the little ones," Adjanor said. "It is our duty, and our privilege, to help them. They will be better than we are."

According to Adjanor, one child in particular shows up frequently at baseball games and practices. He is only 6, but he zips the ball around and looks comfortable holding a bat, even though there are few his size.

The boy is Joshua Amponsah Jr., son of the local legend.

Will he be the one?

Black major-leaguers becoming rarer

The percentage of African-American major-league baseball players dropped by half from 1991 to 2005, while the percentage of Latino players doubled.

RACIAL/ETHNIC BREAKDOWN OF MLB PLAYERS

1991 2005 CHANGE

White 68% 60% -12%

Other 0% 3% --

Latino 14% 29% +107%

Black 18% 9% -50%

Source: Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport at the University of Central Florida
Chicago Tribune.

See microfilm for complete graphic.

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