Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Baseball on the Border: A Tale of Two Laredos
    Baseball on the Border: A Tale of Two Laredos
    Baseball on the Border: A Tale of Two Laredos
    Ebook296 pages8 hours

    Baseball on the Border: A Tale of Two Laredos

    By Alan M. Klein

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    From 1985 to 1994 there existed a significant but unheralded experiment in professional baseball. For ten seasons, the Tecolotes de los Dos Laredos (The Owls of the Two Laredos) were the only team in professional sports to represent two nations. Playing in the storied Mexican League (an AAA affiliate of major league baseball), the "Tecos" had home parks on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border, in Laredo, Texas and in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas. In true border fashion, Mexican and American national anthems were played before each game, and the Tecos were operated by interests in both cities. Baseball on the Border is the story of the rise and unexpected demise of this surprising team.


    For Alan Klein, a cultural anthropologist specializing in sport, "the border" is almost a nation of its own. Having formed teams of players from both sides of the Rio Grande for almost a century, organizers and followers of the "Border Birds" often join forces but just as frequently squabble with each other in a chronic border tension. Throughout the book, Klein includes firsthand observations of the team and descriptions of its players. Readers will meet Dan Firova, the Tecos' beleaguered manager, a border-region native who nevertheless finds himself a target of the Mexican media. The "Ugly American," Willie Waite, is a young pitcher whose stunning success does nothing to diminish the disdain he has for his Mexican teammates. Ernesto Barraza, "The Trickster," once threw a no-hitter on only seventy-three pitches (on April Fool's Day, appropriately enough), but occasionally shows up at the park missing part of his uniform. And then there is Andres Mora, an aged slugger who, despite three seasons in major league baseball and a life of personal excesses, came within a few home runs of setting the all-time Mexican League record.


    This is just part of the roster of the Tecos and only a fraction of the lineup of Baseball on the Border. Anyone with an interest in baseball will be enlightened and entertained by this informative book.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPrinceton University Press
    Release dateNov 22, 2016
    ISBN9781400884520
    Baseball on the Border: A Tale of Two Laredos

    Related to Baseball on the Border

    Related ebooks

    Baseball For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Skip Novak

      Dec 8, 2022

      Skip Novak
      3 min read

    • Article

      Thanks For Coming

      Oct 2, 2019

      Thanks For Coming
      2 min read

    • Article

      Azteca And 132,247 Souls

      May 4, 2023

      IT WILL be a trip down a previously travelled road when I take my ringside seat on Saturday under the stars on yet another grand Mexican night at the fights. There were 132,247 paying fanatics in 1993 at the Azteca Stadium in Mexico City for Julio Ce

      4 min read

    • Article

      The Fixtures That Forged A Nation

      Mar 28, 2024

      FIRST, AN ADMISSION. YOUR REVIEWER is a sports nut. It started with the LA Olympics of 1984, glued to the TV with my grandmother, as indiscriminate in her love of any competition as I subsequently became. It didn’t matter when all the football migrat

      4 min read

    • Article

      Gary Nixon: Some Hero

      Mar 15, 2021

      Around the time when the ‘Swinging Sixties’ turned into the miserable, three-day week, Ted Heath, and power cuts at tea-time, there was a meeting in a Floridian ale house between various factions of the BSA Triumph meritocracy. There was beer, and bo

      3 min read

    • Article

      A Hundred Yards Of Substance And Style

      Dec 20, 2019

      Clinging to the “National Pastime” crown in the mid-1950s, Major League Baseball battled the NFL’s ever-increasing popularity as the top U.S. team sport. In 1955, the Topps and Bowman companies matched up for collectors’ pocket change, both producing

      4 min read

    • Article

      Touring The Baseball Hall

      Jun 21, 2022

      Touring The Baseball Hall
      6 min read

    • Article

      Terrific

      Sep 3, 2020

      Terrific
      4 min read

    • Article

      Diversions

      Oct 13, 2023

      Thomas Eaton 1 Whose Salvator Mundi went from £45 to $450m in 59 years? 2 In mountaineering, what achievement is abbreviated as FA? 3 Mary Surratt was hanged in 1865 for her part in what? 4 Which online library has over 70,000 free ebooks? 5 Which Af

      3 min read

    • Article

      Diversions

      Jun 4, 2021

      Do people’s names affect their personality? I’m not sure, but in college in Oregon I lived in a house with five Sarahs. Confusing when people phoned: “Which Sarah? ” “The Sarah in my Spanish class. ” Three of us took Spanish. But fun! Twice in my lif

      4 min read

    • Article

      Assassin’s Creed III 2012

      Oct 31, 2023

      Assassin’s Creed III 2012
      1 min read

    • Article

      Sportswriting: A 2,000-Year History

      Jan 22, 2018

      Sportswriting didn’t start with early 20th-century newspaper columnists talking fast and wearing hats with the word “press” written on the brim. The origins of the genre go way, way back past the historical warning track— hunting stories in pictorial

      12 min read

    • Article

      Baseball READING SEASON

      Nov 20, 2021

      The baseball offseason signals the arrival of the baseball reading season. And there are dozens of dynamic volumes to bridge the gap between the World Series and the date pitchers and catchers report to spring training in mid-February. Subjects range

      11 min read

    • Article

      Year In Review: 2020 Brought Unbridled Joy, Incomprehensible Sorrow

      Dec 30, 2020

      LOS ANGELES – The parade filled up both sides of Figueroa, hundreds of thousands of blue caps and fresh tears, Clayton Kershaw and Mookie Betts waving from a fire truck, Dave Roberts screaming into a microphone, all of Los Angeles chanting, "Let's Go

      4 min read

    • Article

      Ric Rolling

      Oct 13, 2022

      If Ric Flair didn’t exist, America would have to invent him, so perfectly does he embody the populist mindset of the nation. “I’m a Rolex-wearing. Diamond-ringwearing. Kiss-stealing. Wheeling, dealing. Limousine-riding. Jet-flying. Son of a gun. And

      3 min read

    • Article

      The Day The King Was Killed

      Sep 8, 2022

      The Day The King Was Killed
      14 min read

    • Article

      CHAOS, CARNAGE, & CULTURAL COLLISION

      Apr 6, 2022

      Surfing’s Alamo, Nuuhiwa’s last stand, Apocalypse Next, Animal Kingdom meets Sodom and Gomorrah and enter the gates of Hell where surfing collided and stripped down to shed its amateur skin. This was the end of an era. A transitional period in surfin

      10 min read

    • Article

      Giant Missteps

      May 11, 2018

      In the 1960s, the San Francisco Giants were poised to become the best team in baseball. Not only did their roster sport such fan favorites as Willie McCovey and Willie Mays, but the team had positioned itself to take advantage of the new wave of tale

      9 min read

    • Article

      The Bush Administration

      Apr 25, 2017

      The Bush Administration
      5 min read

    • Article

      ‘K: A History Of Baseball In Ten Pitches’ Is 100% In The Zone

      May 2, 2019

      Tyler Kepner loves baseball, and his book will make you love it too. His history of the game uses stories of career-making pitches as the narrative structure.

      3 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Baseball on the Border

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Baseball on the Border - Alan M. Klein

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1