An American Household Name in Venezuela

CARACAS, Venezuela — Squinting under the Caribbean sun, Buddy Bailey reminisced about a minor-league odyssey that began in the Appalachian League and took him to places like Durham, N.C.; Kingsport, Tenn.; and Pawtucket, R.I.; far from the baseball diamonds of Venezuela.

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Meridith Kohut for The New York Times
Buddy Bailey is a rarity: an American praised in Venezuela.
But nowhere along this meandering career as a baseball manager has Mr. Bailey, 52, found the success he has here.

His team, Tigres de Aragua, has won five championships this decade in Venezuela’s professional league, where the season runs from October to January. This record makes him a household name in this baseball-obsessed nation, worshiped by some, reviled by others but ignored by no one with a notion of the game.

Mr. Bailey’s fame also makes him among the rarest of persons here: an American who has attained public success and admiration in President Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela. His feat stands out in a country where the government makes distancing itself from the United States and quarreling with Washington central features of its existence.

“At first it was like, ‘What in the world are you doing?’ ” said Mr. Bailey, referring to the reaction of family and friends when he moved to Venezuela in 2002. “But baseball is baseball,” he explained. “Everywhere I go, the pitcher’s mound is at 60 feet 6 inches, and the bases are 90 feet, so it’s the same everywhere.”

Baseball does seem, at first, immune to the deterioration of political ties between Caracas and Washington. American scouts still venture to villages deep in the interior to find talented ballplayers. Venezuelans like Johan Santana are still plucked from obscurity to become stars in the United States.

The exchange goes both ways. Some aspiring American players and managers, going back at least to the 1960s when Pete Rose played second base for Leones del Caracas, still spend their winters here polishing their skills and earning salaries that rival or top those in the American minor leagues. This season, the Leones will be in the playoffs under another American manager, Dave Hudgens, a veteran who worked with the Oakland A’s.

Even the language of Venezuelan “béisbol,” introduced here by Cuban émigrés in the 1890s, seems phonetically impervious to politics. A strike is still “estraik.” A hit is “jit.” A foul is “faul.” A home run is “jonrón.” And a manager, as any Venezuelan fan will tell you, is simply a “manager.”

Still, Venezuela has few managers quite like Mr. Bailey, who will also manage the Daytona Cubs in Florida this year. He chews tobacco as if he were still in his hometown, Amherst, near Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains. He refrains from peppering his southern American English with Caracas slang, even when he hauls his stocky frame onto the field to argue with umpires.

And in a country that prizes an informal approach to many aspects of daily life, Mr. Bailey is anything but informal. He does not befriend the players in his dugout. He does not make time for small talk. Sportswriters here scoff at his jovial sounding nickname, knowing that behind it lies his given name, Welby Sheldon Bailey.

“Maybe he’s not very friendly, maybe he’s not very easygoing with his teammates, but he’s a leader who knows how to win,” said Alfredo Villasmil, a baseball columnist for the newspaper Últimas Noticias. “Since baseball is a religion to Venezuelans, that’s what matters in this country, no matter what your politics are.”

Such are the passions surrounding him that Mr. Bailey has various Facebook pages devoted to him here. One is for those fans who think he is Venezuela’s best manager, with many of them expressing sadness last week after the Tigres lost their chance to be in January’s playoffs. Another is for the fans of opposing teams, who cannot stand him. Yet another is for fans who want him to manage the national baseball team instead of Luis Sojo, a former major leaguer who was part of four World Champion teams with the Yankees and who held the job this year.

Not long ago, before Mr. Chávez began nationalizing foreign-owned companies and expelling some Americans, including missionaries and Drug Enforcement Administration agents, the atmosphere for those from the United States willing to try their luck in Venezuela was far more welcoming.

For instance, Robert Moses, New York’s master builder, helped design the highway system in Caracas. Nelson Rockefeller financed agricultural projects. Geography encouraged this engagement: an oil tanker leaving the Venezuelan port of Maracaibo is closer to ports in the northeastern United States than is a ship in Galveston, Tex.

Caracas — with its baseball stadium, gas guzzlers and shopping malls — felt more American than almost any other city in Latin America. Americans from various walks of life, though largely in the oil industry, made up the largest postwar American expatriate community in the world at one point, according to the historian Judith Ewell.

Those days, eclipsed by Mr. Chávez’s socialist-inspired revolution and soaring levels of violent crime, are gone. But baseball remains.

The game, too, has taken some blows. Some major league teams have shut down training academies in Venezuela. A regional governor threatened to nationalize a leading team, the Navegantes del Magallanes, before Mr. Chávez, a Magallanes fan, stepped in to reject the idea.

The New York Mets expressed alarm about the personal security of a catching prospect, Josh Thole, playing this year with Leones del Caracas, after the mother of a former Mets pitcher, Victor Zambrano, was kidnapped before being rescued in a commando-style raid. It was only the most recent example of crimes aimed at professional players or their families.

“Obviously, you read about it, certain players, or certain people being kidnapped or carjacked,” said Mr. Bailey in an interview as the sun set before a night game pitting the Tigres against Tiburones de La Guaira. He said Maracay, a city of army garrisons where he lives, was calmer than Caracas and other big cities.

“It’s a big military town, so there’s protection and the security is a little bit better,” he said.

Still, few events in the world of professional sports in the United States approach the intensity of regular season games in the Venezuelan league, according to Mr. Bailey and other Americans playing here. Some compare the Venezuelan games to a traditional rivalry in American sports, like an Alabama-Auburn college football game.

And many in the stands sip not beer but whiskey, adding to the passions. They spew vulgar epithets without quarter, sometimes touching off brawls. It is an environment in which Mr. Bailey has learned, in his own way, to thrive.

In a society in which so many values have been turned on their head, he described a personal philosophy that sounds almost revolutionary here. “If you’re being paid to be a professional, you have to put your nose to the grindstone and go hard all the time,” he said. “I believe in hard work.”