Meet Bruce Baskin, the Bedroom Blogger of Mexican Baseball

Bruce Baskin could see it: Oscar Robles, the veteran Mexican infielder, collecting his thousandth Pacific League hit in Culiacan. Robles "sliced an eighth-inning single off Jalisco southpaw Jose Ivan Salas," Baskin wrote on his website Baseball Mexico, which he rebooted this November after a three-year hiatus.

"Tomateros skipper Juan Navarrete immediately sent out pinch-runner Christian Zazueta to replace Robles, who left the field to an ovation from the crowd of 18,255 spectators at the Tomateros' new ballpark."

To read the lede of the story is to be transported to Culiacan, in the Mexican state of Sinaloa. But Baskin was not in Culiacan, or in Sinaloa, or in Mexico. Baskin was in Washington State, halfway between Seattle and Portland. He was in his spare bedroom, with a glass of ice water and a notebook, watching the line scores update on his computer.

Gameday, a scorekeeping program run by Major League Baseball, noted the estimated field placement of the single, allowing Baskin to determine that it was "sliced." As for the crowd reaction, Baskin looked up the attendance of the game and then made an educated guess, based on instinct and institutional knowledge.

"I know he got an ovation because he has played down there for so long and I've never heard of him getting involved with anything untowardly, so I imagine he's well-liked," Baskin said. "Plus, he's been playing well for Culiacan—one of the few; he's the only regular hitting over .300 for them. You just know enough about human nature, I guess, that he's going to get an ovation when he comes off the field."

This is how Baskin, a white guy with a big booming radio voice who took German in high school and doesn't speak Spanish, has managed to create the largest volume of English-language coverage of the Mexican leagues since he began writing about them in 2005.

By the turn of the decade, Baskin was posting hundreds of times a year, often covering every single game, and getting his stories online before the league itself. In late 2014, his website was drawing more than ten thousand visitors a month, he says. It peaked at more than 55,000 hits in November 2014.

Scouts have reached out, looking for contacts, as have stateside players, hoping for jobs in Mexico. He has to let them down: "To be honest, the teams down there, if they know who I am, they certainly have not told me."

Bruce Baskin was born in Seattle in 1959, which, as a time and place, is a recipe for baseball heartbreak. He can recall the date—August 20, 1969—and the score of the first professional baseball game he ever attended: the Seattle Pilots versus the Baltimore Orioles at Sick's Stadium, where Baskin's grandfather, his hero and chaperone that day, had been a groundskeeper from 1938 to 1960.

"It was just going through the tunnel and just walking out and seeing that field for the first time, just that green, green expanse and all the seats and everything," he said. "From that moment on, I was hooked."

The Pilots, Seattle's first Major League team, went bankrupt after just one season and shipped off to Milwaukee, where they became the Brewers. Baskin was devastated.

"In some ways, losing the Pilots, as traumatic as it was, I think it made me a better fan of the game because for two years I was scrapping for anything at all, because I had just lost my team after first becoming a fan. Tacoma had a team, but it was hard to pick their games up on the radio," he said. "I was even following fastpitch softball on radio; they had occasional radio broadcasts there. So anything that had a bat and a ball and nine guys on the field, I was interested. Even the small stuff in the Seattle Times when they'd have line scores and stuff—I just soaked it all up."

A minor league club, the Rainiers, returned to Seattle in 1972, and Baskin fell in love again. Unfortunately, he was one of the few. They stopped getting radio coverage after their third season. Baskin would take three buses to get to the ballpark. By 1976, the Rainier's last season, home games drew about 200 fans. Local newspapers stopped carrying even the box scores.

"They just had the AP stories and the line scores," Baskin said. "Neither the [Seattle Post-Intelligencer nor the Seattle Times] were even sending reporters out that last year because everyone was swept up with Major League fever"—the Mariners would be coming in 1977. "The minor leagues, it's like they're just playing out the season, who cares.

"Well," he paused, sounding wounded, "I cared."

The Rainiers didn't make the playoffs in their final year, losing their spot to Portland on the last day of the season.

"And that was it for minor league baseball in Seattle," said Baskin, who still has a program and an unused ticket stub from the Rainiers' last home game. "It almost seemed kind of appropriate that I had to wait until the papers came out in the afternoon just because it was—I don't know if I'd quite compare it to Sisyphus pushing the stone, but you hurry up and wait."

Baskin wrote a 72-page record book about the team. He's never loved a ball club the same way.

"It taught me, sometimes you have to dig a little deeper and find other sources and cross-reference them when you can," he said. "So I guess that's a habit I developed pretty early, out of necessity, to follow the Rainiers."

Baskin stayed close to sports. He volunteered as a public relations director for a minor league hockey team, which led to a full-time job in minor league hockey. (He was married on center ice at a game in Bellingham.) Later, he worked in radio. He's covered football, basketball, and hockey games for local radio stations.

In 2005, he reached out to the editor of Our Sports Central, a website that covers minor and independent league sports, hoping to write about something new.

"I said I'd like to write about cricket, like the county championships in England," Baskin said. "I thought that sounded exotic. He said, 'Well, no, we just go with regular minor league sports.' So I pitched the idea of writing about the Japanese League. And he said, 'Well, we prefer them to be minor league sports in the U.S. or North America.' I thought, What about the Mexican League? I thought, It's fairly close but somewhat exotic."

The editor agreed and Baskin began writing "Viva Beisbol," a weekly column.

"I would try to go to team websites where I could find them, but it was just kind of a snipe hunt at times," he said.

Baskin called the assembly of those early columns "painstaking."

"I spent a lot of time with Babelfish and Google Translations," he said.

He credits the help of Carlos Fragoso, a part-time scout out of Mexico City and an early reader of the column, with helping him understand the league.

The column ran for three years. Then he took a break, and started his own website in 2009.

During this second stretch, he wrote hundreds and hundreds of articles without ever having seen these players in action—not even on television or online broadcasts.

You can read about exciting back-and-forth divisional races that Baskin was following from thousands of miles away, through box scores. You can read little profiles of players Baskin's never met.

"I guess the game itself is kind of an island in that context, because I'm not getting into the personalities," he said.

No bit of information is too inconsequential: there are mundane pieces about umpire training or the league's Executive of the Year. Alone in the spare bedroom, Baskin posted an article about the huge fan turnouts for Opening Day, along with a picture of dozens of smiling fans in a ballpark he'd never visited.

"Trying to get even a response from the teams down there, you're have better luck plucking teeth from chickens," said Baskin, who sent e-mails, letters, and even Christmas cards to each of the teams without receiving a response.

Though he was getting only a couple hundred page views per week and almost no acknowledgement from the teams, Baskin continued posting nearly once per day, on average, over a 21-month stretch. There were several months, particularly during the 2009 winter league season, where he'd post more than 50 times a month.

You can tell, during this period, that Baskin was watching a lot of game updates and finding his rhythm as the Mexican League's one and only English-language bedroom beat writer.

As a kid, Baskin played baseball—a leftie who played every position but shortstop and third. "There was something I was good at relative to the other kids in school," he said. "I didn't feel out of place on a ballfield."

He called it "an oasis" and "a refuge." His in-depth baseball blog seems to serve a similar purpose.

Through the box and line scores, the news articles he'd translate with Google, or any scrap of information he could get his hands on, he started to grow attachments to specific players and teams.

"I think you kind of reach a point where there are just certain players where, I guess 'projection' is a good word—you see yourself liking them if you were down there," he said. "It's kind of a hard thing to really describe."

In the summer league's northern division, he developed a fondness for the Yucatan Leones after scouring sporting news guides.

"I would go through those and always look at attendance figures because I'm just funny that way, I guess," he said. "Yucatan was always either at the top of the league in attendance or well in the upper half, or upper third anyway. And it did not seem to matter whether they had good teams, mediocre teams, bad teams."

His favorite team in the northern division is the Monterrey Sultans. Those fandom seeds were planted during a family trip to Tijuana that the Baskins took when Bruce was 12. During the trip, he picked up a Mexican baseball magazine called Super Hit.

"All in Spanish, and of course I couldn't read it, but I could still look at pictures," he said. "On the cover was a player, I think it was Lupe Chavez, in a Monterrey Sultans uniform. And I thought, this looks kind of cool. Something totally as inconsequential as that. There's no logic at all. I guess if logic applied I wouldn't be a baseball fan. I certainly wouldn't be writing about it."

Baskin, always the fan of a scrappy underdog, had developed an appreciation for the Sultans' Heber Gomez, a generally weak batter who always seemed to come up with the big hit.

It wasn't until late 2010, when he and his wife, Linda, took a trip to Mazatlan, that he was actually able to see Gomez or any of the other players he'd written all those articles about. "When I finally got to see him play," Baskin said, "I was like, 'Oh, that's him, OK.'"

Fragoso was friends with Mazatlan's general manager, so Bruce and Linda were given seats in a skybox. It marks the only time Baskin has ever set foot inside of a Mexican ballpark. Still, he said, the trip did nothing to change the way he saw the league in his head.

"Up until that point, it was a matter of basically painting word pictures out of thin air," he said. "I still haven't really seen a whole lot of games. I just read the accounts and will just reconstruct box scores and recaps and such where they go batter by batter."

In 2010, he went so far as to construct a "Baseball Mexico Roadtrip" in which he wrote long, winding essays about every city where teams played. Each entry in the 24-part series starts hundreds of years in the past ("A city of over 600,000 residents, Culiacan was a small village when Spanish conquistador Nuno Beltran de Guzman founded the villa of San Miguel de Culiacan on September 29, 1531…") and works its way up to the present. They typically include a section where you, as the reader, are entering the city from a highway or an airport, en route from the previous destination in his road trip series.

"I had people saying, 'Are you actually down here?'" Baskin said.

He was not. As with his game recaps, he was reconstructing scenes through a variety of second-hand sources: encyclopedia entrees, translated newspaper articles, sporting news guides.

Currently, the Mexican Pacific League offers a package allowing fans to watch games online, but Baskin hasn't purchased it yet.

"I guess it's, in a way, a literary way of recreating a game, kind of like how they used to do in broadcasting, in radio, where guys would just get something on the teletype," Baskin said.

This, too, descends from his beloved Rainiers. During the team's original run, from 1938 to the 1960s, Leo Lassen was famous for his colorful broadcasts.

"He'd just be sitting in a studio in Seattle and they'd just be getting these bare-bones accounts of games, say, in San Diego," Baskin said. "It might say, 'Dick Geiselman ground-out to third.' And that was all he had to work with, but because he'd been a newspaper writer and he'd covered the Rainiers before, he knew the ballpark, he know the other players, he knew the idiosyncrasies. And he had a sound-effects man and he was able to recreate a game just from his memory. I mean, I don't put myself in his category, but I think that's really a lot of what I've done is taking the knowledge that I've picked up in 10 years, off and on, and just applying to information that I get now."

Earlier this month, Gameday showed Sebastian Elizalde scoring a game-winner from second on a one-out pop single to shortstop. Baskin was "flummoxed," he said.

"I'm looking all over the place online. Like, Is there a video I can see? Did it just go to deep short and the guy just gloved the ball and he fell on his face and couldn't make the play or what? I never could find how that play was made."

So Baskin wrote around it, noting that Elizalde scored in "a fashion that would make Cool Papa Bell proud."

"In my mind's eye, there's about half a dozen ways that play could have played out and I have no way of knowing so," he said, "I just figured, you know what, if a guy scores from second on a grounder to short, with one out, I'm going to use that Cool Papa Bell analogy."

Baskin is very concerned with accuracy and he's proud of the fact that he's never had to issue a correction (though it's unclear if his readership would have the first-hand knowledge to correct any mistake). Still, he is sometimes left with gaps to fill.

The walk-off, for example, is roughly as Baskin describes it but, of course, more nuanced. Elizalde is fast, for sure, but he also breaks for third before it's clear the bloop won't be caught. It's a good gamble: the ball bounces off the shortstop's glove in shallow left-center.

Roble's thousandth hit is sliced—to the shortstop, who makes an impressive stab but then an errant throw to first. Robles is given a standing ovation as he's removed from the game, but not before the crowd waits for the play to be ruled a hit, and not before his teammates come onto the field and lift him on their shoulders.

"I guess, to borrow a word from Disney, it's a bit of Imagineering," Baskin said.

Baskin's adrenaline gets running in the late innings, he said, even from the spare bedroom. He's usually clicking between several game updates. It doesn't matter which team wins. He likes the drama.

"I'm sure I've actually cheered out loud before," he said.

With the exception of a stint around the start of the decade, when the Pacific League would sometimes post his articles on their website—Baskin calls it his "greatest honor as a writer"—Baskin believes he's a relative unknown.

"I've sent Christmas cards down to all the teams a couple of years and got no response," he said, "so I've really been sort of a lone ranger on this, but I just think it's worth it because baseball's baseball. They've been playing if for, well golly, since the late 1800s down there."

His website is his only real outlet for his passion. After watching a crazy game unfold on Gameday in the spare bedroom, even his wife is disinterested.

"She's very tolerant," he said, laughing. "She kind of rolls her eyes because she figures, 'Well, he could be out at the casino.' I guess there are worse things to be addicted to than sports. She kind of nods her head and says, 'Oh that's nice.' I've learned that it's not really her thing, so I try not to burden her too much with it."

I asked him if the safety of the spare bedroom, the vacuum, the imaginative re-creation of games were the driving forces behind the Mexican baseball addiction or if he'd take a beat writer position in Mexico if offered. He paused.

"In a heartbeat," he said. "In a heartbeat, I'd go down there for a winter. I would do the whole league, actually."

I could hear Baskin's dueling lobes heating up, the logical side and the imaginative side fusing.

"If I had a situation where someone were willing to pick up the tab for the hotel and maybe $15 a day for meals, I would gladly do that," he said passionately. "I mean, what could be better than hanging around in the morning, Plaza Machado, which is in Old Mazatlan, and reminds me of old New Orleans actually, and hanging around and drinking a coffee in the morning and banging out a story and just kind of lollygagging, and then go the ballpark and writing stories and such."

He paused again.

"I can think of a lot worse ways to spend a winter."