SCOREBOARD IS JUST ONE OF THE MISSING ELEMENTS IN SOVIET-STYLE `BEIZBOL’

By GLENN NELSON

July 15, 1990

Publication: THE SEATTLE TIMES

Page: C1

Word Count: 2397

KIEV – All the Soviet Sports Ministry official in Moscow knows is that the national baseball tournament is being held in the capital city of the country’s second-largest republic.

The official believes there are three games a day, but doesn’t know exactly when or where in Kiev they are being played.

This, after all, is the Soviet equivalent of the World Series, one figures. The people in Kiev will be buzzing about it.

They’re buzzing about it, all right. Z-z-z-z-z . . .

“Where is the baseball championship being played?” one asks upon arrival in Kiev.

“What’s baseball?” is the oft-repeated counter-query.

Eventually, serious sleuthing by the concierge at Kiev’s Dniepro Hotel and then by a taxi driver, uncovers the beginnings of an answer.

In a park amid a maze of housing complexes sits what once was a soccer pitch. The combined forces of nature (a day’s rain) and man (four days’ labor) have rendered it something more – and less.

This turbid tract of Kiev is affectionately known as “Pyanikh Field.” Victor Pyanikh, the local baseball coach, assembled a crew of players and fellow coaches four days before the tournament. Together, they built by hand the country’s first permanent natural baseball field.

Because there is no grass, what should be the infield diamond blends into the outfield. The field has such unusual touches – by Soviet standards, that is – as an outfield fence, foul poles and backstop.

Pyanikh Field also features the first pitching mound ever used in a Soviet tournament.

In the Ukraine, spring has not yet completely wrenched itself from winter’s icy clench, so the Soviet Union’s finest comrades of summer are assailed by numbing winds as they vie both for a national championship and spots on the country’s entry to the 1990 Goodwill Games.

Undeterred by the sloppy conditions (one tournament was played in the snow last October), the players manage to slip and slide through a game. It’s a wonder they manage. One of the two game balls is so caked with mud it is almost undiscernible in the cloudy twilight.

“Usually, the balls are white,” says Igor Kulagin, catcher for a team from Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan and Seattle’s sister city. “But you get used to the dirty ones.”

Baseballs have been a scarce commodity from the start. The first ones actually were tennis balls wrapped heavily with tape. Many players have mastered the art of extracting a baseball’s core and sewing on a new leather cover. Once, a player accidently hit a ball into a nearby river and was forced to wade into the water to retrieve it.

None of this matters much to Vasili Bespalov, another rare aspect of Soviet baseball – the spectator.

Pyanikh Field is flanked by a couple sets of bleachers, whose occupants are almost exclusively athletes either hanging around after having played the previous game or waiting to play in the next one. A field house overlooking the field is jammed the same day with hundreds viewing a girls’ wrestling tournament. The country’s national baseball tournament attracts only a handful of people, more curiosity seekers than anything.

“I’m having trouble understanding this,” says Bespalov, who wandered over from his nearby home. “Maybe it’s because I’m a little sick in the head and don’t understand much anyway. I’ve had a brain tap and I’m very old.”

Alexander Grabel, standing just up the first-base line from Bespalov, is slightly less perplexed. “This is an interesting game,” he says diplomatically, “but football (soccer) is more comprehendible.

We don’t have as good a tradition in this baseball. It’s easier for everyone to go out for football. Maybe later people will like baseball as well.”

First, they’ll have to figure it out. One thing missing at Pyanikh Field is a scoreboard. And the scorekeepers doggedly guard their scorebooks as if they contain state secrets. The only thing that blares from a loud- speaker-equipped van, manned nearby by tournament officials, is the occasional rock-‘n-roll ditty.

`People don’t even know who’s winning,” says Dmitry Mazulevich, who had a falling out with Pyanikh and no longer plays. “They just watch.”

Alexandra Chomenko and Oksana Popereva wander by. The two babushkas (Soviet “grandmothers”), their chunky bodies wrapped in overcoats and their hair veiled in scarves, stop and watch. It isn’t long before quizzical looks grip their faces.

They are asked what they think of baseball.

“Oh, this is baseball?” Chomenko replies. She pauses, then adds, “What is baseball?”

Popereva smiles and says, “My first impression is that I like this game very much . . . because the young people are doing something instead of just hanging around.”

Soon reaching their curiosity threshold, the two waddle away. A few yards down the road, they turn, peer back at the game and engage in animated discussion, then continue their journey. The sequence is repeated several more times before they disappear from view.

It’s not likely the babushkas are talking strategy, or even about the game. Their thoughts are more likely occupied by the country’s moribund economy or the perils of nearby Chernobyl. As those who follow Soviet baseball like to say, “There are more Americans interested in Soviet baseball than Soviets interested in Soviet baseball.”

Bob Protexter is one such American. A couple of months ago, he sold most of his possessions, including his car, left Morningside College in Sioux City, Iowa, and headed for the Soviet Union. By prearrangement, he has been helping coach Moscow’s D.I. Mendeleyev Chemical and Technology Institute team.

Mendeleyev is the most Americanized team in the Soviet Union, mainly because Richard Spooner is its mentor. Spooner is a project manager for the U.S.-U.S.S.R. Trade and Economic Council and a former Yale intramural baseball player. Some consider him the American father of Soviet baseball.

Yet, even Spooner’s influence has failed to purge Mendeleyev of the idiosyncrasies that befuddle Protexter on an almost-daily basis.

The most striking thing to Protexter is the relationship between Soviet players and coaches. Pyanikh, for one, is a notorious tyrant, known not-so-affectionately to his players as Atila the Hun. He often stops his players between innings to excoriate them with such insults as “you run like a pregnant cockroach!”

“That’s typical,” Protexter says. “Here, the biggest problem is that the players don’t think the coaches know what they’re talking about. The coaches don’t think the players know what they’re talking about, either.

“And they’re both right.”

Such circumstances are understandable. Beizbol is just slightly younger than glasnost, Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of openness that itself has provoked a prolonged period of adjustment. The Soviet Union officially adopted baseball in 1986, after the International Olympic Committee granted the sport full medal status for the 1992 Games in Barcelona.

Literally starting from scratch, the Soviet sports hierarchy’s first task was developing a pool of players. It began by drafting athletes on the verge of losing their sanctioned status in other sports. Some attempt was made to match athletes with positions requiring skills already honed in another sport. Pitchers tend to be former javelin throwers and catchers, former soccer goaltenders.

It seems there weren’t enough former javelin throwers to arm the country’s pitching arsenal, however. Each team has only two pitchers;

many double as position players. As a result, Soviet pitchers typically go the distance nearly every time. Early in the season, their arms not yet in shape, they are being shelled in about the fifth inning – with no relief in sight.

“Yes, my arm hurts,” says the Central Army’s Alexander Dundick, considered the country’s best pitcher. “But I am not in the best shape right now. I hope to be in top shape in Seattle.”

Dundick, 33, is – what else? – a former javelin thrower. Like many of his comrades, he can’t quite put a finger on his attraction to baseball. That is, other than the fact the sport has enlisted him among its many second-chance athletes.

“For a person who already has played another sport, it is hard to go work at a plant,” he says. “After sports, anything else is very boring.”

Vladimir Bogaterev, the national team’s “general manager,” says, “Soviet people like sports in general and baseball is one of the new sports that came with perestroika. To us, the game is very interesting.

People relate to it because it’s played in the fresh air and, really, anybody can play.”

After finding players, the next most pressing obstacles in Soviet baseball’s evolutionary process were, according to Bogaterev, “equipment and knowledge.”

As for the former, the Soviets improvised at first. They made their own bats – out of birch, however, so they had the staying power of toothpicks. The first Soviet catchers used goalie masks and gloves from hockey. First basemen also used hockey mitts. Though Japanese models are starting to proliferate, most gloves used by the Soviets still carry the Hecho en Cuba (“made in Cuba”) stamp.

Cuba and Nicaragua were their first baseball tutors. Advisers since have been loaned by Canada and Sweden as well. The Japanese provided $3.2 million for the artificial-turf stadium built last year for Moscow University.

But the aid the Soviets cherish most has come from the Americans.

The Soviets have an instructional arrangement with the Eastern League minor-league circuit. Peter O’Malley, Los Angeles Dodger owner, has provided equipment and offered the use of his coaches in the future. Game films and instructional videos from the United States are considered precious.

American videos, in fact, have become so sacrosanct, players often blow off advice from their Soviet coaches, arguing, “That’s not the way (Pete Rose/Wade Boggs/George Brett) does it.” One Soviet catcher once vowed to name his first-born son after Gary Carter, the veteran major-leaguer whom the Soviet examined closely on video tape.

This infatuation with U.S. aid stems only partly from the fact that baseball is the American pastime. Several Soviets, in fact, dispute the claim that Americans invented the game. They maintain that lapta, a folk game played with a bat and ball which can be traced to the reign of Peter the Great, was actually the inspiration for baseball.

“After World War II, people started to forget lapta,” Bogaterev says. “Now, we are trying to put it back into the schools and hope it helps our baseball development. Lapta reminds many of our people of baseball.”

One can only imagine what lapta must have been like because, well, Soviet baseball might not always remind a lot of Americans of the game to which they’ve grown accustomed.

Soviet pitchers throw curveballs, for example; but many of them hang like the gag signs youngsters attach to the rump of unsuspecting buddies. Instead of “kick me,” they say, “hit me.” Soviet baseball scores often run into the 30-run range for each team, but that has just as much to do with the quality of fielding.

The Soviets also have a strange way of leading off base. Many Americans extend a left arm back toward the bag as sort of an imaginary tether in the event of pickoff attempts. Soviet baserunners extend their right arms, wave them wildly and shout obscenities while the opposing pitchers begins their windup.

Who taught them this?

“Nobody,” Mazulevich says. “This is our way of putting our own stamp upon the game.”

The one thing the Soviets have mastered is the art of looking like baseball players. Theirs could be faces straight off Topps baseball cards. They walk like baseball players, talk like baseball players and spit like baseball players. One, Andrei “Andy” Tselikovsky, even chews tobacco.

“I’m fricking running out,” says Tselikovsky, who actually uses the word, “fricking,” along with its more-profane derivative. “Know where I can get some more?” Tselikovsky was dubbed “Red Man Dude” during a recent stint with a junior-college team in Tennessee.

This resemblance to baseball players – in appearance if not deed – could be linked partly to a cultural tendency to sugar-coat reality.

Such inclinations hearken to the days of tsarist Russia. Count Potemkin erected mock village fronts along the banks of the Dnieper River to present a touring Catherine the Great the illusion of prosperity.

In contemporary, glasnost-inspired times, personal facades such as those fabricated in baseball may be more psychological defense mechanisms.

In little more than a week, the Soviet Union takes the extraordinary step of releasing obviously subordinate talent into a global arena.

Their first taste of international competition will come at the 1990 Goodwill Games’ baseball tournament in Tacoma. They will begin the tournament against the United States July 26. Expectations are not high.

“Our hope is not to lose by more than 20 runs,” admits Kiev’s Alexander Riabikov, another of the country’s top pitching prospects.

The Soviets have drastically downgraded their expectations for international success in baseball. Judging by the sport’s place in the country’s athletic pecking order, they’ve almost had to. Alexander Kozlovsky, deputy chairman of Goskomsport, the state Committee for Physical Culture and Sports, says, “I don’t feel baseball will ever become the most popular sport in the Soviet Union.” Which goes to show what kind of support the sport enjoys from the top.

Bogaterev says the Soviets are going to Tacoma “not to win, but to study.” The Soviet Union’s baseball fathers hope the country improves enough to have a shot at the European championship, circa 1992. They hope to then qualify for Olympic competition in 1996.

Judging by what is occurring between the Central Army and Kiev, two of the longest-standing teams in the Soviet Union, these are haughty objectives.

Central is batting, with a runner on third and one out. The Kiev pitcher tosses a moonball. The Central batter manages only to tap it to a capless Kiev third baseman, who fields the ball cleanly but slips in the muck. As he scrambles to his feet, the Central runner bolts from third.

The Kiev third baseman winds up to get the out at first, but changes his mind. Pyanikh’s frantic screams echo throughout the park. The third baseman rifles a throw toward the plate, but the wild heave evades the catcher. Meanwhile, the Central batter chugs into second base.

Dmitry Mazulevich pries his fingers off the cyclone-fenced backstop, turns away and shrugs in resignation.

“I’m sure you are used to a higher level of play,” he says almost apologetically to an American spectator. “Unfortunately, this is what we have done to your game.’