Thirty years he had waited. Thirty years he had plotted. Thirty years Ron Fraser had traveled the amateur baseball backroads, in Holland, in Cuba, even once in the cargo section of a plane across South America to reach a game and provide stories that sound funnier than they ever were.
Now came his reward. Now came the first pitch to the first batter in the first inning of the first big game, the one against Cuba, in the first Olympics where baseball matters.
So what happened?
Was there any doubt?
Havt you been paying attention to Fraser all these years?
What he tried from the first pitch Wednesday night in the L`Hospitalet Stadium is what he has always done at the University of Miami.
He tried to create. He had Calvin Murray, the leadoff hitter, bunt on that first pitch. It went foul. But when No. 2 hitter Chris Wimmer singled, Fraser had him run on the first pitch and steal second.
A couple of walks, a couple more steals, a few Cuban errors and five first-inning runs later-you`d have hated to have Cuba`s starter in the Olympic Rotisserie League-Fraser had delivered his message to the Cubans: anything it takes, anything at all.
No, there wouldn`t be enough against Cuba this night in a decidedly pro-Cuban crowd that had many Spanish Cubans among them with whistles and rattles and chants for Cuba.
Nor can the U.S. team be expected to beat Cuba in this Olympics. ”The Soviet hockey team of baseball,” Fraser called them before the 9-6 U.S. loss. Though it`s true in part, Fraser knows how to work the angles in this. Build them up. Build his team down. And next week, in the medal round, maybe the teams will meet again with all kinds of goodies on the table-and who knows what might happen?
”They think I know how to beat them,” Fraser said.
Does he?
”If they only knew,” he said.
Of course he knows the recipe: Speed, intimidation and respect is the only U.S. chance. He gimped over to the Cuban dugout after the game, bad right knee and all, and the Cubans streamed by to shake his hand.
What he is trying to do now is teach the U.S. players how Cuba plays. He knows. They don`t. And that was in part why they fell apart in the field and in their heads when Cuba rebounded from the 5-0 deficit.
”I think it was a shock to Cuba (when) we took that lead, and our guys thought maybe Cuba will roll over,” he said. ”They didn`t, and they never do, and we learned that tonight.”
What they did was change the game`s pace. Their hitters stepped out of the batter`s box. Their pitcher, Omar Ajete, aged between pitches. And several times, their players called time out, bent down and slowly . . . retied . . . their . . . shoelaces.
How baseball looks to the world in these Olympics is important to Fraser, because his work over three decades helped bring it here.
On Wednesday, it looked slow (four hours) and sloppy (nine errors).
It could have been worse in the time department, too. The game ended just after 1 a.m. local time.
”If we`d have scored more runs that first inning,” Fraser said, looking down at his watch, ”we`d be playing to 3 o`clock.”
But what`s a couple of hours for the man who has waited three decades for these Games?
His reward was a created first inning. But next time, if he meets the Cubans for the gold, he wants to create . . . a miracle.
