Justice B. Hill

BUENOS AIRES — The love of baseball starts with a father and his son tossing a baseball in the backyard.

The love grows stronger as the father teaches his son to hit. It grows even stronger as the father volunteers to coach his son in a league with other fathers (or, sometimes, mothers).

It’s a model for baseball that has helped build the Little Leagues into a showcase sports program for youth in the United States and many places around the globe. Fathers working in partnership with their sons, a relationship that values both.

Except in Argentina.

“We are not working with the fathers,” said Jorge Marcelo Ramia, director of Little League Inc. in Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay. “We are working with the children.”

Ramia has had to introduce the Argentine children to a sport that is unfamiliar to their parents, because baseball is foreign to them.

Fathers and sons don’t play catch here.

“You don’t have that in Argentina where the average dad of an 8-year-old probably had never picked up a baseball in his life,” said Lance Van Auken, senior communication executive with Little League International. “That’s very different than it is here.”

That’s one of the obstacles the Little Leagues and baseball face in trying to find a toehold in countries like Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and Chile, van Auken said in a phone interview.

He sees potential to grow the game in this part of the world.

But the absence of a legion of volunteers has made growing the game even more difficult, though the lack of financial resources hurts as well. For Argentina, while hardly a Third World country, isn’t flush with cash.

The majority of the boys in the fledgling Little League program here are from poor backgrounds, and the program can’t count on the boys’ parents to contribute money or time, Ramia said. They have little of either to spare in the balancing of real life and its stresses.

The shortage of fields to play on, the lack of money to maintain those fields or the money to buy equipment make growth slower than Ramia would like it to be.

“If the field was in Manhattan, I know I would be working with rich people,” he said as he stood near two diamonds the youngsters in Buenos Aires use. “But, here, this is the best we can do. We work with poor people.”

Van Auken said the good thing about the Little Leagues, now in 80 countries, is that its core principles don’t make a youth’s economic circumstances or talent a condition for participating. The Little Leagues is built on the premise that any youngster who wants to get out on the field and play should be allowed to play.

Finding youth who want to play is what Ramia is trying to do in the Southern Hemisphere. His efforts in Argentina are making headway, too. The league here now has 500 youngsters, and Ramia and a handful of others continue to court boys and girls and build their interest in baseball.

The building, however, runs headfirst into the love affair that youth here have with futbol. It is the sport of choice for Argentine youth, as it is in European countries where the Little Leagues is also growing.

“It’s a tough nut to crack,” van Auken said of the obsession with futbol. “But we are making strides on every continent — except Antarctica.”

To crack that nut, Ramia said baseball in South America needs money for equipment, fields and uniforms. It also needs volunteers — men and women who can raise money, who can care for the fields and who can teach the game.

“Our people don’t know nothing about infield fly and sacrifice fly,” Ramia said. “They know nothing.”

But South Americans can be taught to love baseball and its lingo, he said.

They can be taught to value the camaraderie and teamwork that grow out of the sport, as they value these traits in their beloved futbol. They can build the same closeness that baseball brings to fathers and sons in those baseball tosses in the family’s backyard.

Argentina can be the place in South America where the teaching begins.

“Maybe it can be the oasis on the desert,” Ramia said.