MONTERREY, Mexico -- Major League Baseball's first season opener to be played outside the 
United States or Canada is scheduled for Monterrey on April 4. 
The game has aroused so much excitement that tickets sold out in three hours when they went 
on sale here last month. 

Mexican fans hope that the opening game, between the San Diego Padres and the Colorado 
Rockies, means that the major leagues could one day have an expansion team in Monterrey, 
Mexico's baseball capital. Major league executives say only that the game is part of their 
campaign to globalize baseball. 

"We're making an enormous statement by opening the season in Mexico," said a vice president 
of Major League Baseball, Timothy J. Brosnan. "It's part of our plan to grow the game 
worldwide. Mexico is our neighbor, and there's a great Latin baseball tradition. We want 
to bring the game to our fans." 

For half a century, Mexico's baseball leagues have served as a farm system for American 
players and a training ground for Mexican greats like Fernando Valenzuela, even as they 
have delighted Mexican fans. 

When major league executives decided this year to schedule the game in Mexico, it was little 
surprise that Monterrey was chosen for the game. 

Monterrey Stadium is Mexico's largest and most comfortable baseball park, seating 25,000 
spectators. The Monterrey Sultanes are recurring champions, and the city has 50 Little League
networks, as well as the Mexican Baseball Hall of Fame. 

The game will open the 1999 season for the major leagues. But the season for Mexico's summer 
league, which has 16 teams affiliated with the United States' minor leagues, started on March
17. The Sultanes met the Saraperos of Saltillo, an automobile-manufacturing city an hour's 
drive west through the desert. 

Before the Mexican opener, fans were munching not hot dogs, but platefuls of peanuts 
smothered in chile sauce. Otherwise the baseball rituals were familiar. 

Families wept during a scoreboard video tribute to fabled Mexican baseball stars. An army 
bugler played Mexico's national anthem as the sun dipped behind the Sierra Madre over the 
right field fence, and the Governor of the State of Nuevo León threw out the first pitch. 

"Play ball!" the announcer beckoned in English. 

The Sultans-Saraperos game drew 12,000 fans, partly because even in Monterrey, soccer 
overshadows baseball in Mexico. And many working-class fans poured savings into buying 
tickets for the major league opener and could not afford to buy tickets for the Mexican 
opener as well. 

Tickets for regular Mexican League games, including the March 17 opener, range from 50 pesos,
 about $5, for seats behind home plate to 10 pesos, about $1, for the outfield bleachers. 
Tickets for the Padres-Rockies game ranged from $60 for the best seats to $10 for the 
bleachers, about twice the daily minimum wage earned by many laborers. 

"I got mine," said Sigifredo Cantú, 32, the owner of a trucking company who was seated in a 
box along the third base line for the Mexican League opener. "I watch fun baseball in this 
stadium twice a week. But what's lacking here is really great baseball." 

Mexico has had outstanding baseball in times past. 

In the spring of 1946, Jorge Pasquel, a Mexican businessman, and his four brothers offered 
lucrative salaries to lure American major leaguers to the Mexican League. 

When more than a dozen players -- among them pitchers Sal Maglie of the New York Giants and 
Max Lanier of the St. Louis Cardinals, and Mickey Owen, a Brooklyn Dodgers catcher -- went 
to Mexico, the major leagues imposed a five-year ban on those who defected. Most of these 
players soon became disillusioned as reports circulated of broken contract promises and poor
playing conditions in Mexico, and they sought to rejoin their old teams. Happy Chandler, the
baseball commissioner, refused to reinstate them, and it wasn't until 1949 that the ban was 
lifted. 

In this decade, exchanges between Mexican and United States baseball have accelerated. In 
1990, the Dodgers, with Valenzuela pitching, played an exhibition series here with the 
Brewers, led by a Mexican pitcher, Teodoro Higuera. Four years later, a consortium of 
Monterrey executives applied to Major League Baseball for an expansion team, but withdrew 
the application when a peso devaluation damaged the Mexican economy. 

In 1996, the Padres and the Mets played a series of regular season games here, the first 
time that had happened outside the United States and Canada. 

Now, the major league opener has revived talk about a Mexican expansion team. 

"Having the major leagues open their season in Monterrey is a point of pride for us," Gov. 
Fernando Canales Clariond of Nuevo León said after throwing out the first pitch on March 17. 
"We have great fans and we feel very close to baseball. But the cost of sustaining a major 
league team -- well, it's high. So it's a question of working out the arithmetic." 

Pat Courtney, a spokesman, said Major League Baseball, which has two teams in Canada, said 
the company had "no concrete plans for the foreseeable future" to expand into Mexico. 

"But is it an area that's talked about?" he asked. 

"Yes, it is." 

The Sultanes owner, José Maíz García, who filed the application in 1994, said it was too 
early for Monterrey to think about refiling. "Not yet," Maíz said, rising to cheer a hit by 
a Sultanes batter from a box seat behind the plate. "Our economy still hasn't gotten back to 
1994 levels." 

Moments later, Ty Gainey, a former Houston Astros centerfielder from South Carolina who 
plays for the Sultanes, smacked a homer with two runners on. What did Gainey think of the 
chances for an expansion club in Monterrey, he was asked later. 

"Some major league players probably wouldn't be able to adapt to living in Mexico," Gainey 
said. "The food. The water. If you can play here, you can play anywhere. But an expansion 
team is still possible, because Mexican fans really love baseball." 

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