Southern Tehran, and more specifically the Azadi (Freedom) Stadium complex isn’t the kind of place where you would expect to find twenty young men playing baseball, but on the dusty soccer practice field, far from the city’s choking traffic jams, that is exactly what I found on one very hot, recent afternoon.

Perhaps the thought of Iranians playing baseball runs counter to what we think we know about people from the Middle East or the type of activity we think these guys should be training for. It definitely doesn’t fit with our ideas about an Iran that’s headed towards a head-on collision with the US over its desire to go nuclear. But as I learned that day, our expectations and assumptions about “the other” do very little to support reality.

Somehow the politics didn’t matter anymore, as I took infield practice and played catch with the guys. It was very clear that we spoke a common language, one that went well beyond rudimentary headlines and the Cold War verbal battle raging between our two presidents.

I was running with Tehran’s B-team, but I could see that there was potential here. Forget that none of the guys had cleats, or that most of their mitts looked like they’d been borrowed from a girl’s softball league, these were baseball players. While I can’t claim to have seen any so called five-tool players- a guy who can hit for average and power, has speed, throws well and plays good defense- but I definitely saw all five tools on display.

Unlike Cuba, where baseball is even more a part of the national identity than it is in the US, in Iran it was something esoteric, almost clandestine and definitely weird by local standards. Indeed until recently baseball, like so many other good and innocuous parts of Western life had been forbidden in Iran and labeled “Un-Islamic.”

Like all those other banned activities, baseball continued to be played, but without receiving any of the government subsidies that some of the more Islamic sports (soccer, wrestling, archery) did. Love of the game was the only resource that kept it going.

Hard to believe baseball had ever crept into the Iranian consciousness at all, given how isolated Iran is from access to information about baseball. It’s not that Iran is as backwards as you think it is, it’s just that there’s no opportunity to see anything baseball related on TV in Iran. And in a country obsessed with newspapers, magazines and tabloids, one for seemingly every subject, baseball was nowhere to be found.

Still, I asked the guys how much they knew about Major League Baseball and they were able to rattle off names of their favorite players; Randy Johnson, Frank Thomas and Mark McGwire. Yet they only knew them through photos and statistics.

One of the players approached me and pointing to my A’s hat said, “I know your team beat the Yankees 2-1 last night.” He was right, Mark Mulder had thrown a gem and the menacing Mariano Rivera had blown a rare save opportunity.  Read More...