Las Aguilas!

Baseball is to the Dominican Republic as soccer (fútbol) is to the rest of Latin America. It's huge here- there's a national league that many people follow, but it also seems as if everyone here has a favorite American team as well.

This is what wiki has to say about it:
"The Dominican Winter Baseball League (Spanish: Liga de Beisbol Profesional de la Republica Dominicana) is a winter baseball league consisting of six baseball teams spread across the Dominican Republic; it is the top domestic baseball league in that country. The league's players include many from Major League Baseball, and its champion plays each year in the Caribbean Series.
Each team plays a sixty-game schedule that begins the end of October and runs to the end of December. The top four teams engage in an 18 game round-robin play-off the first three weeks of January; the top two teams in those standings then play a best-of-nine series for the national title. The league's champion advances to the Caribbean Series to play against the champions of Mexico, Venezuela, and Puerto Rico."

Wednesday night, 5 of my friends from my Cultura y Sociedad class and I went to an Aguilas game here in Santiago. The Águilas Cibaeñas (Eagles of the Cibao) are Santiago's baseball team... and apparently are pretty terrible. While they did win Wednesday night, it's apparently pretty out of the ordinary. I asked my host brother if they were worse than Los Piratos (the Pirates... like I said, people here are very knowledgable about baseball in the states) and he laughed and said that No, they're not that bad...


The outfield

Main differences between Dominican baseball games and American ones?

Ticket prices- Between 50-700 pesos ($1.34-$18.82). We bought ours for 200 ($5.38) from a guy outside. We gave him about 100, walked though the gate and got them scanned to see if they worked, then left again and paid him the rest of the money.

"Security"- There were about 5 or 6 girls in each section of the stadium wearing verrrrry short shorts and crop tops who would act as "security" and also check tickets. They also would dance every five minutes, in a way that I never would imagine a security guard dancing in the states.

Actual security- Is it normal to get scolded for putting your feet up on the seats while at a stadium in the states? I've never been yelled at for it. Also, normal security guards don't usually creep as much as these were.

The attention- Guys coming up to our row with video cameras and just filming us watching the game for extended periods of time. They didn't work for the stadium, nor for a newspaper (as they said). They were just, you know, filming.

Food prices- Here, everything was soooo cheap. An empanada usually costs 35-40 pesos on the street, and here it cost... 40 pesos. A soda usually costs 30 pesos... here it cost 30 pesos. Pizza? 50 pesos a slice. Water? Also cheap. I was expecting the worst, after having gone to Heinz Field and PNC Stadium and the Dome... but nope. I was pleasantly surprised.

The type of food they were selling- Apples. Oranges. Hunks of cheese. No, not mozzarella sticks. Not fried cheese. Just... cheese.

There were also a surprising number of Americans on the team. Our favorite was a guy named Daniel Murphy. Can't get more gringo than that...