Nurturing Dreams, Maximizing Talent

Fernando Valenzuela.
Sammy Sosa.
Tony Perez.
Rod Carew.
Juan Marichal.
Luis Aparicio, and of course,
Roberto Clemente.

These baseball legends, celebrated for breaking records, surmounting barriers and advancing the game, played diverse positions in careers spanning more than five decades, but all have one thing in common:

Each was a native of Latin America who went on to become a superstar in Major League Baseball.

Latin America has long been renowned as an exceptional breeding ground for baseball talent, contributing more than 1,300 gifted Major League athletes since the 1950s. Yet despite the impact that players from such countries as Puerto Rico, Panama, Venezuela, Mexico, Cuba and especially the Dominican Republic have had on the game, the talent in the region’s other nations has barely been tapped. Now, thanks to a new enterprise of the International Baseball Association and its affiliate, the International Baseball Academy of Central America (IBACA), a fresh source of baseball talent is preparing to burst onto the scene: Nicaragua. Although Nicaragua has always been a baseball-loving country, its most promising young players have lacked the same opportunities to develop their talent that their peers in neighboring countries have enjoyed.

Through IBACA’s new state-of-the-art baseball academy, all that is about to change, providing extraordinary new opportunities for talented young Nicaraguan and Central American baseball players, the local community and Major League Baseball alike.