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sports
National Junior Baseball Tournament underway by Eric Jackson
It began on January 5 with a Panama Metro massacre of Colon, 9-0 with right hander Arquímedes Nieto pitching a two-hit shutout and striking out 14. It's the National Junior Baseball Tournament, an event in which Panama's best teenage players show their stuff before crowds that usually have major league scouts in attendance.
In this year's tournament, several teams will play no home games as their fields are in disrepair, undergoing reconstruction or just farther away than the league cares to travel. Thus, no games on the Atlantic side or in the provinces on our eastern and western borders, at least in the first round.
After the first round there will be a draft in which the best players from the teams that were eliminated will be picked up by teams that made it into the second round. That means that some of the scouts will not come until later in the month.
The NCAA university baseball powers have usually stayed away from these tournaments, claiming that there are too many academic eligibility problems for kids who don't speak English. However, English is now being taught in all of Panama's schools, with some of the younger players there are more years to prepare to pass a TOEFL exam, and Panamanians have become eligible and done quite well in a number of other NCAA sports. Thus there is a possiblity that some of the kids may sign university letters of intent rather than minor league contracts.
And who have we seen in prior editions of this tournament? Mariano Rivera and Carlos Lee, to name a couple....
First round games --- there will be second and third rounds as well
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