“I can tell you, it feels just unbelievable,” Rodriguez said, standing near first base hours before the opener of a series against the New York Mets. “I’m very aware of what it means for me, for my family, and really for the whole (island). It’s like a dream come true for me.”

A week ago, he was the Marlins’ Class AAA manager in New Orleans. Filling in for fired Fredi Gonzalez, Rodriguez had been told he’ll be with the club for the entire series in San Juan. What happens next remained anyone’s guess. Turns out they want him to stay as manager. Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria said Rodriguez would remain as manager through the rest of the season.

Rodriguez grew up about 90 minutes away from San Juan and his current home is not only in the city, but about a five-minute drive “with traffic” away from the ballpark.

Joe Espada, the Marlins’ third-base coach and a native of Santurce, said he could only imagine the kind of pride Rodriguez is feeling before the history-making series in the U.S. Caribbean territory.

“I’ve known Edwin for a long time, and there is nobody who deserves this more. For what he’s done for the game here in Puerto Rico, from little league to the big leagues, it’s incredible,” Espada said. “He deserves it all, and what we need to do is get a couple of wins out of this for him.”

Rodriguez is a candidate for the Marlins’ full-time managerial job, having interviewed with the team formally on Saturday. He is one of three known candidates, with former major league manager and current ESPN analyst Bobby Valentine and Arizona Diamondbacks third base coach Bo Porter, (a former Marlins coach) being the others.

Rodriguez signed autographs for fans before the game, and it was clear who the favorite for the job is in Puerto Rico. “It’s about time a ‘boricua’ made it as a manager, so good for him,” said Marlins fan Manuel Ortiz Carrasquillo, using the Taino Indian word, which is the term Puerto Ricans use to refer to themselves.

Yet two years later, after a series of arm ailments, the A’s still haven’t seen Michael Ynoa throw a pitch in a meaningful game. And that could leave Ynoa figuring very heavily in what are sure to be contentious negotiations for a new collective-bargaining agreement between the clubs and players.

The current labor deal expires after the 2011 season, and Commissioner Bud Selig has gone on record as saying he wants an international draft included in the new contract to help rein in bonuses. Currently, only players from the United States, Canada and Puerto Rico are subject to the draft, allowing players from the rest of the world to sign as free agents.

The imposition of a draft would have a major effect on players are developed and signed throughout Latin America – but nowhere more so than in the Dominican Republic, which sends more players to the big leagues than any country other than the United States. The average signing bonus for players from the Dominican Republic has climbed above $100,000, about 16 times the average year income in that country.

“When you have such a limited history on the kids that are getting this much money, the risk assessment involved in that is pretty high,” said the executive, whose team is in favor of an international draft. “In the international market, like in Latin America, all of a sudden a guy comes on the scene and goes from tryout camp to tryout camp. But unless you’ve got some sort of history with that player, it’s very challenging when you start talking about millions of dollars.” Teenage prospects are pictured here training outside Estadio Quisqueya in Santo Domingo.

Wading gingerly into the middle of the fray is Sandy Alderson, a former major league general manager and club chief executive who has been asked by Selig with cleaning up baseball’s operations in the Dominican, where steroids, fraud and corruption have damaged the game.

Alderson got a sense of how Dominicans view the prospect of a draft when the Santo Domingo hotel where he was staying became the site of a large and emotional protest this spring. But he insists that the draft is just one of the many options baseball could use to clean up the sport in the country.

“I’m not there to institute a draft,” he said. “I’m there to deal with some other problems that exist. If we don’t clean up these problems short term, there’s a great likelihood of a draft being imposed. If we’re able to clean up the problem, there will be a less likelihood.”

The power potential and strong arm of Kelvin De Leon, pictured here, made the young outfielder worth a $1.1 signing bonus to the Yankees in 2007. Charles Farrell, a former Washington Post journalist and a closer observer of Latin baseball as co-founder of the Dominican Republic Sports and Education Academy, agrees that the threat of a draft probably will earn Alderson cooperation on other issues.

And it appears to be working. Sanctioning – or even identifying – an employee who fails a drug test is prohibited in much of the Dominican Republic, but recently the government allowed big league organizations to name and suspend players who test positive for performance-enhancing drugs. And after years of foot-dragging the government has offered to help license and regulate buscones, the independent scouts who find and develop most Dominican players and whose operations have been responsible for much of the fraud and drug use.

“The international draft, at this point, is a leveraging tool for Alderson,” Farrell said. “But (I) hope he wields that tool with a tempered hand. Tempers have flared, with prospects and buscones fearful of what could happen.”

In addition to reducing bonuses, for example, a draft could also lead many teams to rethink the size and operation of their Dominican academies, the backbone of a baseball infrastructure that pours more than $100 million into the struggling Dominican economy each year.

“There are so many ramifications to it,” Seattle Mariners General Manager Jack Zduriencik said. If a vote were held today, Zduriencik thinks that most clubs would push hard for the draft. But if progress continues to be made on issues such as identity fraud and drug use in the Dominican Republic, he says support would shrink.

“I do think, to some degree, we’re going down that road to try to figure out how to make this thing better,’ said Zduriencik, whose team in recent years has signed players from China, El Salvador, Brazil and South Africa as well as the Dominican Republic.

“Change is a scary thing to a lot of people. If you’re sitting in a certain country and you’ve had it your way for many, many years, you’re not going to want to change. That doesn’t mean that it’s not for the betterment of the game.”

Photographs by Jeff Chiu, Associated Press and Angel Franco, The New York Times and Associated Press

It’s the latest move under the direction of Sandy Alderson, tabbed by Commissioner Bud Selig as a consultant in charge of improving the league’s operations in the Dominican Republic. Part of the registration process, according to Alderson, could involve finger-printing, which MLB hopes will reduce the amount of age and identity fraud in the Dominican Republic.

“Age and identity continues to be a major issue, and it’s important to address it before the signing process begins, and the fingerprinting technology will help us do that and lock in their identities,” Alderson told the New York Times. “From the drug perspective, a vast majority of our positives have come from Latin America, in particular the Dominican Republic, and it’s important in other countries, such as Venezuela.

Some of Alderson’s moves have become front-page news in the Dominican press, largely due to a fear of a looming international draft after the next collective bargaining agreement in 2012.

Alderson has maintained that his role is not to lay the groundwork for an international draft. Yet many agents, trainers and team officials are skeptical, particularly given Selig’s public comments stating his preference for an international draft to be implemented in the next collective bargaining agreement.

MLB has also sent scouts from the MLB Scouting Bureau to evaluate Dominican prospects, though their appearances have led to contentious encounters with trainers.

“They’ve come stating they want to have a collaborative process, and the process hasn’t been all that collaborative with respect to people in the trainer community,” one agent said. “We have our doubts on what the true intentions are, short term and long term.

But when it comes to baseball, the German organizers are among the best on the continent. The twelve participating nations expect nothing less than a perfectly organized tournament. With the countdown on to the first pitch of the European Baseball Championship, the athletic aspect finally moves into focus after weeks of infrastructure preparations at each of the hosting locations.

Germany’s head coach Greg Frady, pictured here, was pleased to hear that the German club teams ended their European Cup duties with brilliant results. The defending Germany Champion Heidenheim Heidekopfe took part in the qualifying tournament in Brno, Czech Republic, fighting to and an outstanding second place finish behind the reigning Italian champions Fortitudo Bologna.

As such, they become the first German team to participate in the European Cup Final Four Tournament, which will be held in late September in Barcelona. The Heidekopfe will test their merit in the quasi semi-finals against three Italian clubs.

The Solingen Alligators, from Germany’s North Division, put on an equally impressive show during their participation in a CEB-Qualifier for the CEB Cup Final in September. As hosts of the week long tournament, comparable to the UEFA Cup competition, the Alligators qualified for the final by going undefeated against their European competition, topped off by an exciting final against the Swiss champion Therwil Flyers.

Frady was pleased with the practice his players received against tough European competition. It is hard to imagine a better way to prepare for the EU Championship, than the way the numerous national team players on Heidenheim and Solingen were able to do.

The national team coach will name his 40-man squad roughly 30 days before the first match, which will then be whittled down to 24 during the subsequent preparation. As part of this preparation, Frady will see the men in Black-Red-Gold take the field in warm up games against Belgium and Great Britain.

Yoshida bounced off the mound with an ear-to-ear smile, looking every bit like an 18-year-old who had just graduated from high school and was enjoying a new country. It was what she did on the pitcher’s mound – and in the batter’s box – that set Yoshida apart. She became the first woman since Ila Borders in 2000 to pitch professionally in the U.S. Yoshida showed that she and her sidearm knuckler can compete with the men.

Yoshida was unfazed when a former major leaguer opened the game by bunting for a hit. She had a few knucklers that danced almost as much as those of her idol Tim Wakefield of the Boston Red Sox. She pitched a scoreless first inning in her debut for the Chico Outlaws of the Golden Baseball League, before allowing a two-run homer to Juan Velasquez in the second inning.

She added an RBI single in her first at-bat against David Rivas of the Tijuana Cimarrones, leading to a standing ovation from the near sellout crowd on “Girl Power Night.” Even her teammates got caught up in the excitement, taking pictures of Yoshida standing on first after her bases-loaded single through the hole between first and second.

After former San Francisco Giants infielder Ivan Ochoa led off the game by bunting for a single, drawing jeers from the crowd. Yoshida settled down and kept Tijuana off-balance with a sidearm knuckleball that usually registers in the 50 mph range. She got Erold Andrus on a foul pop behind home plate before inducing former Yankees bonus baby Jackson Melian to ground into an inning-ending double play. Yoshida hopped off the mound in excitement after the nine-pitch inning and exchanged high-fives with her teammates in the dugout with a huge smile on her teenage face.

She fared better in her second encounter with a former major leaguer, getting Juan Melo to pop out to second base to open the second inning. She then got another former major leaguer, Kit Pellow, on a fly out to left before hitting Carlos Lopez with a pitch in the back. The only player to hit the ball hard against Yoshida in the first two innings was Velasquez, who drove a ball over the fence in left-center. Yoshida escaped the second with no further damage.

Spurred by the interest in Yoshida, the Outlaws are streaming all their home games live on the Internet this season. About 25 media outlets were credentialed for the game and the team drew a much larger crowd than usual for “Girl Power Night.”

Yoshida learned to throw the knuckler as a young girl by watching Wakefield. She taught herself the pitch and never had any formal coaching for how to throw the knuckler until meeting her idol during spring training in Florida earlier this year. Wakefield gave her a tutorial and was impressed by what he saw.

Yoshida became Japan’s first female pro baseball player last year when she pitched for the Kobe Cruise 9 in the Kansai Independent League. She was 0-2 in 11 appearances with a 4.03 ERA in 10 2/3 innings. She then went to the Arizona Winter League this past offseason, where her manager on the Yuma Scorpions was former Los Angeles Dodgers outfielder Mike Marshall. She went 1-1 with a 4.79 ERA in Arizona and impressed Marshall enough to get a shot in Chico, where Marshall is the president and general manager of the Outlaws.

Marshall said he has no doubt Yoshida has the makeup to handle this historic challenge. He said the biggest factor in determining how far she will be able to take it will be how much stronger she gets in the next few years.

“There’s going to be a draft here in a couple weeks and there’s probably only a handful of 18-year-old high school kids who are going to get drafted that could come here and play. Men,” Marshall said. “Look at the rosters. You have Double –A, Triple-A, big-league guys. This isn’t affiliated rookie ball; this isn’t affiliated A-ball. This is way up there. These are 25- to 35-year-old men she’s playing against.”

Despite the disparity in age, experience, gender and cultural upbringing, Yoshida is fitting in well with her new team. Manager Garry Templeton, an admitted skeptic when he first saw her pitch this winter, said the players missed her when she didn’t make a season-opening road trip to Mexico. He said Yoshida has been taken to kangaroo court, where she was fined a dollar, like all newcomers to the court.

The only special treatment she gets is separate locker room facilities to change in and her own hotel room on the road. “They’re protective of her,” Templeton said. “She blends in well. She’s just a ballplayer. They see her as a ballplayer, not as a girl.”

According to general manager Ulf Steinvall the federation was in contact with him for several years now since he has roots in Sweden. After Knutsson resigned in December, Cook’s name quickly moved to the top of the candidate list. During the ABCA Convention in Dallas, Texas both sides talked and Steinvall knew that they had the right man for the job.

Cook made his MLB debut for the San Francisco Giants in 1988 and stayed in the big leagues until 2002, pitching also for eight other teams. He received two World Series rings during his career, one with the Florida Marlins in 1997 and another one with the Anaheim Angels in 2002. The left-handed journeyman had an ERA of 3.91 in 665 appearances (71 starts) overall.

The rest of the coaching staff for the Swedish national team is already completed. Cook will be joined by his fellow Texans Scott Scudder and Stephen Labay. The 41-year-old Scudder pitched five seasons in the major leagues for the Cincinnati Reds and the Cleveland Indians between 1989 and 1993, winning the World Series in 1990. The 48-year-old Labay was a pitcher in the Philadelphia Phillies minor league system between 1984 and 1986.

Nine-time Swedish champion Rickard Reimar, who retired following the Baseball World Cup, and Doug Skiles also will be on the staff. Sweden is facing Great Britain, Spain, Italy, Croatia and Greece from July 23 to August 1 in Pool B of the European Championships in Germany.

With this draw Cook also will meet his former teammate with the Mets Mike Piazza in the preliminary round, who is expected to serve as Italy’s hitting coach.

Steinvall already has sent profiles for 47 potential players and DVDs of Sweden’s games at the Baseball World Cup to Texas, so the new coaches get a fast start into their assignment.

When I became a teacher at the Hauptschule Herbertskaul in 2002, I had no idea of playing baseball at all. The pupils, however, told me that they wanted to learn it. With the support of the German Baseball and Softball Association, we had our first experiences in regular sports lessons.

We saw a chance to integrate boys and girls in one kind of sports because they don’t have any experiences and prejudice. So we offered special sports the following year when the pupils played only baseball. There was a big run to our newly founded baseball working-group, and the children had much fun to play it. As expected, there were no problems between girls and boys.

We noticed that the American professional league, Major League Baseball (MLB), had a special program in Germany to hire new players from German baseball clubs. In the so called PlayBall!-league, there were children playing between 10 and 13 years who were not playing on a club. In 2004, we joined the Playball!-League and played for six weeks on the field of the baseball club Cologne Cardinals. Our players were dressed in original MLB-Team-shirts and received lessons from professional club-trainers.

In Germany, the children of low-level-educated parents, for the most part, do not have access to sports played in a club. One reason is that often they do not have money to pay for the equipment, the yearly fee, or pay for transportation to travel by bus to the club. So we tried to build a bridge between school- and club-sports.

The best teams of the Playball!-league meet during the summer in Cologne. The Playball!-World-series tournament determines the best team of Germany. As a mixed team of Hauptschule Herbertskaul, a ‘Realschule’ and a Gymnasium of Cologne, we won the tournament wearing the shirts of the MLB-Club Cleveland Indians.

Following this fantastic success, we had many children on our team learning how to play baseball. In 2005, we reached the 3rd rank at the end of the World Series and in 2006 we won the title again.

Since 2004, each year we have been invited by the mayor of the city of Frechen to receive the Big Sports Medal, dedicated to the most successful sports-teams. Soon, we began to create our own shirts for our team. At the beginning, I tried to make my own design. During the search for a suitable font, I found ‘Bello’ by Underware on the Internet. After some email correspondence, they asked what Bello typeface was needed. Following our explanation, Underware ended up giving us a helping hand with the Firefox-logo type design.

Our children have become one of the best school-baseball teams in Germany. This is very important to them because in their ‘normal’ school lessons, they often have some disappointing results. The more success they have in sports, the more their self-assurance is strengthened.