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When Andrea Moreno wandered through the dimly lit showroom at the La Casita Cultural Center in Syracuse almost every week her freshman year, she’d often stop to take photos of one certain exhibit: “Balcon Criollo: Béisbol.” 

Posters and photos of players, championship trophies and artwork lined the left-side wall in honor of the Santurce Crabbers, a Puerto Rican professional baseball team that Moreno’s father owns. The Crabbers are 16-time Puerto Rican Independent Baseball League champions, and are the current back-to-back champions.

Back in Puerto Rico, Andrea has watched her home gradually turn into a Crabbers museum, too. It’s filled with very similar memorabilia, items her dad has gathered both before and after he became president of the team in 2017.

Tere Paniagua, director of La Casita, hosted students last year to talk about Hurricane Maria’s devastating aftermath more than a year after the natural disaster. Andrea briefly spoke about how it affected the Crabbers.

“You’re not going to believe it,” Paniagua told her. “But my dad owned the team, too.”

The Paniagua family owned the team between 1976 and 2002, prior to the Morenos, but it was that moment during their discussion when the two — and their families — began to form a connection.

Now, the two families are rekindling a shared bond over the Crabbers. Andrea, now a junior, and Paniagua, a 1982 Syracuse University graduate, have grown closer over baseball and sharing their culture with the Syracuse community.

“She was like my parent here at ‘Cuse,’” Andrea said of Tere. “I definitely felt very at home with her and all of the people at La Casita.”

Baseball has always accompanied the Paniagua family. Tere’s father Reinaldo “Poto” Paniagua Diez was an avid Crabbers his entire life, admiring many Crabbers greats like Willie Mays and Roberto Clemente. He wanted to play professional baseball but was never good at it, said Tere’s sister Rita. So, at the University of Puerto Rico’s law school, he managed Sigma Beta’s baseball team. The experience inspired Reinaldo to purchase the Crabbers in 1976 when the founder, and his friend, Pedro Zorrilla offered to sell him the team. 

After Reinaldo took over, everything Crabbers-related became a family affair. He always made it a point to walk through the lower concourse of the Estadio Sixto Escobar in San Juan to greet fans at their seats well into the early innings, current owner Justo Moreno Sr. said. Rita and Tere’s mother, Mary, perused the stadium concourse as an unofficial usher and second mom to all kids in attendance. Rita remembers her mom would sneak slices of pizza to children — if they asked politely.

And when Rita and Tere were teenagers, they joined their parents and traveled with the New York Yankees during summers so Reinaldo could scout Major League Baseball players for the Crabbers to sign.

“We would just go where (the Yankees) were going,” Rita said.

Junior Andrea Moreno talks to Tere Paniagua and Rita Paniagua at the “Balcon Criollo: Béisbol” in the La Casita Cultural Center. Emily Steinberger | Photo Editor

They traveled with the Crabbers during the Caribbean Series to host countries such as Venezuela, Cuba, Mexico and the Dominican Republic, too.

When Tere and Rita graduated from college in the early 1980s, they returned home to work for the Crabbers. Tere worked on and off for the team’s media department in the 1980s, while Rita worked marketing and sales from 1984 until 2002.

Rita, now a Syracuse Common Councilor-At-Large, said that working for the Crabbers developed her marketing and public relations skills. She worked with companies like American Airlines and Coca-Cola to sell tickets and donate them to fans from underprivileged communities near Santurce. She also set up events for the Crabbers’ players to play baseball with children in the neighborhood. 

“We made sure that the team, the players, were also personable in the community,” Rita said.

Rita helped the players buy presents for their loved ones while they visited Mazatlan, Mexico, for the 1993 Caribbean Series. The task — like many others — wasn’t in her job description, but she did it out of love for her father’s team. After the souvenir shopping spree, the team went on to beat the Águilas Cibaeñas, a Dominican team, in the Caribbean Series.

While celebrating the win, Rita remembers two players lifted her into the air and placed her on top of the bar at Bora Bora Antro in Mexico. The group erupted when the first notes of “Tequila” by The Champs played on the speakers, and a conga line snaked through the bar. 

“The pictures were in the paper the next day, and I got into so much trouble,” Rita said, laughing.

One of the trophies from the Santurce Crabbers sits in the team’s exhibit at the La Casita Cultural Center. Emily Steinberger | Photo Editor

Within the sales side of Rita’s job, she formed relationships with customers and season-ticket holders. That’s when the current owner, Justo, first met Rita — he’d call every summer to renew his family’s tickets ahead of the upcoming season.

“I still remember where he sat in the baseball park, in box No. 9,” Rita said in February.

Justo knew it was important to maintain the Paniagua’s hospitality when he purchased the team in 2017. Financial stability was important, but the sense of community at Crabbers’ games was Justo’s priority. “Abonos,” or season ticket holders, sat in the same seats at the Crabbers’ stadium for years, growing close to the families who sat nearby. 

“Fans more or less become an extended family,” Justo said. 

In spring 2017, Justo and a loyal group of fans called the “Las Cocolias Crew” — small crabs — held a postseason dinner where the Crabbers owner announced he did not want to move forward with the team. Six weeks later, Justo and three others submitted a joint application to assume ownership, which was approved by that summer.

Like Reinaldo, Justo grew up an avid Crabbers and baseball fan. At the dinner table, no one could speak unless they were talking about baseball, he joked. Even on unrelated business trips, before owning the team, Justo would call home frequently during Crabbers’ games to get play-by-play updates. 

That fall, Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico and jeopardized the league’s 2017-2018 season. Representatives from each of the six teams in the PRIBL convened to determine whether or not a season would be played. Initially, Justo said he wasn’t in favor because the island wasn’t in playing shape. 

But he changed his mind when he realized baseball was “the path to normality.”

The PRIBL hosted a one-month tournament. Despite finishing in second place for the second year in a row, the Crabbers represented Puerto Rico in the Caribbean Series and won. 

Though the Crabbers opted out of the 2020-21 season due to COVID-19, Tere and Andrea are looking forward to the “Latinos and Baseball: In the Barrios and the Big Leagues” exhibit opening at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History this summer. The two will play a small role in the museum’s larger project to trace the unexpected stories of the United States’ diverse population, said Margaret Salazar-Porzio, curator in the museum’s Division of Home and Community Life and overseer of this initiative.

To represent something that (has) always been included in our culture, in our heritage and that’s part of the story that we want to tell and the history that we want to highlight,” Tere said. “Baseball is certainly that kind of overall project.”

Back in Syracuse, the Crabbers — and the families associated with them — are passing along their traditions to the next generation. Aunts, uncles, cousins and siblings attend Crabbers games regularly. Growing up, Andrea was never a big baseball fan, but now, she is helping Tere make sure the team’s history is documented and shared at La Casita. 

“I think it allows me to become more connected to my family,” Andrea said. “It’s just so cool to see everyone just sporting Cangrejeros merch and just (be) really immersed in the game.”

Published on February 24, 2021 at 10:40 pm

Contact Louis: louis@dailyorange.com | @JBL__98