The Mulegé municipal government opened its 2025 Primera Fuerza Baseball League last weekend, with games played simultaneously in four towns spread across one of Baja California Sur’s largest and most remote municipalities. Mayor Edith Aguilar Villavicencio threw the ceremonial first pitch in Heroica Mulegé, kicking off a season that runs through August and carries the name of a beloved local sports figure.
The Mulegé baseball league is named this year for Juan Antonio Robles Mada, a posthumous honor for a community sports leader from Punta Abreojos, the small Pacific fishing village about 170 kilometers southwest of the municipal seat. Opening day also included a retirement ceremony for the number 6 jersey of Salvador “Chavalo” Patrón Fuerte at the Estrellas de Cachanía stadium in Santa Rosalía.
Baseball Runs Deep in Baja’s Pacific Fishing Towns
Baseball arrived in the Baja California peninsula in the late 1800s, brought by American miners and merchants working the copper deposits around Santa Rosalía. The French mining company El Boleo, which operated Santa Rosalía’s copper mines from 1885 to 1954, helped build some of the region’s first organized leagues. The sport took root in ways that soccer never quite managed in these isolated coastal communities.
Towns like Punta Abreojos, Bahía Tortugas, and Bahía Asunción sit along the Pacific coast of the Vizcaíno Desert, connected to the Transpeninsular Highway (Highway 1) by long, lonely stretches of two-lane road. Punta Abreojos is roughly a two-hour drive from the highway turnoff. Bahía Tortugas requires a three-hour drive on a paved but winding road through the Vizcaíno Biosphere Reserve, a UNESCO World Heritage buffer zone. These communities, home to fishing cooperatives that harvest abalone, lobster, and clam, range from about 800 to 3,000 residents each.
In places this remote, the baseball diamond doubles as the town square. Games draw entire families. Local teams carry names tied to the sea and the land: the Ostioneros (Oystermen) of Punta Abreojos played the Lopones in Santa Rosalía on opening day, while the Cardenales de Mulegé faced Club Atléticos Somos Fuertes in Heroica Mulegé. Each town fields its own roster from the local population, and rivalries between villages date back generations.
Baja California Sur has produced players who reached Mexico’s top professional league, the Liga Mexicana de Béisbol. But the Primera Fuerza leagues, organized at the municipal level, remain the backbone of the sport in the state. Primera Fuerza translates roughly to “top division” and represents the highest tier of amateur adult play in a given municipality. Below it, youth and second-division leagues feed talent upward.
“Baseball is an essential part of our history and the life of our communities,” Aguilar Villavicencio said at the opening ceremony. She pledged continued support for the sport’s development across the municipality.
Four Towns, One League Stretched Across 300 Kilometers
The municipality of Mulegé is the largest in Baja California Sur by area, covering more than 33,000 square kilometers from the Gulf of California to the Pacific Ocean. That geographic spread makes this league unusual. Games take place in Heroica Mulegé (on the Gulf side), Santa Rosalía (also Gulf side, about 60 kilometers south), and Bahía Tortugas and Bahía Asunción (both on the Pacific coast). The straight-line distance between Santa Rosalía and Bahía Tortugas is roughly 200 kilometers, much of it across the Vizcaíno Desert.
Municipal secretary general Celina Ramírez Castro attended the opening ceremonies in Bahía Tortugas and Bahía Asunción on behalf of the mayor, a logistical necessity given the distances involved. Teams travel between towns for away games throughout the season, often driving several hours each way on desert roads.
For visitors driving the Transpeninsular Highway through Mulegé this summer, catching a game requires little more than asking around. In Santa Rosalía, the Estrellas de Cachanía stadium sits near the town center. In Heroica Mulegé, the field is easy to find in a town of roughly 3,700 people. Admission is typically free. Games usually start in the late afternoon to avoid peak heat, and vendors sell snacks and cold drinks from the stands.
The season runs through August 2025, with games scheduled on weekends across all four towns. The league was reported by BCS Noticias.