SAN PEDRO DE MACORIS, Dominican Republic - To find the Orioles' future field of Dominican dreams, you leave this town - home to sugar mills and Sammy Sosa - and drive south for about 10 minutes, turning off the paved road in between the sugar cane fields.
From there, you bounce along a potholed road, past a garbage dump, to a decaying farmhouse where a goat rests in the front yard.
There, Carlos Bernhardt, the Orioles' director of Latin American scouting, is wearing a black windbreaker - a new one that replaced the one with the knife marks from the attacker - talking on his cell phone with Orioles owner Peter Angelos, and beaming about the possibilities.
Two architects have come with blueprints, describing their vision for a $2 million project.
On this 14-acre plot of farmland, the Orioles have plans for three baseball fields, a new service road, a giant security gate and all-important housing in which Dominican prospects can escape their tattered lives and taste the good life for 11 months a year.
"When we get this thing built," Bernhardt says, "it's going to be one of the top three or four academies down here."
And to know how much that prospect means to Bernhardt, you need only follow the rest of his tour.
Bernhardt winds his truck through a decaying neighborhood in San Pedro de Macoris, a section in which the homes are one-room tin shacks, a place in which children walk through the streets in their underwear.
He pulls over at the field where he has spent the past two years teaching his players the Oriole Way. The field is enclosed by walls topped by barbed wire, and Bernhardt waits for a moment until his assistant comes to open the gate.
Inside, the grass is brown, the bases are dirty, and the orange and black paint is chipping along the cement outfield wall. Bernhardt said the place is still an upgrade over the field the Orioles were using before, in an area 20 miles outside of San Pedro called Quesqueya.
One day two years ago, Bernhardt was working there with a pitcher in the bullpen when an attacker came wielding a knife. Bernhardt managed to escape without harm; the blade cut his jacket, but not his skin.
He told the local authorities but has yet to hear of any arrests. The incident was enough to persuade the Orioles to change facilities.
"I put my life in danger there more than once," Bernhardt says. "It was a very bad neighborhood, and so is the one we're in now. We're trying to get out of there as soon as we can."
