Juan Carlos Chávez, the Toros team driver, passes north through the San Ysidro Port of Entry into the United States, aiming his hulking white passenger van decorated with painted baseball seams toward a quiet, residential neighborhood of Imperial Beach. The small Southern California border town, which sells itself as the “most Southwesterly city” in the continental United States, is starkly different from its southern neighbor. It is full of one-story bungalows with bougainvillea accents and well-tended lawns. Chávez parks a few blocks from the beach and waits for five Toro players to show up. Pointing across the sprawling green mess of salt grass and sage scrub towards some apartment buildings in the distance, he says: “Eso es Tijuana right there.”

One by one, the players — Carlos Hernández, Tyson Pérez, Aaron Kurcz, James Russell, and Logan Watkins — arrive from their nearby apartments and pile in. Chávez turns the van back toward the border. It’s 2:45 p.m.; batting practice starts at the stadium in Tijuana at 4.

Juan Carlos Chávez, the Toros team driver, crosses the border four times a day during the season.

Russell is a long-haired white Texan, one of the team’s six foreign players, and the son of former Major League pitcher Jeff Russell. The other four have Mexican passports, meaning they’re technically “domestic” players, at least according to the 2016 rule. Kurcz is from Las Vegas and Pérez and Hernández are from California. All three present as Latino on first glance. Watkins does not; he looks like a white guy from Kansas. Esquivel tells me, “He’s got no Spanish. Not even cerveza,” which Watkins disputes. In fact, Watkins says his pocho claim is better than many of the Mexican American imports that have signed in the league. His mother is half-Mexican. “I wouldn’t get so much shit if I had my mom’s last name,” he says, though the other guys in the van aren’t convinced.

As the van approaches the short border queue to reenter Mexico, each player explains his own path to the Liga Mexicana. Watkins grins as they learn that it’s actually Hernández, the left-handed starting pitcher from San Jose, California, that has the most precarious claim to Mexican citizenship. Cruising through Tijuana Centro, he explains that his great-grandparents were the last of the Hernández family to be born in Mexico. The Northern California-raised pitcher didn’t speak a lick of Spanish growing up and he says his parents were terrified when the Toros reached out with an offer. They haven’t ever been to Tijuana to visit; they don’t even have passports. “They think ‘another country,’” he says. “They think ‘the worst.’”

Why wouldn’t a city defined by the border have a baseball club defined by it as well?

Chávez winds through a rough neighborhood near the stadium that hasn’t seen the fruits of the city’s recent boom times. He double-parks by the gate and the five American Toros walk down toward the field. It’s taken 35 minutes to get from Imperial Beach to Estadio Chevron. 20 minutes later, the guys are dressed and in the dugout. This proximity is the Toros’ greatest advantage. The border has transformed the franchise just like its hometown.

The Toros win 8–7 over the Tecolotes that night. Afterwards, fireworks explode above the outfield and a live band starts playing near the exits. It’s nearly midnight now and Chávez is parked out front again, waiting to shuttle the players back to Imperial Beach. At this hour, with his Secure Electronic Network for Travelers Rapid Inspection (SENTRI) — like TSA pre-check for drivers — it takes only 30 minutes to get to the players’ apartments. Then Chávez will cross back, for the fourth time that day, before arriving home for good. There’ll be four more crossings tomorrow, and every other day the Toros play a home game during the six-month season.