“I like to stay involved in baseball all year,” Harp, 69, said during an interview in the restored 400-year-old convent that houses his foundation’s office in downtown Oaxaca. “Out of season, I go to the academy.”

It may be impossible to overstate Harp’s enthusiasm for baseball. His stamp museum in the city of Oaxaca opened a baseball-related exhibition in May, with stamps borrowed from Peter O’Malley, also a Padres owner and a former Los Angeles Dodgers owner.

Harp’s face lit up as he recalled checking box scores in the newspaper each morning as a child and seeing Mickey Mantle and Sandy Koufax play in a Mexico City exhibition game in the 1960s. He rattled off names of his favorite players: Mantle, Joe Morgan and Josh Gibson, the Negro Leagues slugger who also played in Mexico.

The academy mixes Harp’s love of baseball and his affinity for Oaxaca. Its two-story building is decorated with the black pottery specific to this town. Agaves and cactuses dot the campus, or at least those parts not covered by baseball fields.

The school sends players primarily to Harp’s two Mexican teams and the Mexican League’s academy near Monterrey, but major league teams have taken note. One alumnus, Roberto Osuna, is a pitching prospect in the Toronto Blue Jays’ organization, and several others are training at major league academies in the Dominican Republic.

“I think what he has built there is the No. 1 academy in Latin America,” Omar Minaya, a senior vice president with the Padres, said of Harp. “Traditionally, Oaxaca has not been a hotbed of baseball activity. I think it’s going to improve the level of baseball kids play in Oaxaca.”

So far, however, that improvement has not translated into Oaxacan baseball success. Many blame the sport’s lack of television exposure for its failure to catch on in Mexico’s southern regions and nationally, as soccer has; others say Oaxaca’s youth leagues are not instilling enough of a work ethic in their players.