#girldadlife: The drives of our lives
I'm not weepy. Wait, yes I am.
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In this newsletter:
A weepy look back at road trips as my daughter gets ready to head off for college.
I crack open the vault on the story that I spent the most time on/interviewed the most people for.
There’s still time to buy MABA gear.
You would look great in a MABA t-shirt.
Or maybe a hat (these are new and look awesome!)?
The road trip to end all road trips
I was doing fine.
I wasn’t getting weepy or even thinking about getting weepy.
I sat with my daughter recently at the welcoming ceremony of a college scholarship competition—if that ain’t a chance to get #dadweepy, I don’t know what is—but I viewed it as just another college visit among 2,112 we had made already.
Then we met her host for the weekend, and they started yapping away as if I wasn’t there, as if she didn’t need me at all … and suddenly my throat dried up and it got really dusty in that onion-chopping factory.
I collected myself so as not to embarrass her and drove off to my hotel. I was baffled as to why that little interaction got me all up in my feels … and then I realized the answer was in my description: She didn’t need me at all.
Well, at least she needed me to drive her home, and that got me all up in my feels, too. How many thousands of hours have we spent in the car together? We have driven all the way through Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Kentucky and Tennessee.
As we drove home, I thought about those long rides plus short ones and everything in between …
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She was born early on a Monday morning. PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT FOR READERS WHO ARE PREGNANT/HAVE A PREGNANT SPOUSE/MIGHT EVER BE ONE ONE OF THOSE TWO THINGS: there’s a special kind of terror related to going home with your first baby.
In those early hours/days/weeks/years of being a parent, every decision weighed 10,000 pounds and would set her life on a course of irreparable harm if I made the wrong one and by if I mean when. I was worried about approximately a billion things, including dropping her, breaking her, not knowing what in the heck to do with her, etc., etc., etc. But before I could screw any of that up, first I had to get her home, alive and in one piece.
When I get stressed, indecision paralyzes me. I am incapable of making even simple decisions. For example: along what route should I take my baby girl home?
There were two options – the interstate and surface streets. They would take roughly the same time, so I couldn’t simply pick the fastest.
I could not imagine, not in a million trillion years, getting on the interstate and pushing my foot down on the accelerator fast enough to go the speed limit, not with that living, breathing, adorable miracle in the backseat. Nor could I imagine, in a million trillion years, taking surface streets and risking some dope running a red light and t-boning us … or worse, me running a red light and t-boning someone else.
I spent hours, yes, hours, with my guts churning and my heart racing as I tried to decide which way to go. And the damnedest thing is I can remember the fear – I can feel it crawl up my spine, cut through my back and lodge in my heart just retelling it … but I can’t remember what I actually decided.
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If somebody hasn’t invented this yet, you should do it, credit me, and we’ll become rich: Put a device on your kid that measures when she starts to fall asleep in the car. Put another device that measures the speed, shocks, bumps, etc. of the car in the minutes before she starts to fall asleep/when she sleeps best. Then invent a device that you attach to her crib that will recreate that car sensation — speed, shocks, bumps, etc.! — and VOILA! The kid falls fast asleep.
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She’s road-tripped with me on assignment many times. The most memorable was an eight-hour drive from our home in St. Louis to a cabin in the woods of southern Ohio. We were exhausted when we got there. We plopped our bags down, ate dinner quickly before bed … and then were startled by a mouse running across the floor. I barely caught my breath from that when another one darted under the fridge.
I wrestled with whether to stay or go. I didn’t want to be the dad who flees the woods because he sees a woodland creature. But I didn’t want to be the dad who forces his kid to stay somewhere that she’s scared and won’t sleep. And if she wouldn’t sleep, neither would I.
We were an hour’s drive through twisty, turny country roads from any other accommodations. I wasn’t even sure I could find my way because cell coverage was so spotty and I didn’t have a paper map.
Also it was snowing.
I gambled that we’d make it, and we did, well after midnight and with my hands aching and the steering wheel soaked from a white-knuckled drive.
She slept for hours once we got there.
So did I.
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I taught her to drive, and I’m not sure what she learned, but I learned I’m a much bigger pain in the butt than I realized, and I knew I was bad before this.
After she got her permit, she drove us across the state so she could attend the Taylor Swift concert in Kansas City. I road shotgun — the only long trip I’ve done that for — and we listened to Swift’s greatest hits, deep cuts, and everything in between. In my #girldadlife, that day ranks near the top.
On the way, we visited a makeup store to buy glue-on fingernails to complete her Eras outfit. She asked my opinion on which to buy, and OF COURSE that made me weepy.
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One of these days it’s going to be our last road trip. She’ll be a college freshman in the fall, and at some point I’m going to drop her off somewhere, and that’ll be it, she won’t come home again.
I’ll be more than weepy the whole way home, regardless of if I take surface streets or interstate.
A look back at a deep dive
This scholarship competition was at Union University in Jackson, Tennessee. I had never been to the campus, but I had visited Jackson on assignment for The Sporting News in 2008. I was there to interview a Cuban defector who was playing for a Double A baseball team in Jackson. His name is Johan Limonta, and his interview haunts me like few others.
You’ll see why when you read the story below.
I worked longer on this story and talked to more people for it than any other in the 13 years I spent at The Sporting News. I’m tempted to track down the characters to see what has happened to them now that they’ve been in the United States for more than 20 years.
They came chasing baseball glory. Only one of them caught it (if you define “glory” as “making the big leagues.”) Was it worth it? Several of them have started families. One of them is in jail. If they could go back, would they do it again?
Behind the story
Bob Parajon, then The Sporting News’ prepress director, conducted the interviews with the Cuban players in Spanish. Parajon’s parents defected from Cuba in 1965, and Parajon was born two days after their arrival in Florida.
SHARKS IN THE WATER. SHARKS ON LAND.
Two months before the worst two nights of his life, Yunel Escobar was a frustrated baseball player in the Cuban National Series, Cuba’s equivalent of major league competition.
He could see his future, and that was the problem. There wasn't much of one. He had been passed over for the Cuban National team, the elite squad that plays in international tournaments, and his baseball career had stalled, if not started going backward.
It was 2004, and though he was just 21, Escobar had already spent four years with the Industriales, the closest thing Cuban baseball has to the Yankees. But he was told he would be sent to a developmental league. "Those things started to upset me," he says. "My mom and dad were very sad. Until one day, I said, 'I don't think I have a future here, Dad. I've got to find my future somewhere else.’"
Jose Cordero, a pitcher and longtime friend of Escobar’s, had come to the same conclusion. He, too, had had enough of baseball in Cuba. Eventually they learned they were thinking the same thing: They wanted to defect.
Over the course of two months, Escobar and Cordero spread the word among a group of baseball-playing friends. Four other guys agreed to join them-outfielder Joel Perez, pitchers Rafael Galbizo and Yamel Guevara, and first baseman/outfielder Johan Limonta. A member of the group contacted someone in the United States who could arrange to have them smuggled out of Cuba.
The six men—five were in their early 20s and one was 19—had known one another since childhood. They could trust one another with their dangerous secret amid the iron-fisted rule and closed society of the Castro regime, which doesn't tolerate dissenters or defectors. Details of the planning of their journey had to be (and must remain) secret to outsiders because the players didn't want friends and family staying in Cuba to have to answer for their escape. "The days are filled with worry, with nerves, with desperation, because you can't talk to your family, you can't talk to anyone," Limonta says. "You can't tell anyone anything."
The boat would leave October 6. They had to be on it.
Two weeks before the worst two nights of their lives, the six ballplayers fled their homes. They ran away to stay in a forest. After they had spent about 10 days there, the rendezvous point changed. They hitchhiked several hundred miles to the west, traveling by truck in a journey that took roughly 4 ½ hours. The first 10 days, they had stayed in what they described as huts; now they were exposed.
During the day, the sun cooked them. At night, mosquitoes devoured them. Two days before the worst two nights of their lives, they had to make another journey. "We had to cross a river about 50 meters wide," Cordero says. "Then hide in a little key. Two days there with nothing to eat."
At least one of the players slept in a tree. "We were hidden in the woods and even slept one night in a swamp, where there were about a million mosquitoes per person," Perez says. "It was very stressful. We had to sleep there, next to crabs."
And the worst was yet to come.
As much as Escobar had thought about defecting, as much as he had planned it, as much as he had daydreamed about the aftermath—becoming a star in Major League Baseball and playing against the greatest players in the world—he says he never thought about the boat trip. He hadn't considered the chance he’d get caught, he hadn't thought he might drown, he hadn't thought about the waves or the sea or the sharks that were in it. He figured he’d get onboard and in a snap, he’d be in Miami. "Since I was only 21 at the time, I still didn't know what danger was," he says.
The boat trip taught him.
At about 8 p.m. on October 6, 2004, the six baseball players and 30 other people climbed
aboard the boat, which has been described as a 25-footer and a 38-footer. They carried with them only the shirts on their backs and the anxiety of leaving their families behind. Limonta and Cordero had the added burden of grief—each was mourning the recent death of a family member.
"The day the ship arrived, there was stormy weather," Cordero says. "There were waves that were 12 to 18 feet high, and they broke one of the motors on the boat. We had to spend an extra day at sea so the storm would pass because if we tried going through with those waves, we might have gotten picked up by the Cuban Coast Guard, who was checking the area for boats."
For the first time, Escobar realized the danger he had put himself in. "There was a moment at sea when I said, 'I don't think we’re going to make it.'"
Children's screams pierced the air. The six players stood together throughout the trip. Destination: the Florida Keys. Escobar remembers a l-year-old. Perez recalls three boys and a girl, ages 5 to 11. Cordero can see, in his mind's eye, two boys, 5 and 7. Everyone around the players vomited. If the waves didn't make the passengers throw up, if the people around them throwing up didn't make them throw up, the overpowering smell of gasoline did. Escobar—a proud man-admits he vomited.
For two days and two and a half nights this went on. There was no food and no water.
And sharks circled the boat.
"To see those sharks so close nearby, it would scare anybody," Perez says. "The boat had to get out of there in a hurry because it really started to get ugly."
Everyone was exhausted, physically and emotionally. The boat, slowed by the weather, finally hit land at about 1 a.m. on October 9.
"Nobody wanted to get out," Perez says. "We didn't know where we were." He worried the boat had done a giant circle and arrived back in Cuba. "The guys driving the boat said, 'We're here,’ but nobody wanted to get out because we were all scared still from the sharks. And then we had to jump in the water."
What if it was Cuba? What if the players waded ashore and Fidel Castro's border guards met them? It was not Cuba. It was the United States.
And yet their journey was still not over.
There were sharks waiting for them in Miami, too.
Media coverage at the time called their arrival the biggest defection of players since Castro assumed control of Cuba in 1959. One report predicted Guevara, a hard-throwing righthanded pitcher, would draw the most interest from big league clubs. In interviews after arriving, the players harshly criticized the state of baseball in Cuba.
Here, the story turns weird. Details of the months following their arrival are difficult to flesh out because of the seeming nefariousness of what transpired. From October until June, the players stayed with a man in Miami. He provided the players with spikes, gloves, food, a place to stay and the opportunity to practice.
But this was not an act of generosity. Who was this man? Different accounts say he was one of the smugglers, that he hired the smugglers and that he paid the smugglers when the players didn't have the money to pay for themselves.
Sources say he wanted to be paid for his role in getting the players into the country and that he wouldn't let the players leave his property until he was.
The man tried to recoup the money by holding what amounted to an auction for the players. Joe Kehoskie, an agent who has represented many Cuban and other Latin American players, says he received a phone call within 72 hours of the players' arrival. He flew to Miami and went to the man's house.
Kehoskie talked with two men he believes were the smugglers. They demanded $150,000, up front, to allow him to represent the players. A law enforcement source puts the going rate to get one person out of Cuba at $10,000. Baseball players cost more. Kehoskie refused. He and others say more agents were offered the deal. None paid. Kehoskie describes the relationship between the man and the players as effectively a hostage situation and the $150,000 as a ransom.
The players won't talk about that time in any detail. Escobar describes the relationship with the man positively. "He helped us a lot," Escobar says. The full truth of what happened might never be known. But this much is not in dispute: From October until June, Perez, Galbizo, Cordero, Guevara, Limonta and Escobar practiced and worked out, both at the man's house and at fields around Miami.
Word spread about them. They rounded up other players, many of whom had recently been cut by professional teams. Eventually there were enough players to stage games in front of scouts. The man apparently viewed showcasing Escobar as the best way to get his money back. In at least one game, a scout who was there says Escobar led off every inning.
Eight months after the worst two nights of their lives, the players' paths began to diverge. Guevara was allowed to go to the Dominican Republic, where he could avoid the 2005 amateur draft and hope to sign a big free-agent contract. The five others also were set free—whether any of the players paid for that freedom is unclear—but they opted to become available for the draft.
And one incredible story became six incredible stories.
The one whose pain continues
After all the players went through just to play baseball in the United States, it would be heartwarming if each suited up and started hitting the ball all over the place or blowing
fastballs past unwitting hitters. But that didn't happen.
Joel Perez was the first to see his baseball career end. After being drafted by the Yankees in '05, he played one year of rookie ball in Tampa—he was a member of the Gulf Coast League playoff champions—and was released.
He moved to Miami, where he worked for a while as a personal trainer. Perez now works for a company that helps the disabled, and he plays baseball at night and on weekends.
He lives alone, though he has relatives in the area. Leaving his family behind was the hardest part of deciding to defect: "It was the only thing that made me question my decision-leaving my mother and father behind without knowing when or if I'd get to see them again. That upset me a lot. When I got here, I suffered with that for a long time. But when I talk to them on the phone, they try to reassure me (that I made the right choice)."
The one with Cuban flair
Separating fact from fiction in Cuban defection stories is difficult. The truth is malleable. Stats are embellished. Backgrounds are fabricated.
Rafael Galbizo, a hard-throwing righthander, was drafted in the 20th round in 2005 by the Marlins. He brought to the mound verve and energy, passion and fire. What Galbizo did not bring was much of what was in his bio. He did not attend the University of Miami, and he was not, by any stretch, 6-1, 185. "I'm 5-6," says Amanda Williams, public relations director for the Class A Greensboro (N.C.) Grasshoppers, for whom Galbizo pitched in 2006. "And standing next to him, he's not much taller than I am.”
But he pitches like a much larger man. He's thick across the trunk and has big, if not terribly long, legs. From there springs his power.
"His goal was to put three digits on the gun" says George Sisson, assistant general manager at short-season Jamestown (N.Y.), where Galbizo pitched in '05 and '07. "He just gets on the mound and gets right after you. He liked to pump his fist when he got a strikeout. He’d look at the umpire. He was never afraid to ask if he was sure about that."
Galbizo was either unhittable or unable to get anybody out. Combine that inconsistency with a velocity drop-from the 90s into the 80s, as one person who saw him throw recently said—and he didn't have much of a chance. The Marlins released him this spring, and though he has attended at least one workout in front of scouts, he didn't sign with a team and hasn't been heard from since.
The one you'd want to have a beer with
The only thing that surprised Jose Cordero when he arrived in Florida nearly four years ago was ... everything. From breakfast to cars, TVs and DVDs, everywhere he looked things were different—better, bigger, more readily available. Especially when it came to baseball.
"In Cuba, you'll get a glove that's a few years old, a pair of spikes that should have been thrown out a couple years ago," he says. "And here you've got two or three pairs of spikes and two gloves, three caps, five practice jerseys."
Cordero, a power pitcher, was drafted in 2005 by the Twins in the 44th round (1,329th overall) after he impressed the team during a workout in Fort Myers, Fla. "This young man had some size, velocity. He had arm strength," says Jim Rantz, the Twins' minor league director.
Though Cordero's numbers were decent, the Twins organization had too many pitchers and not enough spots to put them in, so he was released after the 2006 season. Since then, Cordero's baseball career has rocked and rolled like the boat ride that brought him here. In addition to being a Twin and a Snapper in the Minnesota system, he has been an Explorer, Bronco and Air Hog in independent league baseball.
Cordero is a gregarious, outspoken man. His English isn't great, but it's good enough, and he is comfortable trying, at least. He is also willing to discuss details of the defection— a few of the others who made the trip are unwilling to say much because they are still too traumatized by the near-death experience or too worried about possible repercussions back in Cuba.
When Riley Gostisha, assistant G.M. for the Class A Beloit (Wis.) team, an affiliate of the Twins, picks up players at the airport, he typically asks them about their background as a way to pass the time on the drive. He got more than he expected with Cordero. In understandable but broken English, Cordero told Gostisha about his boat trip from Cuba. "It was like, 'Holy crap. You only see that in the movies,’" Gostisha says.
Cordero still hopes he'll land in the big leagues. But even if he doesn't, the travails haven't gotten him down, and he doesn't hesitate when he says he would do it all over again. He misses his family, of course—he left behind two sisters, a brother and his parents. And the departure came amid heartache: “I had always said to myself that as long as my grandmother was alive, I'd never leave her,” he says. “So after she passed away, I made my decision.”
Though he hasn’t seen his family in Cuba since he left, he has started his own. He got married in early 2006. He joins his wife and 21-month-old daughter in Puerto Rico during the offseason.
The one making a comeback
At the time of the defection, the word on Yamel Guevara was that he was 6-3, 225, reached the mid to upper 90s with his fastball and had two great breaking pitches. He had a 17-2 career record in the Cuban National Series and in 2002-03 went 10-0, held hitters to a .198 batting average and helped his team win the championship.
Kehoskie, the agent who was offered the auction deal, says Guevara was the “best by far” among the six. “I doubt you could find a defector who has gotten more bad advice than Guevara,” Kehoskie says. “A guy like him should’ve been a millionaire four years ago.”
Yet Guevara is the only one of the six who has not played an inning in the affiliated minor leagues. He hadn’t even played in the United States until this year. Teams shied away from him because he had a sore shoulder, though it’s not clear whether he hurt it before or after arriving in Florida.
“It hasn't turned out exactly as planned,” Guevara says. “But I’ve got faith and hope that things will work out just fine.”
They might, after all. About 15 months ago, he hooked up with Fred Ferreira, an agent who had been a scout and spent 30 years working for big league clubs. This spring, Ferreira arranged a tryout for Guevara with the Lancaster (Pa.) Barnstormers of the independent Atlantic League. Though he had not pitched anywhere in more than a year, Guevara hit 88 mph and won a job.
Keith Lupton, the Barnstormers' senior vice president and director of baseball operations, says Guevara already has Class AA stuff and will improve by pitching regularly. “He looks like he could be a real good pitcher,” Lupton says. “He just needs work.”
Guevara has had several good outings and a few not so good ones-including one in which he gave up a grand slam to former big leaguer Carl Everett.
As Guevara’s baseball career appears to have turned a corner, there also has been good news in his personal life. Around the time he signed with Lancaster, his wife, also a Cuban defector, gave birth to twins. “We always knew over here, if you're good and get a chance to play, you’re going to have a better life,” Guevera says. “This is the greatest country in the world.”
The one you will root for
Just looking at Johan Limonta, it's easy to like him. He has loosey-goosey body language. By the way he walks-arms bowed at his side, a giddyup in his gate—he looks like Dontrelle Willis. No fewer than five people interviewed about Limonta call him “a good kid,” or something close to it. He has a giant, bright smile— the true beauty of which is how close to the surface the pain behind it is.
He wears his emotions. The joy on his face as he plays baseball is as evident as the sorrow in his voice when he talks about his family and his struggles after arriving in the United States. None of the other players hesitated when asked if they would defect again.
Limonta took a long time to answer. And when he finally did, what he said was revealing: That he would do it but that he’d do things differently.
Nothing turned out as he had hoped. After going undrafted in 2005, he enrolled at what was then called Miami-Dade Community College and played a season there. He drew the attention of Mike Tosar, a scout for the Mariners. “First and foremost was his makeup, his desire,” Tosar says. “Leaving the family behind, leaving his country, will tell you a little bit about his focus, his dedication to the game.”
Limonta could play, too, and the Mariners drafted him in 2006 and sent him to Class A.
At the end of last season, the team told him to get in better shape. Just as the boat trip was a life-defining moment, this was a career-defining one. online.
He changed his diet and worked out tirelessly in the offseason. The results blew the organization away. He lost 30 pounds. He stands 5-11, and at 195 pounds appears to be made of solid muscle. “He had the best conditioning of any player in camp,” says Greg Hunter, Seattle’s director of player development.
But Limonta started the 2008 season still stuck in Class A, at High Desert in the California League. Again, disappointment washed over him. But it didn't defeat him. “The coach said, ‘Don't worry. Just play hard.’ So I played hard," Limonta says. “Then the coach called me to his office and said, ‘Thank you for everything because you're in AA now.’ I said, ‘Wow! That's nice.’”
Even that day was bittersweet. He would have to leave his host family, and in particular Brenda Coultas, who has become like a mother to Limonta. She speaks no Spanish, and he spoke only a little English when they met, but they grew close.
The host family arrangement gave structure to his life, which had been lacking since he arrived in the United States. To have a place that feels like home to retreat to after a game—as opposed to a drab apartment with teammates as roommates—was a big deal. To have someone obviously care for him, as Coultas does, was a big deal. He calls her mom, and she considers him a son.
They still talk or text every day, and she listens to broadcasts of his games.
There's something else, too: Shortly before he left Cuba, Limonta’s mom died.
The one who made it
In Cuba, Yunel Escobar played “for the love of the jersey,” as the Cuban saying goes. But he had a hard time loving the jersey. He says he grew up in a rough part of Havana and that baseball officials in Cuba thought he’d never amount to anything because of that. Nobody good ever comes from that neighborhood.
He loves his Atlanta Braves jersey. He's already a good player, and he appears headed for full-fledged stardom. The Braves drafted him 75th overall in 2005, and he sped through the minors.
He reached the majors last summer, got into 94 games and batted .326. When Atlanta traded Edgar Renteria in the off-season, Escobar was entrusted with the starting shortstop position. That's a dizzying ascension for a guy who four years ago was going nowhere in Cuban baseball.
But his fast rise didn't come without a few waves. Escobar plays like a guy who defected from Cuba without thinking about the danger involved. He plays cocky. He plays with so much enthusiasm he bothers some people. It sounds ridiculous, but he gets criticized for enjoying himself too much.
He doesn't care what anybody thinks of him. If he did, he’d stop whistling. He has cut it down, but old habits die hard. He has been doing it since he was a kid. “It rubs a lot of people the wrong way,” he says. “Some people might try to throw at you, or it might just bother other people.”
Even his teammates. Jeff Francoeur, the Braves right fielder, likes when the Braves play in a packed stadium because the crowd noise means he won't hear Escobar's whistling. “It’s loud and annoying, even from the outfield,” he says. (Francoeur laughed as he said it, which is not to say the whistling is not loud and annoying.)
Quirks and all, Escobar’s teammates rave about him. He hits for average and has some power. He has superb range, soft hands and a cannon arm. Francoeur says he hopes Escobar makes all the money he can because Escobar will put it to good use, helping others get out of Cuba. Third baseman Chipper Jones says Escobar, 25, has a huge heart and that American players “cannot fathom” what he went through to make the big leagues.
“He’s got the game,” Jones says. “Now go out and still play with that youthful exuberance. But act like you've done it before.”
Far more than that of the others, Escobar's trip to America has ended in success. In addition to becoming an everyday player in the major leagues who looks to be a future star, he also has brought his family over from Cuba. And this is where six stories become one again.
The one dream they all share
When the players discussed their incredible journeys, they said baseball was a means to an end, not the end itself. The end is getting their families to the United States, and baseball was supposed to be the means by which they could afford it. Escobar’s mom, dad and sister now live in Miami, but the others' close family members remain in Cuba, scraping for any bit of news about their sons, their brothers, their grandsons and granddaughters.
“I hope,” Perez says, “God willing, that we”ll all be able to get together again.”
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What road trip would you say has been your daughter's favorite (other than driving to the Taylor Swift show)?