The Journey Home

by Jorge Posada

  In spite of all that I did wrong—disobeying rules, getting bad grades—I was especially lucky that my dad never took away the one privilege that really meant the most to me growing up: attending spring training in the United States with whatever team he was scouting for. We had an agreement: if my grades were good enough—which meant passing my classes—and if school wasn’t in session, then I could go with him when he reported for spring training.

  The first spring training I attended was in 1981 when he was with the Blue Jays. The head of Latin American scouting for the club, my dad’s boss, was Epy Guerrero. To me and to my family, he was just Epy, the guy who worked with my dad and was a knowledgeable and fun baseball guy and the brother of Miguel Guerrero. He was also the father of five sons, Miguel, Sandy, Frederick, Lawrence, and Patrick, who was named after the Blue Jays’ general manager Pat Gillick. I hung out with those guys when my family traveled to the DR.

  It wasn’t until later that I realized just how important a figure Epifanio Obdulio Guerrero was. He signed more than 50 Latin ballplayers who eventually played Major League Baseball, including guys like Tony Fernández, Carlos Delgado, Dámaso García, Alfredo Griffin, José Mesa, and Freddy García. He was so successful and influential that he was named a member of the Dominican Republic’s Sports Hall of Fame and earned the Professional Baseball Scouts Foundation’s Legend in Scouting Award. Sadly, he passed away in 2013 at the age of 71. I don’t know for sure what role he played in my eventually getting drafted, but I know it didn’t hurt to have him and my father in the picture.

  He also was acknowledged as helping the Blue Jays develop from an expansion team into a powerhouse through the development of Latin ballplayers. Toronto came into the league in 1977 and won World Series championships in 1992 and 1993; they were very competitive very quickly, especially in comparison to the other team that came into the league that same year, the Seattle Mariners. The Mariners didn’t even have a winning season until 1991 and still haven’t won a World Series or even gotten into one. When Epy passed, a lot of Toronto’s management gave him, along with many other scouts in the organization, credit for having built that team through the draft and trades. No one had ever heard of a lot of the young players involved in those expansion-era trades, but some of them became a big deal for teams down the line. Epy played a role, for instance, in the Jays eventually trading for Fred McGriff. The Jays then traded him for Robbie Alomar and Joe Carter, two guys who were important in bringing them their championships.

  In 1981, Epy was on the Jays’ coaching staff, and that was the year I got to attend my first spring training camp, in Dunedin, Florida. This wasn’t my first trip to the States, though. A few years earlier, my dad had taken our family to visit Disney World in Orlando. Michelle and I were thrilled. We’d seen television ads for the place, and after talking to other kids who had gone, we developed a game plan for riding all the attractions. Flying was a big deal for us, but we were so excited that we could have flown there without the plane. When we got to the park, we were both like racehorses in the starting gate. With their cooler heads, though, my mom and dad kept us from dashing into the park.

  Disney World was as advertised—a kid’s version of heaven. We had a great time, and I didn’t even mind seeing the Dumbo the Flying Elephant ride.

  We were sad to see the day come to an end, but we knew that all we had to do was eat dinner, fall asleep, and then come back to the park. In baseball, going 2-for-3 is a very good day. In Disney World terms, it isn’t a very good day at all. And the emphasis here is on the word “day.” We got up the next morning and got on a shuttle bus. Instead of going from the hotel to the park, it took us to the airport. Michelle and I looked at one another and then at my mom. She shrugged her shoulders and said, “Yesterday was good, right?” We nodded. Then my father added, “What else is there to see? One day was enough.” Michelle leaned against me, and I could feel her shoulders shaking. I sat there dumbfounded, thinking that we had to be the only family in the history of Disney World to fly in and spend only one day—and to be precise, it wasn’t even a full day—at the Most Magical Place on Earth. It was magical all right—my dad made it disappear.

  When I returned to the States for spring training in 1981, I knew going in that my dad couldn’t make the Jays’ spring training complex disappear. And to be honest, no offense to the Disney people, for me, all those baseball diamonds, batting cages, and major and minor leaguers made Dunedin, Florida, the happiest place on earth.

  I was only eleven years old, so I was more in awe of the place than I was later on. Seeing all the guys on the team working out, though, had an impact on me. It wasn’t that they weren’t having fun, but I saw that guys at that level were doing some of the same things that my dad was having me do. They took ground ball after ground ball. They hit in the cages, did soft-toss against a barrier, and worked on their swings hitting tires or a fence. What I remember most, though, was how green those diamonds were, how red the dirt was, and how bright the white lines and the bases were. As lush as Puerto Rico was, most of the fields I played on were dusty brown patches of dirt and grass. When those pure white balls rolled across the ground—and it seemed like there were thousands of those pearls lying around and being used everywhere—they stood out against the darker colors of the ground and sky.

  Watching those practices and eventually a few intrasquad games was like watching a fireworks display. Everything seemed bright and loud, and even if I didn’t make the sounds, I was oohing and aahing at everything I saw. I felt nearly as bad at having to leave there after five days as I did having to leave Disney World.

  I didn’t get a chance to return to spring training in person for a few more years. In my mind, though, I was there every day. In a way, spring training was like going to the best zoo in the world, a nature preserve where the animals on display were in their natural environment living the way they did in the wild. I couldn’t imagine anything better than that. That is, not until my dad loaded us up in the car and took us to the airport in 1983.

  We were going to New York City, and through some connections he had with other scouts, we were going to Yankee Stadium to see a game. On Monday, June 27, the Yankees were playing an afternoon game with the Orioles.

  The bus ride we took from where we were staying with friends of my dad’s was like another fireworks display. People crowded on, and I stood in the aisle to let adults sit, riding the waves as the bus bumped over the road, wobbling and bending my knees like I was one of my surfing cousins in the DR. When we exited the bus outside the stadium, it was like Carnaval Ponceño as Mamí Upe described it to me. The Diablos Cojuelos were street vendors selling everything from giant bags of peanuts to pendants to T-shirts and bottles of water. Nearly anything you wanted or needed was for sale outside the stadium.

  Once we got through the turnstile, my heart started beating faster. When I caught sight of the striped outfield grass, I nearly broke out of my mother’s grip. I turned and looked up at her and said, “Someday I’m going to be out there.” I pointed at the field. My dad was with Michelle, but he heard me.

  “That’s up to you,” he said. “You want it. You work for it.”

  My mouth went dry. That was as close to words of praise as I’d ever really gotten from my dad. That would be true for quite a few more years as well. It didn’t matter.

  Something about seeing the crowd and feeling the energy at the stadium was almost too much for me. Though I was there as a part of the Blue Jays organization, I knew about the Yankees and their long tradition. Who didn’t? They had been so good for so long that you couldn’t help but know about them, even in my little corner of Puerto Rico. When we took our seats, my dad handed me a scorecard and I started to pencil in the names of the players. For the Orioles, the names that stood out were Ripken, Murray, and Singleton, but I also liked Benny Ayala, who was from Yauco, Puerto Rico, and Aurelio Rodríguez, a third baseman from Mexico who would play in the big leagues for 17 years.

  I can s
till feel in my feet how the stadium’s concrete buzzed and throbbed when the Yankees tied it late in the game and then won it in the eleventh.

  What could have been better than an extra-inning walk-off victory to make up for my dad’s previous efforts to rain out that special trip in Orlando? It was as if the baseball gods decided to let me enjoy even more than was scheduled. We decided to walk back to our place after the game. Normally, I might have moaned a bit, but I kept quiet, taking in the scene. As we got farther from the stadium the crowds on the sidewalk thinned and there were fewer cars on the road, but still the air smelled of exhaust and dinners being cooked. We were just past the longest day of the summer, so the evening shadows trailed behind us as we made our way west and north toward the Hudson River.

  Though I wished for it, I had no way of knowing then that those neighborhoods would one day become my neighborhoods, that I’d drive these streets of the Bronx when I went to work. I’d eventually think of catching for the Yankees as my job, and I’d have to put a lot of work into it to get there, but there’s a reason why we say we “play” a sport. I felt a deep satisfaction in the Yankees’ victory that day. They’d scored the tying run thanks to an Oriole’s error and Lou Piniella’s hustle. They’d taken advantage of the other team’s mistake, and that was good. But if I felt so good about a result that I had played no part in, I couldn’t even begin to imagine what it would be like to play a part in putting a W in that all-important W-L column.

  More than that, I was happy to be walking through the streets of the Bronx with my family. I kept telling my dad over and over, “Thank you. Thank you.” Perhaps it’s strange that I could thank him for one game he arranged for us to attend, but not for all he’d been doing for me for many years. We often take for granted the things our parents do for us, and I was certainly guilty of that as a kid and as a teen, and even later. But in my case, there was always someone “granting” me things. I wasn’t a very good student of English in my early years, or even later, but when I decided to look up the word “granted,” I discovered that it means “to give,” “to agree,” “to admit,” and “to transfer.” I can see now that my dad and I were involved in a complicated exchange of grants.

  Another way to look at it was that there was a lot of give-and-take going on. At the time, I felt like I had to take a lot of what my father was handing out—his discipline, his demands, and his sometimes unexpected and inexplicable desires. But I was also being given a whole lot of opportunities. You have to take advantage of opportunities, just like fielding errors, and you often don’t know when they’re going to come along.

  In 1987, when I was 16, my dad was working part-time for the Braves organization. I got the chance to attend their spring training in West Palm Beach. By then, I wasn’t just a little snot-nosed kid. I got to suit up and work out—not with the team, but I could take advantage of the facilities. Just like I’d done in 1983, I got to see the players go about their business.

  I still had a bit of scavenger in me. When I’d find broken and discarded bats, I’d tape them up as best I could with some athletic tape I had with me and then use those bats. And I mean use them. I took batting practice off the machines until my hands bled. I’d tape up my broken skin and go back to it. When one of the Braves’ minor league coaches saw me one afternoon, he pointed at the bloodstains on my pants. “You’re crazy,” he laughed. “You don’t know when to quit, do you?” He might as well have told me that I was the next sure thing. He couldn’t have paid me a higher compliment.

  A day or so later I was in the cage hitting when Dale Murphy, the Braves slugger, came up to the cage. I immediately stepped out of the box and started to pick up the balls.

  “No, stay in there. I want to see you hit.”

  “No, sir,” I said, nearly choking on my words, surprised that he even acknowledged that I was there. “I can’t do that. You need it. You take it.” I felt like I was talking like a little kid. My face and ears burned.

  “I mean it. Keep swinging.”

  I looked down at the ground. It seemed to me like I could have fit my whole bed from home in his shadow. He was six feet four inches tall and weighed more than 200 pounds. I was intimidated by who he was but not by how he was treating me. He was a big guy with a deep but friendly voice and a broad, open smile. He stepped into the cage and started to pick up the balls with me.

  “You could have stayed in there,” he said. “You’ve got a really nice swing.”

  I mumbled something that was as broken and taped up as my bat. The balls thudded into the five-gallon bucket, making it hard for me to hear or to be heard.

  I walked out of the cage and fought the urge to run.

  I heard him say something else, what sounded like “Stick with it.” At least that was what I hoped he’d said. Maybe he said, “Get your stick,” in reference to my bat, or who knows what else.

  All I knew for sure was that he’d said, “Nice swing.” As I made my way toward a diamond where I knew my dad was watching some of the minor leaguers, I thought about telling him what had just happened. By the time I got there and saw him sitting with a bunch of other scouts, one hand on his chin, the other holding his clipboard, a stopwatch dangling around his neck, I decided that it would be better to keep this gift to myself. I knew that my dad would want me to keep my hat on, to not let my head grow too big.

  Instead of sitting with him, I hunted around for another empty cage. I was still there as the sun set, matching the bloodstains on my pants and making the ball grow dim. I was having too much fun to stop.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Growing Pains

  If there was one pain that I was hoping to feel, it was the mythical pain of growing. I’d always been one of the smaller kids in my class, but at 16 I was still only five feet six inches tall and weighed 135 pounds. I know for a fact that was my height and weight because both my dad and I were concerned enough that I went to a doctor to see if there was something wrong with me that was stunting my growth.

  The doctor who treated our family, Dr. Areces, was an older man in his 60s. He wore thick glasses down toward the end of his nose and had the habit of tilting his head up to look through them, squinting until his vision focused. As a result, he had a surprised look on his face most of the time. When my mom told him why she’d brought me in, he did his head tilt and said, “I can see you’re really worried about it. We can do some X-rays.”

  My dad had already told us that we were to do whatever we could, so we agreed. After the X-rays were taken, it took a couple of days to get them back, and I spent a lot of that time doing what I’d been doing for the last two years—worrying and standing on my toes trying to stretch my spine.

  When my dad and I went back to discuss the X-rays, Dr. Areces spent most of the time doing the talking. What I got from the conversation was this: There were gaps between the bones of my arms and legs at the elbows and the knees. That gap would allow for the bones to grow longer, which meant I’d get taller. When that gap closed, that was it—I’d be done gaining height. I remember staring at those cloudy images of my bones and seeing those small gaps and thinking, That’s only a half an inch or so. I’ve got to get bigger than that. My dad must have been thinking the same thing because he tapped the X-ray and asked, “¿No más?”

  Dr. Areces explained that the gaps weren’t the measure of how much I might grow, but just a relative space that would adjust, we all hoped and God willing, as my bones lengthened.

  Neither my dad nor I wanted to leave it in the hands of God or Mother Nature or whoever or whatever was going to determine how tall I got. We didn’t like to let other people or beings or forces take control of our lives. So the solution was the same one that we’d applied to other problems—hard work.

  Eventually, viewing the world upside-down became almost normal for me. Shortly after that meeting with Dr. Areces, my dad installed an iron pipe in the frame of the door leading out of the kitchen. I’d do a pull-up, swing my legs up to hook the bar with the bac
ks of my knees, and then let my head drop back. I’d spend hours a week hanging upside-down to make sure those gaps didn’t close.

  At first it was hard to get used to the sensation of blood rushing to my head. My sister told me that my big ears getting red reminded her of pictures she’d seen of bats in a cave. I didn’t care what I looked like.

  Along with hanging upside-down, I also held on to the bar with my hands and hung suspended, or I did pull-ups to make sure that the gap didn’t close in my arms. No point in getting taller if my arms stayed the same length. I was especially religious about doing those pull-ups, rarely missing a day.

  Now, after years of working with some of the best trainers in sports and being treated by some of the best sports medicine doctors in the game, I understand that all the work with the bar had no impact on my ability to grow taller. Regardless, by the time Dale Murphy saw me in the cage nearly a year later, I’d put on three inches and close to 15 pounds. It might not have been the bar work that did it, but I was finally getting bigger.

  Still, being small when you’re younger has a way of staying with you, even after you’ve literally outgrown it. I’ve heard people talk about the “small guy complex”—the feeling that you have to be tougher and maybe a little bit meaner or crazier to get respect and recognition on and off the field. I’ve known a bunch of smaller guys who were like that. Add in that Latin temperament and you can get somebody who, I heard later in my career, had a bit of the red ass.