The Journey Home

by Jorge Posada

  Well, that day it was like a vision of the image I was supposed to be putting together came to me. I still had quite a few more pieces to put together, but at least I knew what the finished product was supposed to look like. Things were going to be easier from that point forward, but the burden was on my shoulders. I knew what had to be done, and it was just a question of having enough patience and enough stamina and enough focus to fill in that picture.

  I did end up being selected for that all-star team. The tournament in the United States turned out to be a quick trip to a desolate spot in New Mexico called Farmington, during which we got off the plane, played one game, lost, and got back on the plane to come home (Disney World: The Sequel). I was left with memories of a crazy blue sky and the reddest dirt I’d ever seen.

  I don’t remember a whole lot of the specifics of that game, or any of the other games I played in American Legion ball. Okay, I have to admit that, even though a lot of the games I played as a kid have faded from memory, I do remember my first home run. I wasn’t completely selfless and all about the team winning.

  I was playing Legion ball for Caguas, batting eighth. Leading off the third inning, I made good contact and drove the ball to right field. I took off running like a madman, hoping to get extra bases. I didn’t understand what I’d done until I came into third base standing up, rounded it, and heard my coach say, “Hey! Slow down! It was out of here!”

  I didn’t get to celebrate the whole way around the bases, just when I was at home and my teammates greeted me. That was how it should have been.

  Playing in the United States on that team made me think more about the bigger picture of my baseball career—what might be possible once I graduated from high school. The best-case scenario was that I’d get drafted and go into professional baseball immediately, but that didn’t seem likely. My dad always said that it was best to have options. You didn’t want to be in the position where you had no choice but to sign. The team would have leverage over you and could offer you very little money as a signing bonus, and the attention, my dad said, sounding both sad and a bit angry, went to the guys the teams had invested the most money in. That was a lot for me to take in at 16, but he wanted to be realistic with me. He told me that it was becoming more common for guys who played in college in the States to move through MLB organizations quickly. The level of coaching and competition was getting better, and scouts spent a lot of time at college games.

  A couple of years earlier, my dad and I had gone into San Juan to watch the final game of the NCAA College World Series on television. I’d watched the University of Miami Hurricanes beat the University of Texas, 10–6, to win their second title in four years. After the game was over, the TV announcers named the all-tournament team, and my dad said, “Will Clark, he’s the guy.” Clark played for Mississippi State, but all I could think about was Miami. After all, they’d won the College World Series, and Florida was a place, despite my brief Disney World experience, that I knew about and heard about quite a bit. What was Mississippi other than a big river? I also liked Miami’s green and orange colors. I later did some reading about the place, and the University of Miami’s baseball program was a huge part of the community. The Florida Marlins weren’t there yet, so a lot of baseball fans had adopted the Hurricanes as their team. A lot of families I knew visited Miami or had relatives or friends living there. My uncle Leo—he was my dad’s cousin but I called him Uncle out of respect—was there, as well as my grandmother.

  The following summer, at the end of my junior year of high school, while I was still playing American Legion ball, I got a letter from the coach of Florida International University, Dave Price, letting me know that they were interested in having me play for the school. Eventually, one of his assistants, Rolando “Cas” Casanova, a former player on the team, called me and said that they’d like to have me there, that I should come and check out the school. So, once school let out, we made a plan for me to visit.

  My whole family was going to go since the school was in Miami and we had family we could stay with and visit. My first impression of FIU was that it seemed as big as San Juan. Today it markets itself as having one of the largest enrollments in the country, with 54,000 students. It wasn’t quite that big then, but I was completely overwhelmed at first. Still, I felt comfortable knowing that a very large percentage of the students enrolled came from Latin backgrounds. What I really wanted to see, of course, was the baseball field. It didn’t disappoint.

  It was as nicely kept a field as any I’d seen, with the exception of Yankee Stadium. We got there just as the grounds crew was done mowing it, and the smell of fresh-cut grass, the dew reflecting light like diamonds, all had my eyes wide in anticipation. The school, and the baseball program, had only been around since 1965, but it had advanced to the NCAA Regionals and Super-Regionals. They’d fallen short of their goal of getting to the College World Series, but Cas said that getting there was the goal every year and he hoped I’d be part of the first team to do so. He also said that they hoped to upgrade the field, turn it into a true stadium instead of just a field with bleachers.

  I don’t know if my dad talked scholarships with him, but I walked away from my introduction to the place thinking that FIU was a great option for me. I liked the idea of having family nearby and a familiar culture and language I could rely on. Coach Cas told me that all I needed to do was score an 800 on the Scholastic Aptitude Test and I’d be set. I’d heard other students at home talking about the SAT, but even though I was going into my senior year, I hadn’t made any plans to take it. That would change.

  So would my thoughts about attending FIU. When we got back home, my dad sat me down and said, “I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to go there. There will be too many distractions with family around. Miami would be too easy for you to fall in love with and forget about your baseball and your studies. You won’t use your English enough and that will be bad for you later on. You’re not going.”

  I was disappointed, but my dad wasn’t someone I could disagree with. I’d trusted my father with every aspect of my baseball life up until then, and I didn’t doubt that he knew best about college too. I knew that now that my dad had vetoed the city, the University of Miami was also out, even though Miami hadn’t expressed any real interest in me.

  I had one more college trip to look forward to. My aunt Leda and her husband, Bruce Brubaker, lived in Lexington, Kentucky. The University of Kentucky was known for its legendary basketball program, but as a member of the Southeastern Conference, one of the elite sports programs in the country, Kentucky was competitive in all sports, and in particular baseball. We flew into Louisville and made a quick detour downtown to drive past the Louisville Slugger factory before going on to Lexington.

  I really wanted to experience college life as I’d seen it in the movies, and the University of Kentucky campus and its facilities seemed like something from a film. I fell in love with the place and its stately old buildings and central campus area.

  Once again, the number 800 came up, a reminder of the minimum SAT score I needed to be eligible for a scholarship. That was the goal, just like under seven seconds had been the goal. My parents encouraged and sometimes forced me to study, even enrolling me in an after-school SAT preparation class. Despite doing the full ten sessions, for some reason the lessons I’d learned about hard work on the field didn’t translate to the classroom—mostly because I didn’t put in a full effort. I’m not proud of that, but I’m fortunate that things worked out like they did.

  I can’t say that I’ve spent a lot of time looking back and wondering what if. But now that my kids are getting older and I’m beginning to think about them going to college, I am even more grateful that I was able to seize the opportunity I did, with the help of others. I loved baseball, and it was good enough to reward me. I didn’t love studying, and I can still remember sitting in the cafeteria, where I took that SAT test in early January 1989, feeling a bit envious as I saw others around me, their
heads bent in concentration, turning page after page of that booklet and confidently filling in their answer sheet. I sat there struggling at times just to understand exactly what the question was, especially in the analogies section, and being puzzled by the fact that desire and result didn’t have the same relationship when it came to taking that test that they had on the field. In the end, I scored only 730—a full 70 points below what I needed.

  I was disappointed, but not crushed. Maybe it’s because in baseball, as everyone always says, you have to get used to failure and getting a hit three times out of every ten could get you into the Hall of Fame. I just figured there was going to be some other way for me to get where I wanted to go. I could have taken the test again, maybe my family could have hired a tutor, or I could have found another book or another class on test preparation that might have helped me, but none of that happened. I was okay with giving up the University of Kentucky. I treated it like a little corner piece of the big puzzle, but one that could easily be replaced with something else.

  My dad told me not to worry about the SAT, even after Coach Cas at FIU called and tried to talk me into taking the test one more time. He was sure that just by having taken it once, I’d be able to make up the 70 points I needed. I felt bad telling him no, but I also knew what my dad had said about Miami not being the place for me. My dad was thinking strategically, and now he said that I should try to enroll in a junior college. His words made sense. If I enrolled in a two-year school, I wouldn’t have to wait to be a junior to be drafted, like I would if I enrolled in a four-year school. The goal all along was to get to the big leagues, so we needed to use the system to our advantage. We weren’t breaking any rules, but my dad knew that the odds were stacked against every player who wanted to live the dream.

  The trouble was, which junior college? Unlike baseball programs at four-year schools, junior college programs didn’t have recruiting budgets that would help them find a guy like me from Puerto Rico. Here’s where I was really fortunate again. My dad was working for the Braves, and a fellow Braves scout happened to talk to a junior college coach in Calhoun, Alabama. The coach, Fred Frickie, told this scout that he needed a shortstop for the coming season. My dad’s buddy knew about me and told Coach Frickie that I was a good ballplayer, the son of a major league scout, and that I was looking for someplace to play.

  I knew none of this when the phone rang one late afternoon in April. I picked up and heard an unfamiliar voice. The man introduced himself, but at first I didn’t quite catch his name. In fact, I had a hard time understanding him at all. His accent was so thick that it was like I had to chop through all kinds of sounds to get at the words. He said that he knew my dad and had spoken with him, and he wanted to offer me a chance to come and play for him in Decatur, Alabama.

  “Where’s Alabama?” I asked. I didn’t mean to sound rude or anything, but I knew that I wanted to play someplace where the weather was warm, like Florida or Texas, someplace where the national championship contenders came from.

  “Well, son, I can tell you this. You get yourself on a flight to Atlanta, and I’ll be happy to show you.”

  “Okay,” I said, knowing that the team that employed my dad was in the South. I didn’t have a clear vision of where I was going, whether there would be palm trees or plastic flamingos or pyramids. All that mattered was that I was taking the next step. It didn’t matter that in a few months I’d be stepping out of a plane into the unknown. If they had a baseball field, I was pretty sure that I’d be able to find my way around. I just wished that the man who was going to be helping me take those steps spoke the same language as me—whether it was English or Spanish.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Next Step

  In June 1989, the summer before I began at Calhoun Community College, another piece of the puzzle fell into place—at least temporarily. I came home from practice one day to find a letter sitting on my dresser; on the envelope was the logo of the New York Yankees. I tore it open and devoured the words on the page. Only three sentences long, the letter congratulated me on being drafted by the New York Yankees, and there at the bottom, in bold pen, was the signature of George Steinbrenner himself.

  The Yankees had selected me in the 43rd round of that year’s draft, and while I was ecstatic, my happiness didn’t last long. My dad sat me down that evening and explained to me that even though I was drafted, I wasn’t going to sign. I’d been too low in the draft—the 1,116th guy selected—so the Yankees wouldn’t be making a serious offer. (It’s funny to note that Jason Giambi was selected two slots after me, and that, of the 26 first-round selections, only Frank Thomas, Chuck Knoblauch, Charles Johnson, and Mo Vaughn became All-Stars, while Thomas also became a Hall of Famer.)

  My dad also said that, because I had other options, he doubted whether the Yankees would even make much of an effort to contact me. This proved true: in the days after the draft I didn’t hear from anyone in the Yankee organization. My dad had let people know that I was pursuing college, and that was enough to inform the Yankees that it wasn’t worth their time to pursue me. They’d done what they’d wanted to—let me know of their interest in me and made me aware that, if things fell through on the college option, they were interested.

  You have to remember that this was back in the day when the draft wasn’t as big of a deal as it is today. No TV network carried it live, and we didn’t have round-by-round coverage on the Internet—if such a thing was out there in any form, I wasn’t aware of it. So when my dad told me that we were going to stick with our plan, I was okay with it. Decatur, Alabama, here I come.

  I framed the letter I got from the Yankees, and it hung on my wall, far more important to me than my high school diploma. All I could think about was what the next step in my baseball life was going to be. I’d been hanging out with a girl back home named Lydia, and we had fun together, but there was nothing serious between us. I knew I would miss her, but I had my priorities and she had hers. She was going to university in San Juan, and we weren’t going to be able to see each other much anyway. More than her, I was going to miss my car.

  A few weeks after I’d turned 16, I came home from school, and sitting in the driveway was a white Cadillac Coupe de Ville. As the name implies, it was a two-door, and it had a blue landau roof—a kind of fake leather or suede that made it look like a convertible. I realize now that it looked like something that wouldn’t even need to be a part of the “pimp my ride” program, but I loved it for its white leather seats and all the rest of its luxury and glamour. I sank whatever money I was earning at my jobs into serious performance and safety upgrades—including a new stereo-cassette player and speakers. Sitting here now, all I have to do is recline a bit in my chair, put on my shades, kick my feet way out in front of me, stretch my right arm out to its full length—and you know that was a looong way thanks to all those pull-ups and hanging I was doing—and I’m right back there doing my Sonny Crockett and Ricardo Tubbs thing, even if I was in San Juan and not Miami. I spent some of my happiest hours cruising with the windows down and Def Leppard cranked loud enough that I could have gone deaf. A man never forgets his first love, especially one that he spends so much time pampering. I bathed her and put on coat after coat of wax to keep the sun from dulling her finish.

  From the perspective of more than 20 years later, I realize now that spending so much time taking care of that car was a way of showing my dad how much I appreciated what he had done for me in buying it. We’re men, after all, so I told him thank you when I got it, but I didn’t ever spend any more real time saying to him how much the gesture meant to me, how much I liked the car, and I never asked him to come for a ride with me so that he could hear how great the stereo sounded. It was basically a one-and-done: thanks, Papí, and now let’s move on to something else.

  In some ways, the gift of that car was symbolic of other changes in our relationship. As I’d gotten older and my prospects as a baseball player had improved, my dad and I got along better. I’m not sayin
g there was a direct cause-and-effect relationship there—my dad would have loved me even if I hadn’t gotten better as a player—but the two of us started to have more respect for one another. We were becoming, in a sense, teammates. We shared a vision for my career, and though we differed a bit in how to get me there, at least we both agreed where “there” was. And for the time being, “there” was going to be Decatur, Alabama.

  The day after that first phone conversation with Calhoun’s Coach Frickie, I think the coach and I both knew we had some homework to do. I had to check a map to be sure I knew exactly where Alabama was, and then I had to find Decatur. It seemed south enough. For his part, I later learned, Coach Frickie was as concerned about our inability to understand one another as I was. In spite of my strong Puerto Rican accent and his heavy Southern one, my limited English and his almost nonexistent Spanish, we both thought we understood each other, but he wanted to be sure. To do that, he got a woman from his church who was a Spanish teacher to get on the follow-up phone call he made to me. It was made clear to me that I was being offered a full scholarship to play for Calhoun Community College for the spring 1990 season.

  A few short months later, my dad and I were on a flight to Atlanta so that I could register for classes and move into the dorms. First we caught a Braves game, and then we started the four-hour-or-so drive to Decatur, with my dad behind the wheel. For the first little bit, he was pretty quiet, and I sat silent in the passenger seat, trying not to think about what I’d signed up for. Then, out of the blue, my dad started talking to me. I was half asleep and had the window open, so the sound of his voice, the tires on the road, other cars passing by, all seemed to kind of merge together.