The Journey Home

by Jorge Posada

  At that point I couldn’t stand the idea of everyone being punished for something Ney and I had done. I also figured that Ney, being a new guy, would have been in more trouble with Coach Frickie than me, and I didn’t want to see him get kicked off the team. After all, I was the one who’d gotten him to Alabama, and I felt responsible for him.

  So I went to Coach Frickie and told him what I’d done and what the dean had said. He made the call for me, and I was banned from living in the Cabanas for 90 days. With no place to live or any way to rent something—my “allowance” wouldn’t cover it—Coach Frickie took mercy on me.

  “George,” he told me, “I know boys will be boys, but that was a dumb one. Pack your stuff. You’re moving in.” I did, and his wife, Martha, took mercy on me and fed me breakfast and dinner nearly every day. The room in their house was much nicer than the one in the Cabanas, and I had a TV in it, but there was one downside. Coach was an early riser, and he liked to get to the athletic offices around seven or eight. I didn’t have any classes until midmorning, so I spent a lot of time hanging out in the lounge near the cafeteria. I’d eat a second breakfast, which was helping me put on the pounds I needed.

  Throughout the spring of 1991, the Yankees continued to look at me. It didn’t hurt that during that time I continued to grow. By the end of my second spring at Calhoun Community College, I’d grown to six-foot-one and weighed more than 180 pounds. I had split my time between third base and shortstop while at CCC, playing third my freshman year and shortstop the second. I was big for a middle infielder, but the model of a stocky or smaller guy playing second and short had been changing—think of Cal Ripken Jr., who was 30 at the time and just at the start of his MVP season in 1991.

  The Yankees had scouts show up at quite a few of our games during that spring. Since they’d drafted me before, they were in contact with me besides just watching me, letting me know of their continued interest. Though I’d scaled back on my calls home to three times a week, I still checked in with my dad after every game, especially when I had something to report about the Yankees or other scouts being around. He said that he was going to hold a hard line with them.

  The Yankees ramped up their attention as my season at Calhoun drew to a close and the draft neared. The Yankees still had my rights, but if they didn’t sign me before the next draft, I’d be a free agent and any team could draft me. It took another man, Victor Pellot, to help us shift our perspective. You may know Victor by the name he used when he became just the second Puerto Rican of African descent to play in the big leagues. He played for 12 years, from 1954 to 1965, as Vic Power, but every year when he came back to Puerto Rico to play winter ball he was known by his given name. Many consider him the second-best Puerto Rican player in Major League Baseball, behind only the great Roberto Clemente.

  And of course my dad knew him. Vic told my dad that there was another way to look at the Yankees and their pursuit of me. They drafted me once. I didn’t sign. They drafted me again. That was a good thing. If they were willing to do that, that meant they saw a future for me in the organization. That gave my dad something to think about. And the Yankees gave him something else to think about.

  As draft day 1991 approached, the Yankees’ attention turned serious. Leon Wurth was the main scout who’d been following me, and at one point in May he was joined by a cross-checker who put me through a workout. I ran, fielded, and hit, all under their watchful eyes. They never showed any sign of emotion when I was out there, and I did feel kind of like a farm animal up for auction. I also didn’t get too nervous during the workout. I pretty much knew that I was going to be drafted again, by the Yankees or someone else.

  Adding to my comfort was that I signed a letter of intent to play with the University of Alabama. If we didn’t get the deal we wanted, then I had another option. We could also use that option as leverage in negotiations down the line. It may sound callous to say that I didn’t care which option materialized, but that’s really the truth. I wanted to do what was going to help me realize the dream I had of playing pro ball. If that could mean either signing or going on to a four-year school, I was cool with whatever was going to work to my advantage. Teams will often stick longer with guys who are drafted higher and get larger signing bonuses. That’s the economic reality of it. Still, if the Yankees didn’t come up with the money, I would be very happy to go to Alabama to play. I knew I’d enjoy college life in Tuscaloosa, while playing a high caliber of baseball that would prepare me well for the pros.

  In his role as a scout, my dad had Caribbean countries as his territory, and because he knew about players from the Caribbean and Latin America, he was very honest on this point: culturally, the guys he scouted were different from American prospects. Latin players weren’t used to being away from home as much as American kids were. More and more, teams were selecting college players, who were used to being on their own and away from home. If I hadn’t played baseball, I would have been like 90 percent of the guys I knew and grew up with—I would have lived at home until I got married. That’s just how it was. My dad knew that we Latin players took a bit longer to mature. He also knew that we didn’t face the kind of competition that college players did in the States, and in his mind we weren’t as mentally or emotionally mature as the guys we’d be competing against in the minor leagues who came from the States. He’d signed more than a few young players out of the Dominican Republic or Puerto Rico who were talented, but because of language issues, homesickness, or a bunch of other reasons that didn’t have to do with their physical skills, things had not worked out and they had been released. He told me over and over again that the odds were tough for anybody, but the odds were tougher for Latin players. I needed to do as many things as I could to be prepared and to be protected.

  Accordingly, my dad wanted to do something to make it more difficult for the Yankees to release me if I didn’t impress them from the get-go. We knew that in moving from the 43rd round to the 24th, the Yankees had shown greater interest in me, so we were looking for them to show something extra in their offer to me, something that might set me apart from other players besides draft position or signing bonus—a more substantial commitment from the team. For my part, I wanted the dollars. In my mind, that was like an insurance policy. The more they spent on me the less likely they were to discard me. In the end, my dad, the Yankees, and I each got our way.

  At the end of the season and the school year, instead of going right home, I stuck around and played for a semipro team in Hartsell, a community just a few miles south of Decatur. A semipro team has that name because amateurs like me play alongside former professional baseball players. Some of the guys on that Hartsell team had played minor league ball and were as old as their mid-30s, and some had wives and kids. Because many of the guys had jobs, they sometimes couldn’t make games because of work or family commitments. One day we showed up for a game, and our starting catcher couldn’t make it. I volunteered to put the gear on, and I played that game behind the plate. The Yankees scout Leon Wurth was there, and I began to wonder if I’d given them that added value my dad had been talking about—that extra reason to think twice before giving up on me.

  As the deadline for signing me before I became a free agent again neared, I headed home to Puerto Rico. The Yankees sent a couple of their representatives to negotiate with my dad. Robert Rivera was one of the Yankees scouts whose territory was Puerto Rico. This complicated things a bit for us, because whenever we were with Leon Wurth, we could speak Spanish to keep him from understanding our strategy talks. We overcame that with Robert. Still, my confidence was also boosted by the fact that the Yankees had sent some actual representatives to Puerto Rico to get me to sign. This was a lot different from the form letter I’d received the first go-round.

  In the end, the Yankees upped their offer by $10,000 and gave me $30,000 as a signing bonus. While I liked the $30,000 and was glad that my dad was able to get them to up that offer, he fell short of his own goal. He wanted them to
guarantee that they’d give me three years with the organization. That’s basically unheard of, especially for a guy drafted as low as I was. My dad knew me well: in addition to hoping that I’d be in a place where I’d be comfortable, with Latin players, he knew that a commitment like the one he was seeking would help take some of the pressure off me and allow me to play better. But in truth, even if he’d managed that miracle of negotiation, I was still going to feel the pressure—in pro ball there’s no way around it. I’d always been eager to prove myself, however, and from then on that was going to be especially important.

  For their part, the Yankees did stick with standard operating procedure. They weren’t going to guarantee anything other than that I’d join the more than 1,200 guys drafted and be given a shot. What I did with that shot was up to me—not even my dad could do anything to influence that. I was okay with the money, though I have to admit that I would have liked to have gotten more, both to support myself and to give me a better chance of sticking around with the team. When you’re not yet 20 years old, $30,000 sounds like a lot of money, and it is, but I also knew that I was nowhere near the kind of signing bonuses some of the other guys in the draft were likely to get.

  That was okay, though. I knew the overall odds were long—only one in six guys drafted ever makes it to the big leagues for even one game—but I believed that ultimately talent and desire were going to count more than the dollars handed out in signing bonuses. Once we reported to our teams, we were all going to be earning the same amount, and I figured that everybody was going to really go after it as hard as they could regardless of the round they were drafted in. Just let me compete and I’d be okay. Now I was in control of what would happen next, and I liked the feeling of having my fate in my own hands. Signing that contract was like making a promise to myself: I was going to do everything I could to show people that I deserved this opportunity and that I’d more than pay them back for the faith they had shown in me.

  My family didn’t do anything elaborate to celebrate my getting drafted and signing with the Yankees. We were a baseball family, so in some ways it was not a big moment. Think about it this way: if you were raised in a family where everyone had advanced degrees and worked as doctors, lawyers, and professors, no one would go nuts when you graduated from high school. They’d expect you to get to that point and would be pleased that phase was over, but then it would be time to focus on the next bigger and better thing. I didn’t just want to be a pro baseball player; I wanted to be a big leaguer.

  My teammates were pretty excited for me though. A couple of them phoned me to let me know that a few beers were downed in my honor. Coach Frickie was really happy for me as well as for his program. We got a little bit more attention in the local papers as a result, and we both hoped it would help him attract more ballplayers to the school. And Ney benefited from my being drafted—I let him keep the car. He was coming back for a second season, and I didn’t think that it would make the drive to Oneonta, New York, where the Yankees were having me report to their low A team in the New York–Penn League. Steve Gongwer also called, and I let him know that I was grateful to him and really happy that he’d become an All-American.

  Steve also told me something that I didn’t really quite get until later on. He said that when I showed up at Calhoun and we started practicing together, after a few days he called his dad and said that he was giving up his hope of playing pro ball. He told his dad that he’d seen what a pro ballplayer looked like, and that he was impressed by me and my God-given talent and my work ethic. That meant a lot to me. I still don’t really think that I had that much God-given talent—He gave me whatever I had—but I was also blessed with a desire to succeed and a dad who made sure I stayed on track and did things the right way. Where I was going, I’d need every bit of that.

  When I reported to Oneonta, I was joined there by a group of guys who seemed older than me—22- and 23-year-olds who had mostly played at four-year schools. Among them were Lyle Mouton, who’d had a great college career at LSU, and Steve Phillips, the oldest at 23, who’d played for the University of Kentucky and was an unsigned free agent. We also had Shane Spencer, who signed out of high school in California. Nearly every single one of us was starting out his pro career in 1991.

  I wasn’t the only Latin guy on the team, though the other guy, Sandi Santiago, stuck around only for a week. He missed his buddies too much. The Yankees agreed to let him return to the Rookie League team in Florida. I was shocked, not that the Yankees let him do that, but that Sandi even asked them to essentially demote him. He was going into his second year in the minors, and to move back down the ladder made no sense to me in some ways. In other ways, Sandi illustrated what my dad had been saying to me all along about Latin players, about their need for an adjustment period and their levels of maturity. Seeing what happened with Sandi helped me put in perspective some of the long-standing complications between my dad and me.

  Though I had been listening to my dad for years, now some of what he had been having me do, even going back to those early days of hauling dirt and painting wrought iron, started to make more sense. I had to be serious and I had to be disciplined. He wanted to help me so much, and did so much for me, but he wanted me to conduct myself like a man when I was still a little boy. Then there were times when he’d acted like he was a boy and we were buddies, and that confused me even more. I wanted to act like what I was—a kid. I wanted to do what my peers were doing, I wanted to have fun, I wanted to be stupid and irresponsible. And I’d needed to get that stuff out of my system so that when I got to the point I was now at—starting my professional baseball career—I could be a professional, a man, and not have those stupid urges that got me into trouble (though probably not as much as they should have or could have). Meanwhile, my dad had wanted me to grow up long before I got to pro ball so that I wouldn’t become someone like Sandi who damaged his chances of succeeding.

  Even though Sandi didn’t stick around very long, he got to experience what “the Yankee Way” was all about. At our first team meeting, our manager, Jack Gillis, got up in front of everyone and told us that from that day on, no matter where we were from, or who we played for, we were going to do things the Yankee Way. That included how we wore our uniforms. One of the coaches, Brian Milner, came out and demonstrated just what that meant. He had one of the guys join him in front of everybody and showed us how to put on the uniform every day. Four inches of blue on the socks had to be exposed. The pinstripes had to be perfectly vertical on the pants and the top. No hair on the collar. No chains around the neck. No facial hair of any kind.

  We all took those lessons to heart. They were part of a complete approach the staff took to making sure we did things a certain way. I had to get used to the idea very quickly that I was being judged 24 hours a day, seven days a week—even more strenuously observed and reported on than I ever had been with my father. After a few days, I saw some guys who wanted to test the system. They were the guys who’d gotten drafted high and showed up in Oneonta, maybe not with the flashiest new cars, but with the nicest muscle cars and a few foreign ones like BMWs. Me? I was literally no-va, except on the new bicycle I bought. I knew that being judged like I was, I had to toe the line, so I made sure my uniform met every specification. Those other guys who tried to get away with pushing the limits didn’t get away with it. They got fined, and while the money didn’t seem to matter to them, I sometimes wondered why they would risk getting a bad reputation.

  I don’t know if I can make it clear how seriously I took this opportunity. I’d had jobs before—chores at home, working at the hardware store La Casa de los Tornillos, coaching at the camps—but this was a job. I was being paid to do something I loved, $800 a month, which was big money for me, and I also knew that as I advanced my earnings were going to rise. More than that, though, I remembered my dad talking about Eddie Santos, a guy he signed for the Blue Jays. I couldn’t help but remember him because my dad told me about him all the time. Santos was c
oming up through the Blue Jays organization about the same time as Fred McGriff. He had really good numbers, and then, all of a sudden, he was released and no other team signed him. It was like he just disappeared. My dad never knew why, and Eddie Santos became a cautionary tale, with my dad telling me, “You don’t want that to happen to you.”

  Since I didn’t know exactly why Santos got released, I figured that, when it came time to play pro ball, I had to do everything I could to make sure that I didn’t give the team a single reason to even consider getting rid of me. That included how I conducted myself outside the game. If I was told to be somewhere at 2:00, I’d get there at 1:30 to make sure I wasn’t going to be late. I also didn’t fraternize too much with guys who partied a lot or who badmouthed the coaches or the organization. The expression “keep your nose clean” isn’t one we have in Puerto Rico, but if we did, I would have gone overboard and said “keep your whole body clean.” I wasn’t going to do anything to jeopardize my chances. Gone were the days when I’d take shortcuts—across airports or anywhere else—go for semitrailer-truck joy rides, hop on scooters, or do any of the other silly stuff I’d done as a kid. My dad’s plan had worked once again. At 20, I may still have been a “kid” when I went to Oneonta, but I was going to conduct myself like a man.

  In those first weeks with Oneonta, I also saw a few guys who had a lot of talent but who didn’t put in a whole lot of effort in practices—and believe me, we practiced a lot. Once the season began, we played nearly every day, but we also either worked out in the gym—we were close to the campus of SUNY Oneonta—or were out on the field, in the cages, or in the training room getting worked on. I had very little downtime, and what little I’d had disappeared because I was switching positions. The Yankees wanted me to play second, and it’s a lot harder than you might imagine switching to the right side of the diamond from the left, where I’d been playing most of my life, and especially for the last two years. The angle the ball comes off the bat is different, and that took some getting used to. But the Oneonta Yankees staff was more than willing to help me make that adjustment. Brian Butterfield was a roving instructor who worked with infielders. If we had a 7:00 home game, I’d get to the park at 1:00 after grabbing a quick lunch at one of the nearby fast-food spots, and he’d work with me. I took thousands of ground balls back then.