SCORES ANALYSIS COMMENTARY SATURDAY, OCTOBER 17, 2020B7
YSAN DIEGO — Randy Arozarena was
born in Arroyos de Mantua, a small town
on the northwest coast of Cuba, a four-
and-a-half-hour drive from Havana. He
has fond memories of dancing in the
streets and playing soccer, his first love,
with his brothers and his friends. He re-
members his father watching him play
for the Vegueros de Pinar del Río, a pro-
fessional Cuban baseball team. His nick-
name is El Cohete Cubano (“The Cuban
Rocket”).
Make no mistake, Arozarena is Cuban.
But deep down, his heart has become in-
tertwined with the country only 30 min-
utes away from San Diego’s Petco Park,
where he has starred for the Tampa Bay
Rays over the past two weeks.
Mexico is where Arozarena, 25, found
a home after fleeing Cuba on a small boat
five years ago, where his daughter was
born two years ago and where he started
a journey that vaulted him to the major
leagues last year. And one day, he hopes
to wear the country’s uniform in interna-
tional competitions.
“I feel like I represent Mexico,” he said
in Spanish during a recent interview. “I
have a daughter in Mexico, and I’d do it
in honor of her and for the part of my ca-
reer that I spent in Mexico, and for all the
friends I’ve made in Mexico.”
Arozarena’s experience is familiar to
many of his fellow Cuban-born players in
Major League Baseball. The island is
their homeland, but dozens have es-
caped the communist country to chase
their dreams, often putting their lives in
the hands of smugglers or taking har-
rowing boat rides.
Arozarena said that after his father
died unexpectedly of an allergic reaction
to shellfish in 2014 and he began feeling
alienated by his team in Cuba — he was
left off Pinar del Río’s roster for the 2015
Caribbean Series in Puerto Rico despite
hitting .291, as officials feared he might
defect — he decided that he needed to
leave to provide for his mother and two
younger brothers.
“At 19, I earned more than my mom,”
Arozarena said. In his first season in
Cuba, he said, he made $4 a month and
then eventually $38 a month.
So in June 2015, Arozarena said, he
took an eight-hour boat ride, and saw
waves over 15 feet en route, to Isla Mu-
jeres, just off the coast from Cancún. De-
fecting Cuban baseball players must es-
tablish residency in a third country be-
fore they can be cleared by the U.S. gov-
ernment and sign as free agents with an
M.L.B. team. From where Arozarena
lived in Cuba, Mexico was the shortest
journey.
The list of people he knew in Mexico
upon his arrival: “No one.”
Through an agent, Arozarena was
eventually connected to Guillermo Ar-
menta, then a scout for the M.L.B. Scout-
ing Bureau who also oversaw player de-
velopment for the Toros de Tijuana of the
Mexican professional baseball league.
The first time Armenta worked with
Arozarena, in Mérida — the largest city
on the Yucatán Peninsula, not far from
where Arozarena first arrived — he saw
the athletic potential. Armenta said a
skinny Arozarena first ran the 60-yard
dash in 6.9 seconds, as fast as an average
major league player. He eventually im-
proved his time to 6.38 seconds.
“He ran like a lighting bolt,” Armenta
said.
After being asked to train Arozarena a
few more times, Armenta convinced him
that he should come to Tijuana to de-
velop at the Toros’ academy, which had
sent other prospects to major-league or-
ganizations.
At the academy, Armenta said,
Arozarena had so little to his name that
he shared cleats and batting gloves with
another prospect during workouts. He
grew frustrated as M.L.B. teams scouted
him and gave him looks in private work
outs but declined to sign him.
One day, Armenta jokingly gave
Arozarena what he thought was an im-
possible challenge: A team will sign you,
he said, if you can walk on your hands
from home plate to first base. Arozarena
announced that he had done gymnastics
in Cuba, flipped onto his hands and did it.
“I thought, ‘Wow, this kid is a super
athlete,’ ” Armenta said.
After struggling in his brief Mexican
League debut with the Toros — five
games in 2016 — Arozarena starred for
their feeder team, the Toritos, winning a
batting and stolen bases title, and refin-
ing his power stroke. The St. Louis Cardi-
nals signed him to a $1.25 million con-
tract.
Arozarena made his major-league de-
but with St. Louis on Aug. 14, 2019, and hit
.300 in 20 at bats over 19 games. Tanta-lized by Arozarena’s talent, the Rays
traded for him, coughing up their top
pitching prospect at the time.
His Rays debut this year was delayed
until Aug. 30 because of a positive co-
ronavirus test. While isolating, he said,
he loaded up on chicken and rice — all he
knew how to make — and did 300 push-
ups a day. And although he wasn’t an ev-
eryday player upon his return, he earned
regular duties by hitting .281 with seven
home runs in only 23 games.
“He came here without anything that
he has now,” Armenta said from Tijuana
in a phone interview. “But look at him
now. That’s Randy.”
In the postseason, Arozarena has been
by far the best hitter in the Rays’ offense.
He blasted three home runs in five
games to help topple the Yankees in the
American League division series. And in
a celebratory dance competition set to
Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” after
Tampa Bay won the series, Arozarena
beat his teammate Brett Phillips by bust-
ing out the moves — including spinning
on his head — that he used to do with hisbrothers and friends back in Cuba. It was
the type of joy that has come to exemplify
the Rays and Arozarena this postseason.
“Life is too short,” he said. “And that’s
what how we do it: enjoying every mo-
ment that life brings.”
In the first five games of the A.L.
Championship Series against the Hous-
ton Astros, Arozarena crushed three
more home runs. His six postseason
home runs tied the record for the most by
a rookie in major league history, match-
ing Evan Longoria’s mark with the Rays
in 2008, the last time Tampa Bay had ad-
vanced this far.
“Everybody is just in awe every time
he steps into the box,” Rays catcher Mike
Zunino said of Arozarena. Rays Manager
Kevin Cash said Arozarena’s accom-
plishments were more impressive given
that he had no previous experience
against many of the pitchers.
Arozarena wouldn’t be doing this if not
for his formative time in Mexico. At the
Toros’ academy, he grew not only as a
player but as a person. Teammates and
staff members there helped him buy his
first cellphone and open social media ac-
counts (he is now active on Instagram
and hosts Facebook chats with fans).
Before the Rays swept Toronto in the
best-of-three first round of the 2020 play-
offs, Arozarena posed for a photo with a
friend he hadn’t seen since their days to-
gether at the Toros’ academy: Alejandro
Kirk, a Mexican catcher with the Blue
Jays.
“He’s Mexican because of his love of
the homeland,” Armenta said of
Arozarena.
If Arozarena had his way, he would still
play in the Mexican winter leagues, as he
did for the Mayos de Navojoa in Sonora
in three previous off-seasons. He said he
loves living in Mérida because it is tran-
quil and the warm weather year round
reminds him of his native island.His family is around, too: his brother,
Raiko, plays for the Cafetaleros de Chia-
pas, a third-tier Mexican soccer team,
and his mother makes him Cuban food
often — although he still indulges in his
favorite Mexican dish, carne asada ta-
cos.
“It’s like living in Cuba,” he said.
But of course, Arozarena is not. The
only bond he feels with his homeland, he
said, is the family and friends he left be-
hind and the little town where he was
born “where everyone knows me and ev-
eryone loves me, and where they loved
my dad and I’m proud of being from.” He
added that “the situation in Cuba is bad.”
Last year, President Trump reversed
an agreement negotiated by the Obama
administration in which M.L.B. and the
Cuban Baseball Federation had eased
the path for players to compete in the
United States without defecting.
Arozarena said he still hopes conditions
will improve one day for all Cubans, in-
cluding ballplayers.
“There’s a lot of Cuban players that
want to represent Cuba, for example, in a
World Baseball Classic or an important
tournament, but because of politics, they
can’t,” he said, adding later, “For my part,
I wouldn’t represent Cuba until every-
thing changes.”
Until then, Arozarena has a few more
goals: Win a World Series, have his
mother watch him play in the major
leagues in person, and become a Mexi-
can citizen. He said he had already taken
the citizenship test and was waiting to
hear back in order to apply for a pass-
port. He has time: The World Baseball
Classic originally scheduled for 2021 was
tentatively postponed two years because
of the pandemic.
“I’m Cuban, but it’d be an honor for me
to represent Mexico,” he said, “and for
my daughter.”From $38 a Month in Cuba to Playoff Stardom for the Rays
The Rays outfielder Randy Arozarena has become the breakout star of the
postseason after appearing in just 42 regular-season games over two seasons.
“Everybody is just in awe every time he steps into the box,” a teammate said.ORLANDO RAMIREZ/USA TODAY SPORTS, VIA REUTERSJOHN G MABANGLO/EPA, VIA SHUTTERSTOCKGrowing in Mexico as a
player and as a person.
By JAMES WAGNERThe news that Alabama Coach Nick
Saban tested positive this week for the
coronavirus gave an uppercut jolt to
big-time college football, which is doing
all it can to continue with its season —
pandemic be damned.
What will the jolt
change?
So far, after announc-
ing the positive test,
Saban has said he feels
fine. “I’m not really con-
cerned that much about my health,” he
told reporters in a Zoom call from the
isolation of his home.
This is, of course, an unpredictable
disease. Saban is 68 years old, a partic-
ularly vulnerable age for this virus. But
that does not seem to matter to major
college football, which keeps twisting
itself into knots, straining to rationalize
playing games amid a pandemic that
has led to at least 217,800 deaths in the
United States — with no end in sight.
Even with infection hitting its most
famous coach, the mind-set of the col-
lege game’s most vigorous enablers has
not altered. They are bent on moving
forward.
“He knows the risks,” they say. “Let’s
keep going.”
“Move on.”
Just look at how this season is unfold-
ing. We’ve got teams playing on cam-
puses that are seeding outbreaks in
cities, regions and towns. Tuscaloosa,
the University of Alabama’s home, is
just one of them.
None of that matters to those who
would grasp for any rationalization just
so they can have some college football.
Move on, they say. Go ahead and
play.
We’ve got teams traveling state to
state on buses and planes. Teams stay-
ing in cramped hotels. Teams gathering
in the tight confines of visitor locker
rooms.
In its third game of this season, the
Crimson Tide rolled into Oxford to play
Mississippi. Saban, who regularly
wears a mask and is known to be a
stickler when it comes to protecting
against the virus, suggested that he
might have contracted his illness dur-
ing that trip.
With their sprawling counts of play-
ers, coaches and support personnel, the
movement of college teams around the
country for games every week doesn’t
exactly help slow down the virus. But to
the enablers, the excuse makers, thosewho want to normalize sickness, that
does not mean much.
Move on, they say. Move on.
Even if it means holding games in
front of frothing crowds. After his team
lost to Texas A&M last weekend, Flor-
ida Coach Dan Mullen said the boister-
ous crush at College Station had been asignificant factor in the defeat. So he
promptly called for 90,000 Florida fans
to show up for the Gators’ next game at
home in Gainesville, against Louisiana
State.
Distancing? Crowd control? The
virus? Why bother?
Then came karma. Florida reported
this week that at least 19 of its players
had tested positive. The Gators' battle
this weekend against L.S.U., one of the
most anticipated matchups of the errat-
ic season, has been postponed.Speaking of L.S.U., most of its players
have already had the virus at some
point this season, according to Coach
Ed Orgeron.
So it goes. Rutgers. Clemson. North
Carolina. Virginia Tech. Kansas State.
All of these teams, each with suppos-
edly tight protocols, have experienced
outbreaks. Mississippi is grappling with
the virus. Vanderbilt cannot play this
weekend because so many of its play-
ers are infected.
No worries. Move on.
After first announcing the suspension
of football until after Jan. 1, the Big Ten
and the Pac-12 reversed course and
bowed to the need to chase the tens of
millions in guaranteed television reve-
nue by holding a season. By early No-
vember, both conferences will be play-
ing again.
Both claim to have a magic formula:
better testing and increased safety
measures.
If this magic formula does not work
as planned, if more coaches and players
fall ill, expect a hail of the now typical
excuses from college football enablers.
And expect little to change.
This virus starts as an isolated ember
before becoming a blazing fire. Ithardly stays confined to the individual.
What happens when the young quarter-
back, who may not even have symp-
toms or shrugs them off, goes to frater-
nity row and inadvertently keeps the
spread going? What happens when he
unwittingly takes his illness home to his
parents? And when he gives his coach
a hug and passes on the virus?
“We are all in this together, all of us
connected,” Dr. Cyrus Shahpar, director
of the epidemic prevention team at
Resolve to Save Lives, a nonprofit
group that focuses on global disease
prevention, said when we spoke this
week.
Shahpar cited a list of long-term
health problems that can hobble anyone
infected with the virus. “Every organ
system can be affected,” he said.
“Lungs. Kidneys. Heart. Neurological
problems. We don’t have a lot of experi-
ence with the virus. We don’t know the
long-term ramifications. We still have a
lot to learn.”
We still have a lot to learn. Exactly.
And much to fear. But even with one of
the most revered coaches in college
football now infected with the virus, the
enabling chorus will not fade.
Move on, they say. Move on.College Football Keeps Rolling, Consequences Be Damned
KURT
STREETER
SPORTS OF
THE TIMES
Virus outbreaks in teamsand on campuses don’t
mean much to enablers.