by Jorge Posada
Unfortunately for me, my dad understood very well the connection between grades and sports. Like I said, I was a pretty good kid who didn’t get in trouble with his teachers for being loud or out of control. I had a lot of respect for my teachers, though I did frustrate my fifth-grade math teacher when I responded to her question about why my book wasn’t open by replying, “It doesn’t matter. I’m going to be a ballplayer.” How could you be upset with a kid who told the truth like that? In my mind, I wasn’t trying to be disrespectful or snotty—I was just telling it like I saw it. I can see now how those words came across, and I also see the error of them. In time I would learn that being a professional ballplayer meant performing well not just on the field but off it. Experience would be a harsher teacher than any I faced in school.
Whether or not I was telling the truth to my teacher didn’t matter so much to my father as the truth my report card told about how I was doing. A few weeks after confessing the reason for my disinterest in math class, I came inside after riding bikes with Ernesto and Manuel. We didn’t go to the same school, but we’d meet up nearly every day after the bus spit me out after a half-hour commute. I stepped into the kitchen, and my dad stood there looking at a piece of paper. He was leaning against the counter, holding the paper in one hand and his forehead in the other. He looked up over the top of the paper, and I recognized that look. Instinct took over, and I ran out of the house and into the backyard. My mother shrieked, and my father yelled at me to stop. I didn’t listen. I could hear his footsteps behind me, but everything else was blank in my world except for a mango tree that stood along one edge of our property. Its roots formed a trunk that was like fingers clawing their way out of the ground. I jumped onto one of them and then started to climb up, thinking I’d be safe up there in the tree.
I wasn’t.
My father didn’t climb all the way up the tree, but he did manage to get in range of me with his belt. I was standing on one branch with my hands above my head, clinging to another branch for balance. It was like the belt lashes were tongues of flame rising up to get me. I was doing a little dance trying to get away from them, but I couldn’t always avoid them. I knew that by running and hiding in that tree I had made my dad angrier than he was before, but I couldn’t help myself. This wasn’t like it was later on when I was learning to catch and had to ignore all the potential dangers and pains of being behind the plate. This was me as a fifth-grader doing his best to avoid the pain of being disciplined.
On the one hand, I knew that I had been warned about keeping my grades up. I’d failed to do that and deserved to suffer some consequences. I also knew that I shouldn’t have run away from my father and defied him like I had. I’d added fuel to a very small fire. I knew better than to run out of the house, but something inside me, some impulse, took over and often made me do things I hadn’t planned on doing. On the other hand, I never expected my father to get so infuriated that he’d chase me up a tree. My father believed in corporal punishment; he might have just spanked me if I hadn’t run away, and that would have been the end of it. I didn’t like any kind of physical punishment, but that’s how things were in my house and in the homes of a lot of my friends. My dad was using the belt as a last resort; he literally couldn’t reach me any other way.
At that point, we were both beyond words. My mother had briefly tried to intervene, but he had sent her into the house. I don’t know how long the two of us stayed up there. I’d climb higher; he’d scramble up a little bit more. Eventually, he climbed back down out of the tree and stood there. He made a big show of putting his belt back on and said, his tone still angry but his anger under control, “Come down here. This is no way for us to behave.” My only response was to work my way down the tree. I knew that the worst was over, at least for that night.
When I was back on solid ground, my dad nodded his head toward the house, and I followed behind him. At one point, he slowed to look at me. An adrenaline buzz ran through me, and I covered my head to protect myself. When I didn’t feel anything hitting me, I stood up straighter and looked at him. Instead of seeing shame or embarrassment on his face, I saw sadness when he shook his head, obviously disappointed in how I’d responded. I got into the house and immediately ran toward my mother, who stood in the kitchen twisting a dish towel in her hands.
“No!” my father shouted, and he pointed down the hallway toward my room.
I stepped past my crying mother and went into my room. I spent the next hour lying on my back staring at the ceiling, resisting the urge to toss the ball. Outside my window, cicadas buzzed and moths flung themselves against the screen, rattling the wire mesh. I didn’t dare look at my bare legs. A few spots stung, but I wasn’t going to cry, not this time. I must have drifted off into a troubled sleep.
I woke up and squinted into the bright light. I could see only the outline of who was in the room. It was my dad. With the light behind him, I couldn’t see his expression. He stepped into the room, and I heard him rustling around. I saw him grab my new glove and my heart sank. That was going to be my punishment. He was going to take that from me, maybe not let me play again until I passed all my classes. I shut my eyes.
I heard a chair scrape across the floor and then a creak and a sigh as my father settled into it. A second later, I smelled something familiar. I heard a kind of scratching sound, and I put it all together. My father was rubbing castor oil into the palm of my glove. I heard him humming something under his breath. He held up the glove and inspected it and then pounded his fist into it.
“It’s getting better. Make sure you keep doing this, every day, a little bit at a time. Don’t go crazy with the oil.”
He took a ball and thudded it into the glove.
He turned to look around the room, squinting. “Where are they?”
I pointed toward my nightstand. The sound of the rubber bands going around the glove was a kind of twangy music. He held out the glove to me and said, “You’ve got to take care of things. You know that, right?”
I nodded.
“Then put that away.”
I reached for the glove, a McGregor the color of a cigar, careful to avoid looking him in the eye. Then I slipped the bound-up glove between the mattress and the box spring. I lay back down, feeling the lump in my throat as well as the lump in the bed, one of them a strange comfort.
“And this,” my father said, taking my portable cassette player and a handful of tapes, “you’ll get this back next week after you get your grade up. I’ll be talking to your teacher, and you will do better. You know that is going to happen.”
He stepped out of the room, and I heard him walking away. I sat up again and reached over to my desk. I pulled out my English workbook. A lot of times when I studied, I liked to listen to American pop music, telling myself that the lyrics would help me. Now, with no tape player, I couldn’t do that. So I sat there, alternately staring at the lines of translation I had to do and the label on the tape I’d recorded. I was proud of myself for being able to record Casey Kasem’s “America’s Top 40” off the radio. I had gotten to the point where I could hit the Stop and then the Record buttons perfectly, eliminating the commercials. It had taken me a while to perfect the technique, but I’d stuck with it. So there I was that late spring of 1986, staring at the label, reading my homework pages, and twirling the cassette on one finger. I imagined that I could hear Gloria Estefan and the Miami Sound Machine’s “Bad Boy” in my mind. I lay there snapping my fingers and grinning as the words “Boys will be boys” floated across my vision, like a blooper dropping safely into the outfield. It landed, and I found myself thinking about what those words really meant—in English and in Spanish. I thought again of how lucky I was that no one knew about what I’d done to the neighbor’s patio door all those weeks before.
When the song ended in my head, so did whatever pleasure I’d taken from that immature revenge. All three of us—the Mad Man, my father, and I—were apparently capable of being taken over by some kind of anger
or frustration that clouded our better judgment for a while. None of us were really bad boys to the core. There was just something in us that we didn’t keep under control all the time. Later on, I’d figure out why it was that anger sometimes helped me and other times hurt me. At that point, I was grateful that I hadn’t done more damage to the neighbor’s house, both because I recognized that doing what I had done was wrong and because I didn’t want to have to fully face up to the consequences. In a way, I saw getting away with that act as something I deserved for having been punished for my bad grades. It was a complicated equation, trying to determine deserved and undeserved, guilt and innocence. The calculation exhausted me, so I gave up.
I reached under my mattress and pulled out my glove and unwound it. I set my books aside and tossed the ball in the air, careful not to make contact with the walls or the ceiling. The comforting feel of the ball and the glove made me forget how hungry I was.
CHAPTER TWO
Yo Soy Puertorriqueño
Many fathers and sons have a complicated relationship—we don’t always talk about it, them, but we know it can be confusing. Even so, it’s hard to convey just how complicated the relationship I had with my father was, and what that complexity meant for me both growing up and today. It made more sense to me later on when I worked with pitchers. They had different mechanics, release points, ways of approaching hitters. Some were good at communicating their intent and desires, others weren’t. Some spoke the same languages I did; others didn’t, or sometimes seemed not to. Understanding methods and means to an end wasn’t always easy on or off the field.
To be honest, I still don’t have the puzzle of my father completely solved (show me a son who does), but I will say this again: if it weren’t for my father and all the things he did for me and to me, I wouldn’t have become a big league player. I enjoyed a lot of advantages being the son of Jorge Luis de Posada Sr. There was a method to my father’s madness, but I didn’t see that at the time. Partly, that’s because he never explained to me why he had me do some of the things he did. He was very old-school in that regard. I have no way of knowing this for a fact, but I suspect that even if I had asked my father his reasons for many of the things he had me do, he would have issued the intentional walk, the standard “because I say so” response. Still, I never would have asked him because I also inherited from him a bit of his stubborn streak. While I didn’t actively or directly rebel against what he asked me to do, particularly when it came to baseball, I also didn’t take on the responsibility of improving communications between us. A few things he had me do were clear enough that they needed no explanation: running sprints, climbing hills, spending countless hours in the batting cage or on the field taking ground balls. But a few were more like mental tests he was putting me through, and often my relative immaturity—physically—bumped up against what he was trying to get me to do mentally.
Today I can see that my dad’s parenting represented a generational difference, the old-school mentality I’ve mentioned. It also may have been partly cultural. The stereotype of Latin American men, for better or worse, does have some truth in it. We are more likely than other men to express our emotions and be reactive. Whether that was me taking a BB gun to a neighbor’s house, my dad chasing me up a tree, Manny Ramírez responding to an inside fastball that was nowhere near hitting him, Pedro Martinez mouthing off and then slinging a 70-year-old man to the ground—in one way or another those are the kinds of things that happen when you’ve got guys who are temperamental. I don’t just wear my heart on my sleeve: my emotions are the clothes that cover my whole body. What you see is what you get.
I may suffer from a unique variety of that Latin American passion, since I’m a combination of Cuban, Dominican, and Puerto Rican. Just as the relationship I have with my father is complicated, so is my heritage. But I will say this: my relationship with my birthplace is simple. I love Puerto Rico, and I consider myself to be Puerto Rican. As I write this, President Barack Obama has just announced the reestablishment of ties between the United States and Cuba. It is still early days, and it’s hard for me to know what will happen, but I’ve gone on record for many years stating that I would like to visit Cuba someday. That doesn’t mean that I’m disloyal to Puerto Rico or the United States. I like to travel, and as I get older I get more and more curious about the place where my father grew up. I’d like my kids to see where their grandfather spent his youth.
As much as my dad shaped who I became, I think that Puerto Rico had a nearly equal influence on me. Because of the weather, I had several baseball seasons in the same calendar year. Playing outside year-round was great.
Puerto Rico’s influence on me runs far deeper than just being the place where I could play baseball year-round. I identify myself as Puerto Rican, not so much as a way to fill in a line on a form but as a real part of who I am, even if Puerto Rico, in the big picture, is a really, really small place. With only 3.6 million residents, it’s dwarfed by the Dominican Republic’s more than 10 million in population and by Cuba’s more than 11 million. That makes Puerto Rico an underdog, and I like the underdog mentality. When you look at boxing, one of Puerto Rico’s favorite sports, I think you’ll understand what I mean about identifying as Puerto Rican. I’m proud of Puerto Rico’s contributions to baseball, but when you think about the fact that this tiny commonwealth with its small population ranks third in the world among boxing title holders—across all divisions, not just heavyweights, who get most of the attention in the United States—that says something.
Boxing in Puerto Rico dates back to when it was still a Spanish colony and workers on the sugar and coffee plantations organized secret tournaments. The United States helped develop boxing into a more formal and legal activity within the military, though wildcat matches were always held in various places in Old San Juan. During World War I, US and Puerto Rican soldiers stationed on the island participated in the Campeonato Las Casas (House Championship), but civilians couldn’t participate. For a long time boxing in Puerto Rico was controlled, at least officially, by the military. Fighting a war and boxing seemed to go hand in hand. Eventually that changed, and guys like Wilfredo Benítez, Félix Trinidad, and Héctor Camacho, along with women like Melissa Del Valle and Cindy and Amanda Serrano, followed the line that Sixto Escobar established in 1934 and became world champions.
I didn’t know these things as a kid. I thought of myself as Puerto Rican because that was where I lived. I didn’t go around asking all my classmates about their backgrounds. I just was Puerto Rican. I liked Puerto Rican history. I thought it was cool that Christopher Columbus was credited with discovering Puerto Rico just like he did America. Since Puerto Rico enjoyed commonwealth status with the United States, I looked at my adopted home positively as well. I also looked at it as a source of entertainment, with not just US music but movies and television shows and, obviously, baseball holding my attention.
I don’t think I fully understood why, but the story of Puerto Rico’s native people, the Taínos, really mattered to me. To hear about their struggle to survive European disease and their harsh treatment by the Spanish reminded me of the combative spirit of boxers and underdogs. Though my roots in Puerto Rico aren’t as deep as many other people’s, I’ve been at a Marc Antony concert and felt a little thrill of pleasure and pride when he shouted, “¡Yo soy Boricua!” and the crowd went nuts. When I’m alone driving, and many times when the family is with me, I crank up the volume to listen to Gilberto Santa Rosa and Víctor Manuelle. I’m a big fan of music of all types, but those guys are special to me. Playing in New York was great because of the large number of Puerto Ricans in the city, and because of her work with our foundation, Laura got to ride in the Puerto Rican Day parade. That was a special honor for her, and I would love to have been there, but the Yankees were always playing on Puerto Rican Day. My job frequently took me away from events and people I cared about.
No one is more important to my identification as Puerto Rican than Roberto Clement
e. One of my proudest moments came a few months ago when my four-year-old nephew Miguelo saw a picture of Roberto Clemente and said, “That’s my uncle.” To me, Roberto Clemente is the guy we should all try to model ourselves after. He was an amazingly talented baseball player and played the game the right way, but he was also an amazing human being who lost his life in a plane crash trying to bring relief supplies to people suffering from the effects of a terrible earthquake in Nicaragua. He lived the right way, and I grew up hearing about him. I can still see him rounding second base and tearing for third, his helmet flying off and coming in standing up for a triple.
I got a little sad toward the end of my career when I realized that some of the young Latin players I spoke with knew only vaguely who Clemente was and what he had meant to the game and to the world. Maybe that’s a bit of my dad’s old-school “respect your elders” rubbing off on me, but I hope that Roberto Clemente will be remembered as more than just a name to enter into your phone when you’re looking for directions to the Coliseum or the Stadium named in his honor. Clemente wasn’t just a ballplayer; he was a warrior, a guy who fought hard on and off the field. I would love to have received the award named for him that Major League Baseball hands out to the player who best combines achievement on and off the field. I’m not that into personal honors, but to be voted the player who “best exemplifies the game of baseball, sportsmanship, community involvement and the individual’s contribution to his team” would have been an amazing honor even if it hadn’t been named for a personal hero of mine.
Contributing to a team’s success was always important to me, but the truth is, in order to do that, you have to succeed as an individual. I wanted to be the best at baseball from a very early age. What I couldn’t figure out was why my father seemed to put up roadblocks to slow or even block my progress. In 1980, when I was nine years old, my dad drove me over to the Caparra Country Club, where he helped coach the baseball team. Country clubs like Caparra weren’t places with fancy golf courses where rich people hung out—they were places where what I’d today think of as lower-middle-class families like mine spent time together. They were privately owned, but in truth, they were more like the facilities you find in communities with parks and recreation departments.