good piece on corpas / Sox-related, too

[Gregory Pratt]

Tim Ireland, the Pacific Rim coordinator for the Rockies in 1999, saw in Manuel what Manuel had seen in himself. The moment Ireland set eyes on the bone-thin boy with arms as long as his legs, just one word came to mind: pitcher.

 

The next day the Panamanian boy and the American scout snuck into an old stadium and began to throw. Puny hurled an 82-mile-per-hour fastball, then a heater that clocked 83, and another, and another. But just before he reached back to throw his seventh consecutive fastball, Ireland, who had stood and watched in silence, said, "Ya." Enough. Suddenly the confidence Manuel had shown as a 10-year-old facing batters twice his age evaporated. He thought, "This won't be the first time I've disappointed a scout, but it might be the last."

 

Back in Panama, the Yankees, Pittsburgh Pirates, Seattle Mariners, Chicago White Sox and Texas Rangers had given him tryouts but sent him home without a contract. "Otra vez," Manuel thought. "Nobody's going to sign me. I'm tired of this."

 

So tired, in fact, that the phone call the next morning at 8 jolted him out of a deep sleep. "If the phone is ringing in my room at 8," he thought, "it must be important."

 

"Manuel," Ireland said, fumbling for words in Spanish, which he does not speak fluently, "I'd like to sign you."

 

After talking the Rockies into increasing his signing bonus by $2,000, to $17,500, Manuel Corpas, almost 10,000 miles from home, signed a professional baseball deal. After returning to Panama for a few months, the 16-year-old Corpas would do what millions of other Latino boys had done before him: Leave home to work. The difference for him was that the work wasn't so much a job as a dream fulfilled. But that distinction was of little solace as he headed for the airport to fly to Venezuela and its summer league. As his relatives hugged him and kissed him goodbye, they saw something that his skillet-swinging mother and Panamanian batters twice his age had rarely seen in him: fear. The idea of boarding an airplane made his insides shake.

 

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2008/writ...8/corpas/1.html