St. Louis – Having grown up on the western tip of Cuba, Andy Pages excelled in all the sports he played.
He was good at football and volleyball, probably better in basketball. But he loved baseball for reasons that were not necessarily limited to the game.
The father of pages, Lebanon, a carpenter who had a job to repair wooden boats, helped make her son’s first bats, using wood from the remains given to him by friends. Baseball has soon become the boy’s favorite pastime.
“When I started playing Baseball in Cuba, when things were really bad, there were no bats. There were no things like that,” Pages in Spanish said. “So he has always tried to make me a bat so that I can play.
“I became more motivated, and from that moment, we played baseball.”
Sport finally turned out to be a means of the island for the pages, which has become one of the brightest stars of the Dodgers of its second season with the team.
He entered the start of a series of three games on Monday in San Diego on Monday, hitting. 288 with 12 circuits and 39 points produced, following only Shohei Ohtani in Homers and with Ohtani for the third of the team in the produced points. It is also equal to the second row of the stolen bases with six and has not yet been thrown.
If he can remain consistent, he has a chance to become the first Dodger Center field to strike better than 0.250 with 23 circuits since Matt Kemp in 2012.
Although the pages have never played in the elite of Cuba Nacional, the test ground for stars such as Yuli Gurriel, Yunel Escobar and Orlando “El Duque” Hernández, he became one of the best prospects in the country after having struck .364 / .484 / .581 in a league under 15.
The Dodgers Andy Pages Pages from the Ballon Dodgers at the second base to prevent Ketel Marte de l’Arizona from advancing on a single at Dodger Stadium on May 20.
(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)
These convinced pages (pronounced from the HAP-Hays), he was lucky to be a big fever one day. Thus, at 16, reported athletics, he arranged to be fiery off the island alongside Jairo Pomares, another young Cuban star, traveling through Guyana, Curaacao and Haiti before crossing in the Dominican Republic. He then waited eight months before the Dodgers signed it as an international free agent in March 2018, giving it a bonus of $ 300,000, more than 1,500 times the average annual salary in Cuba, according to Cibercuba.
Pomares signed with the Giants of San Francisco at the same time, but although it remains in minors, the pages of pages to the majors were stable. He reached triple A at the start of the 2024 season. He did not stay at Oklahoma City for a long time, however, hitting .371 / .452 / .694 with 15 points produced in 15 games to obtain a call for Dodgers.
Before her recruit season was over, Pages was a World Series champion. He paid a heavy price for that, spending seven years without seeing his family in person.
“It was emotional because I hadn’t seen them for a long time,” said Pages, 24, who returned to Cuba for the first time in winter before his debut in the big league.
His sister, Elaine, a child when he left “was already an adult woman”.
“So these memories came back to me, and they were absolutely-how should I say it?-strong enough for me,” said pages, who brought his father some of the bats made in the machine that he used in minor leagues.
But if his father provided the spark who made his son a baseball player, his teammate Teoscar Hernández provided help, advice and mentoring that made pages a big daily light.
“He has played in major leagues for a long time now,” Pages said about Hernández, a 10 -year -old veteran who signed with the Dodgers of the months before Pages made his big league debut. “He went through a lot of bad moments. I went through this at the start of the season, for example, and last year too. And he gave me advice that helped me a lot at that time.”
With the family of pages still in Cuba, Hernández became a big brother as well as a teammate, taking him dinner on the days or meeting to play video games.
Andy Pages runs the basics after hitting a Home Run solo against athletics at Dodger Stadium on May 14.
(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)
“Speaking of bad times is sometimes a little difficult when you are alone, when you have no one to help you, give you good advice and make you understand that sometimes things do not happen when you want,” said pages.
And it worked well for the pages. Three games after Hernández came back from a rehabilitation assignment last month, Pages began a sequence in which he struck in 13 of his next 14 departures, including 11 in a row, increasing his 24 points on average to 0.293. He beats .379 with a summit of 11 strokes in seven games this month.
“We are trying to go out to my house. We go to a restaurant with my wife, his wife. Just so that we can come together, have time to enjoy and not think of baseball,” said Hernández.
Pages is not the first player to benefit from the mentorship of Hernández. During his six seasons in Toronto, Hernández took another talented recruit, his Dominican compatriot Vladimir Guerrero Jr., under his wing. Guerrero is now a quadruple All-Star.
Hernández is still so respected in Toronto when the Dodgers played there last season, some Blue Jays players wore his old uniform number during the practice of the striker. Earlier this year, Guerrero offered to buy him a Richard a thousand watch of $ 300,000; Hernández joked by saying that he preferred to have money instead.
While the calm pages have become more confident and comfortable with the Dodgers, his game has improved. A quick voltiger with a more arm, he can also play the three positions.
And while he left Cuba, he never completely left him behind, having expressed his interest in representing the country in the World Baseball Classic of next year. The decision to go to the Dominican Republic in adolescence, after all, was a case, not personal.
The pages would also like to bring us his family one day, although this dream was donated last week when President Trump signed an executive decree restricting access to the Cubans in the hope of coming to the United States
“Hope is still there,” said Pages, who beat incredibly long odds once. “But you have to follow the rules, get papers, do everything you need to make sure everything is fine. And then go here and stay here.
“I’m just trying, trying until they can leave.”
