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Yeah, I'm stealing shit from the Times.
Mets’ Rodriguez Guides Juan Urbina and His Teammates
By DAVID WALDSTEIN
Published: March 25, 2010
PORT ST. LUCIE, Fla. — On March 2, Francisco Rodriguez received a call from a cellphone inside the Penitenciaria General de Venezuela, a maximum-security prison in San Juan de los Morros, Venezuela.
Ugueth Urbina, a former All-Star closer, was sentenced to 14 years in prison.
The call was from a close friend, Ugueth Urbina, the former All-Star closer whom Rodriguez, the Mets’ closer, idolized as youngster growing up in Venezuela. Urbina had a favor to ask. Confined behind bars, 1,500 miles away, the 36-year-old Urbina was unable to look after his son Juan, a promising, young left-handed pitcher now spending his first spring in the Mets’ minor league camp here. So he reached out to Rodriguez and asked him to provide some guidance for the 16-year-old.
For much of the last month, Rodriguez has done just that. He has opened his spring training home to both Juan Urbina and several of his Spanish-speaking teammates in the minor leagues, most of whom also come from Venezuela.
“It’s very, very nice of him,” Juan Urbina said as the minor league coach Jose Carreno translated at the Mets’ complex on Wednesday. “He gives a lot of advice for off the field, on the field and makes us feel at home. He has helped me so much.”
When Ugueth Urbina, who has use of a BlackBerry in prison, reached out to Rodriguez earlier this month, Rodriguez was more than willing to assist. Rodriguez is now 28, but not that removed from his own daunting introduction to the United States a decade ago.
Coming here as a teenager to play baseball in the minor leagues can be a lonely, dispiriting experience, Rodriguez said. Knowing that, Rodriguez wants to help both Urbina, who has the added burden of knowing his father sits in a jail in Venezuela, convicted of a gruesome crime, and Urbina’s teammates.
“I’m not doing this just because it’s Ugueth Urbina’s son,” Rodriguez said. “I’m doing it because these are kids from Venezuela like I was. When I came here, I was 17 years old and I didn’t know any English or anything about American culture, and I suffered a lot. I don’t want anyone else to go through the same thing that I went through.”
Most days, Rodriguez picks up Urbina and several of his teammates in his S.U.V. and brings them back to his home here, where he and a friend cook for them. The players watch TV or play video games and talk about baseball and life, and America. And then Rodriguez takes them back to their hotel before curfew.
So who did that for Rodriguez when he was signed by the Angels in 1998?
“There was nobody,” he said. “I just sat in my hotel room.”
Juan Urbina was 11 years old when his life, and that of his father, changed dramatically. Although it remains in dispute exactly what happened on the night of Oct. 15, 2005, at the Urbina family ranch 25 miles south of Caracas, there seems little question that there was a violent crime.
And nearly two years later, in March 2007 a criminal court in Venezuela concluded that Ugueth Urbina had indeed taken part in attacking five employees of his ranch that night, joining with other men in dousing the workers with gasoline and assaulting them with a machete in an apparent dispute over items missing from the Urbina home. Urbina was sentenced to 14 years for attempted murder.
To those who know Ugueth Urbina, the facts of the incident, as presented, were hard to fathom. Urbina, after all, had suffered terrible violence in his own life, his father murdered in a robbery attempt in the 1990s and his mother kidnapped in 2004 and then dramatically rescued in a raid by the Venezuelan police more than five months later.
Urbina disputed the charges against him. His accusers were drunk, he said, and they brawled after he had gone upstairs to sleep. He never attacked anyone, he said in published accounts, and did not even know about a brawl until the next morning.
But the court ruled against him and Urbina, a millionaire who had played for 11 years in the major leagues, who had been on two All-Star teams and won a World Series as the closer for the 2003 Florida Marlins, now sits in a tough and foreboding prison, hoping his sentence will be commuted soon.
Rodriguez has gone to see Urbina there on several occasions and said each visit was an unsettling experience.
“It’s very difficult,” he said. “Very tough. It’s not like a jail in the United States, which is like a hotel room compared to a jail back home. It’s not nice.”
Rodriguez does not like to think about the prison. He would rather explain how Urbina’s pitching inspired him as a young boy in Caracas and how, despite his own impressive major league résumé, including the major league record for saves in a single season, he considers Urbina the greatest Venezuelan closer.
“Regardless of what he did, I love the guy,” Rodriguez said. “He was my favorite, he was my idol.”
A tall, slender, remarkably-composed youth who still wears a retainer, Juan Urbina grew up in Venezuela living for the most part with his mother, who was separated from his father.
He saw his father pitch only on television and does not visit him in prison, by his father’s request. But he said he spoke with him every day by phone, and he knew his father was reassured that Rodriguez was looking out for him.
With his noticeably effortless delivery, Juan Urbina took the mound Wednesday in a low-minor league game against St. Louis and threw a fastball that was consistently clocked at 90 miles per hour. As he learns his craft and adds weight, Urbina should add velocity, too, but there is plenty of time for that. For now, rookie ball awaits and then, the Mets hope, a quick climb up the minor league ladder.
“It’s exciting to see a young, left-handed pitcher who throws like that,” the Mets senior adviser Guy Conti said. “He’s got a lot of upside.”
Urbina’s teammates and coaches, some of whom know his father, have asked how his dad is faring. His father’s situation is obviously difficult, he tells them, but he is managing, and he relays chatter from Venezuela that his father may be released as soon as this year. Meanwhile, he accepts no pity.
“I don’t think it’s so different for me,” he said. “I look around and I see a lot of guys here from Latin America and they don’t have their dads around, either. So it’s the same. We just focus on learning baseball.”
With, of course, some determined help from Francisco Rodriguez. |
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