Sam the Man

Andy Pages's father is a carpenter in Cuba. His main job was fixing up boats. He had friends who worked with wood, and they would give him lumber, and he would make his son baseball bats. That is where the bats came from. A man in a shop, making them by hand, out of whatever his friends could spare. Tonight that son drove in the two runs that put the Los Angeles Dodgers in the National League Championship Series. Here is the distance between those two sentences. Pages grew up in Cuba playing soccer and basketball and baseball. He was one of the most recognized young players on the island and he never played a game in the Cuban National Series. At 16 he told his family he was going to the Dominican Republic to try to get a contract with a Major League organization. Here is what he says about telling his father. "When I left Cuba, from the moment I told him I was leaving, he just started crying." "It was the first time I ever saw him cry." Then he went eight months without anybody signing him. Scouts told him he did not have the speed to play the outfield in the major leagues. After the Dodgers finally signed him, people questioned his weight. He did not go back to Cuba for about seven years. When he finally did, he brought something with him. "When I went back to Cuba, I took him a few of my bats." The man who carved his first bats out of scrap got handed the real ones. Now here is the part that is still true today. Nobody in his family except his wife has ever watched him play in person. Not one game. Major League games are not broadcast in Cuba. So his parents and his 18 year old sister follow his career through box scores and clips on YouTube. Phone calls frequently do not go through. When his parents do get through, it is usually around midnight where he lives, and he is asleep. Bad storms knock out the lines and he can go days without hearing anything from home. In July he made the All-Star team and could not reach his parents to tell them. He said he was not sure they knew. This is how he describes it. "Anything can happen to me in a game, and it won't be harder than all of that." The thing he says gives him the most joy is not the All-Star team. It is that people walk up to his parents in Cuba just to tell them how well their son is doing. Tonight, in Atlanta, Andy Pages went 2 for 3 and drove in two runs in the seventh inning to break a tie against the Atlanta Braves. The Dodgers won 4 to 1 and the series with it. Somewhere in Cuba tonight, a carpenter is going to find out what his kid did from a box score.