A Life In Baseball

Two years later, his family followed him to Corona, Queens, and from the moment Omar Minaya arrived, sports—pick-up basketball games in the neighborhood schoolyard, touch football games in Corona Park, and plenty of stickball—became a central part of his life. Sports provided friendships and, just as important for a kid growing up on the streets of New York, a means of staying out of trouble.

But of all the sports he loved to play, it was baseball that gave Minaya the fever. It started in Little League when he played in the shadow of Shea Stadium, emulating his baseball heroes such as Roberto Clemente, Willie Mays and Juan Marichal, but it wasn't until Minaya reached Newton High School in Elmhurst, Queens, that his dream of becoming a professional baseball player seemed attainable. "I had developed physically by the time I was a freshman," Minaya remembers, "and it was then that I started to separate myself from the group in terms of ability. By my junior year, I realized that I had a chance to be a player."

During his senior year, with scouts already showing an interest, Minaya excelled. As a catcher, he batted .489 and was awarded all-city and all-state honors, achievements that would get him elected to Newton High's Hall of Fame this past April. For the schoolboy standout, the questions then became whether he would be drafted and signed or attend college. The answer came during the 1978 amateur entry draft when the Oakland Athletics selected him in the 14th round, 342nd overall. "It was a big deal for me," Minaya recalls. "I was chasing a dream."

After graduating from high school, Minaya reported to Bend, Oregon, to play outfield with the Bend Timber Hawks, a short-season A-ball team in the Northwest League. "Coming from New York, it was a different world," Minaya says. As much as he missed New York, he did not welcome his release during the 1979 spring training after one year with the organization. "It was a traumatic experience for a 20-year-old kid who had set his sights and dreams on being a major leaguer," he says. "It was very difficult to accept. You feel like a failure."

Following his release, Minaya returned to New York, working odd jobs. But soon the Seattle Mariners picked up the young outfielder. After a spell in Wisconsin with the Wausau Timbers of the Midwest League, Minaya was again released. This time the writing was on the wall. "When I was released from Seattle," Minaya recalls, "something in the back of my mind told me that you just have to accept the fact that you're just not good enough. That it just wasn't meant to be."

Minaya's playing career wasn't over yet, however. Shortly after his release, an offer came to play in Italy's professional league. Before he knew it, Minaya was living in the seaside Tuscan town of Castiglione della Pescaia, practicing during the week and playing games on weekends. As well as prolonging his career, Minaya found the cultural experience unforgettable. "Those were wonderful years for me," he says. "I was able to learn about a different culture, about food and wine, and I was able to open my mind to a lot of different opinions and situations."

Today, Minaya's experience in Italy holds special relevance considering the globalization of baseball. "I'm a firm believer that God has a plan for all of us," Minaya reflects, "and I think He was just setting things up so I could be where I am today. He prepared the table. If you're in baseball today—or in any sort of leadership position—you have to have a global vision. That experience in Europe really helped me in what became my baseball career later on."

But that "baseball career later on" almost didn't happen. After two years in Italy, Minaya didn't feel the same about playing the game. He was 25 years old and said to himself, "It's time to go out there and do something besides play baseball." But what was that? "I was geared toward the business world, sales and making money," he says, "but I really didn't know what I wanted to do. I was willing to experiment with anything. I just wanted to be creative and I wanted to be something different."

But leaving baseball wasn't easy for a man who believes that Dominicans are born with the game in their blood. Not long after he arrived back in New York, Minaya received a phone call from Ralph DiLullo, the scout who had signed him to his minor-league contract with the Athletics, asking him if he was interested in coaching and scouting. For Minaya, coaching was a no-brainer, but scouting? That was for old men. Still, DiLullo was persistent, convincing Minaya that he had the skills to be a successful scout. "I think he saw me as a person who was going to have an opinion and wasn't going to be afraid to voice that opinion," says Minaya. "I think he saw my work ethic and an ability to project for the long term, which you need as a scout. I think he also saw I was aggressive."

After interviewing with several clubs, Minaya was offered a job with the Major League Scouting Bureau. At the same time his name was recommended to Sandy Johnson, the scouting director for the Texas Rangers. Recognizing the asset in Minaya's ability to speak two languages, Johnson hired him in 1985 as an amateur scout for the Rangers and immediately sent him to the Dominican Republic, Venezuela and Puerto Rico. During the summer, Minaya also coached for the team's affiliate in Florida's Gulf Coast League.

"He had all the things you look for in a young guy," says Johnson, who is now the vice president of scouting for the Mets. "I gave him the opportunity and he took the ball and ran with it. He was a hard worker. He could handle a lot of situations and could communicate with people, from the owners of the Latin American ball clubs where I sent him, right down to the batboys. He had a way about him and you knew he was something special. He was aggressive and he took a lot of pride in representing the organization."

Despite Minaya's early reticence about scouting, he soon caught the bug. "It's the chase" that is so alluring about scouting, he says. "Every morning you wake up and you're looking for that diamond in the rough. You wake up and you have to have that drive to go out and find that guy. I still have that drive today. I'm always trying to improve the Mets. Always looking for opportunities to make this team better."

Hard work and the ability to visualize what a player is going to be in a couple of years are the keys to scouting, he says. You also have to be hard-nosed. "Scouting is a tough business," he says. "It's a failure business and you have to be thick-skinned." Not that Minaya tasted much failure with the Rangers. During his first year, while coaching in Florida, he was tipped off about a 16-year-old Dominican prospect working out at the Toronto Blue Jays spring training complex in Santo Domingo, in the Dominican Republic. After watching the prospect, Minaya was so impressed that he invited him to a tryout with the Rangers and soon after signed him to a contract. That player was the formidable slugger Sammy Sosa.

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