FORTUNATE SON

CARLOS PENA STEPS UP.

By Gary Libman

Late in the afternoon of a cloudless 101-degree June day, Carlos Pena steps into the cage for batting practice. He wears black shorts and a white T-shirt, just like his teammates, the triple-A Sacramento River Cats.

As the Raley Field loudspeakers blare rock and roll, the visiting Las Vegas players, already dressed in their uniforms and stretching in the right-field corner, look over to watch the lefthander hit.

He stands with his bat parallel to the ground, slightly above his shoulder. Then, as the pitch comes, he cocks the bat until it’s almost perpendicular to the turf, and swings.

Spectators are usually impressed. “He puts on a show every day,” says Sacramento hitting coach Roy White, who played fifteen seasons with the New York Yankees. “He hits balls hard and for distance.”

But Pena isn’t pulverizing the ball today, doesn’t hit anything that looks destined for the downtown skyline perched a few blocks beyond right field. After the practice is over, he and the other Sacramento players retreat from the homey, nearly empty stadium to await the evening’s game in the comfort of their air-conditioned clubhouse.

Truth be told, Pena wouldn’t be facing a summer of torrid Sacramento heat if he were hitting the ball like he usually does. Called to the majors last September by the Texas Rangers—where he performed well during the waning days of the 2001 season—the first baseman and former Northeastern star was traded during the off-season to Oakland. Many there hoped he might prove a worthy heir to recently departed superstar Jason Giambi.

Though Pena showed promise and poise in his early weeks with the A’s, in his last 40 at-bats he connected for only 4 hits, plunging his average to .218. On May 21, four days after his twenty-fourth birthday, Oakland demoted him to their minor league team in the California capital.

Yet the Pena reenactment of the American dream seems not to stay in low gear for long. On July 7, after six weeks with the River Cats, Pena was traded to the Detroit Tigers. By early August, his average with the Tigers was .291.

He was back in the show.


The breaks of the game

Pena views the Detroit trade as another step in a journey he never expected to be easy, because he believes hard work paves the roads that lead to fulfillment.

His milestones so far have been impressive. At fourteen, moved with his family from the Dominican Republic to Haverhill, Massachusetts. Starred at first base for Northeastern while maintaining a 3.3 grade point average in engineering.

In 1998, his junior year at NU, drafted by the Texas Rangers in the first round. Signed a reported $1.85 million bonus contract. Went to Oakland in 2002, heralded as the next Giambi. During his 43-game stint with Sacramento, compiled a .240 average along with 10 home runs, 33 RBIs, and 30 runs scored.

A few weeks before Pena left for Detroit, a visitor to the Sacramento clubhouse catches the smiling 6-foot-2, 210-pounder finishing a plate of fruit and a Twinkie. “Good to meet you. Sit down right here,” he says, clearing a bat and a cap off a chair. “Would you like anything to drink?” He hunts down a cup of water.

Talking over the noise of the Detroit-Minnesota game playing on a television directly above his locker, Pena expresses confidence in his athletic ability. But he knows succeeding in the majors will require something else: consistency.

“I think most of that comes from the mind,” he says. “Learning how to focus without becoming mentally exhausted is incredibly important. To see the ball and slow the pitch down, I have to be mentally relaxed. When your mind is going a hundred miles per hour, the ball looks like a pea.”

Not that improving technique is solely a question of mind over matter. “You work on your swing every day, so it’s almost like muscle memory,” he says.

Having spent four years in the minors before joining Texas, Pena says he “wasn’t totally surprised” by his demotion from the then-slumping A’s.

“When they called me in,” he says, “I didn’t waste too much time asking too many questions, or saying, ‘Why are you doing this?’ or feeling sorry for myself. Self-pity is one of the worst diseases known to man. I said, ‘Okay, who do I talk to so we can get going?’ The next morning, I was flying out.”

It was, Pena says, just “another learning experience and another obstacle to be overcome. It’s the way things have been my whole career. It’s taken time for me to earn my respect. I didn’t expect the big leagues to come easier.”

The uncomplaining reaction pleased his teammates. “I think he accepted it like a man,” says Oakland outfielder and designated hitter David Justice, a thirteen-year major league veteran who’s played in six World Series.

Oakland hitting coach Thad Bosley explains that Pena showed considerable “upside” early in the year, hitting 7 home runs and knocking in 16 runs in April, earning the American League Rookie of the Month nod.

But after destroying fastballs on the inside of the plate, he ran into trouble when teams started throwing fastballs away.

“That’s what happens to a lot of young players in the major leagues,” Bosley says. “It’s not a lack of athletic ability. It’s being able to hit pitches in the strike zone consistently. Every good player who’s ever been here has had to make adjustments, because the game changes too much. Pitchers adjust to hitters all the time. If you can’t adjust to pitchers, you’re not going to succeed.”

The A’s also thought the media’s tendency to compare Pena with Giambi, the American League Most Valuable Player in 2000 and one of baseball’s most feared hitters, might have hurt the rookie. Giambi had been Oakland’s first baseman until, as a free agent, he joined the Yankees in December 2001. A month later, the A’s acquired Pena to take over at first.


Fields of dreams

Now the Detroit trade offers Pena a chance to lose the Giambi comparisons and make a fresh start, not unlike the one he and his family established when they arrived in Haverhill in 1992.

Before they moved to America, the Penas lived in a four-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bath house in an upscale neighborhood in Santo Domingo, the Dominican Republic’s capital. Pena’s father, Felipe, worked as an engineer. His mother, Juana, taught school.

After Felipe recognized Carlos’s aptitude for baseball, he organized pitching sessions.

“I would throw an orange, a mango, any ball we could make from paper, whatever we had in hand,” Felipe says. “Sometimes my wife complained if Carlos hit a line drive that crashed against a picture on the wall.”

As they thought about the future, Felipe and Juana decided the possibilities for launching a baseball career—or helping their three sons and a daughter realize any other dream—would be greater if the family lived in the United States.

And so, after waiting nine years for a visa, the Penas left home and lifestyle behind for a two-bedroom apartment in Haverhill. To support the family, Felipe manufactured prefabricated cabinets at a metal mechanical company. Juana worked in a nursing home.

Meanwhile, the children experienced what Carlos calls “cultural shock.” Though he understood some English, he says, “you can’t get it from a book. You have to go out and practice how sentences are formed and words are used.” Lacking English skills, he had trouble understanding class assignments in school.

Even leisure time was a challenge. “In the Dominican Republic,” he says, “we could play outside every day and run all over the streets because it was safe. But when we got up here, my father wanted us to be careful. We couldn’t just run around freely because it could be dangerous.”

Pena worked hard, picked up the language quickly, and started flourishing in school. “My parents stressed the importance of education,” he says. In fact, they told him if he didn’t do well academically, he wouldn’t be allowed to play baseball.

Father and sons found a place to hone baseball skills year-round—the local YMCA. They’d hang a mattress against a wall and hit balls into it. Sometimes Felipe would pitch batting practice on a racquetball court, standing behind two nets he’d hang for protection against line drives.

In the fall of Carlos’s sophomore year, Felipe introduced his son to Haverhill High School baseball coach Chip Dunn. “It was way before the season,” Dunn says, “but you could tell he was very interested in playing.”

Once the season started, Dunn says, “Carlos worked really hard on his defense. He’s one of those kids who would ask me or my assistant, ‘Hey, can you stay after practice and hit some grounders?’ whereas all the other kids would say, ‘Hey, let’s get out of here.’

“We had a senior first baseman when Carlos was coming in,” Dunn remembers. “Carlos started doing his thing in preseason scrimmages, and you could see he had to play at first base. He flat out, fair and square beat the guy. Then, in the middle of his junior year, you could tell he was going to be a player. I didn’t know if he’d be a big-league player, but I knew there was a distinct possibility he would play major college baseball.”

In his junior and senior years, Pena helped Haverhill return to the state tournament they’d been shut out from for fifty years. Even so, he didn’t get a lot of attention from college coaches.

Undeterred, Pena sent out a hundred letters to universities to pique their interest in his abilities. He ended up at Wright State University, in Dayton, Ohio, where he hit .247. But he missed being close to home, and transferred to Northeastern before his sophomore season.

“As soon as Carlos arrived, you could see that he had grown dramatically,” says NU baseball coach Neil McPhee, who had watched Pena play high school ball. “He had a classic swing as a left-handed power hitter, and his defensive play was absolutely outstanding.

“We knew we were getting a potentially outstanding college player,” McPhee says. “But did we know we were getting a number-one draft pick? In no way did we know that.”

Pena hit .309 for Northeastern that first year, then spent a summer in the Cape Cod League. “He had a breakout summer against the top-level college talent in the country,” McPhee says. “That’s when his value rose dramatically.”

He came back to Northeastern for his junior year, hit .342, and the Rangers came calling.

Pena became only the second Husky to make it to the major leagues. George Yankowski, BA’47, was the first, racking up just 18 games with the 1942 Philadelphia Athletics and the 1949 Chicago White Sox.


Talking books

As Pena worked on his baseball skills during college, he refused to ignore academics. He was determined to extract all he could from Northeastern’s learning opportunities, including completing a research co-op in an optical science lab.

“College has all the resources; students choose to take advantage or not,” says Pena. “The message I relate to my siblings is, ‘Try to strain everything out of school. Remember, you’re doing it for yourself, not the school.’”

“It’s unusual in an engineering program to have a student say, ‘I need to take the afternoon off—I’m being interviewed by the Texas Rangers,’” says associate professor of electrical and computer engineering Chuck DiMarzio. “I was impressed that, even though it was becoming obvious he was going to have a major league baseball career, he was very serious about soaking up the knowledge I could give him.”

Pena might have left NU before completing his degree, but the learning hasn’t stopped. He is teaching himself Italian, and he loves frequenting bookstores.

“I feel like if I’m not reading, I’m wasting my time,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle. “Now bookstores are my favorite places. You have no idea how much I enjoy sitting down with a book and a mocha in one of those comfortable chairs. It’s so nice and peaceful.

“When I’m in a bookstore, I think every book is talking to me. All of those great minds, all of those points of view.”

Though he appreciated the academic and cultural opportunities at Northeastern, Pena is particularly quick to remember the time he spent with his teammates. “I’m talking about how close we got,” he says, “working together, playing together, studying together.”

“His relationship with his teammates is essentially the same as with any person he comes into contact with,” says McPhee. “He’s one of the warmest, most sincere people you can meet. You feel like you’re a close friend within five or ten minutes of talking with him.”

The entire Pena clan seems to be disproving legendary baseball manager Leo Durocher’s famous adage: Sometimes nice guys do finish first.

With a $9,000 down payment from Carlos, the family has bought a two-bedroom condominium. Juana is a full-time teacher again. Felipe has earned a master’s degree in business management and hopes someday to publish his thesis. The subject? How college players can stay eligible while being pursued by prospective agents and major league scouts.

The other Pena children are thriving, too. Both Pedro, twenty-one, and Omar, twenty, followed their big brother to Northeastern. Pedro, a biochemistry major, played outfield for NU before transferring to Old Dominion University, in Norfolk, Virginia, last year.

Shortstop Omar, a senior majoring in architecture, has become a big-league prospect himself, according to McPhee.

And Omar’s twin sister, Femaris, is a senior studying communications at Boston College. An accomplished ballerina, she’s performed with the Ballet Theater of Boston and interned with the Boston Ballet.

When the A’s played the Red Sox in Boston in mid-May, the high-achieving siblings and proud parents, along with a vocal Northeastern contingent, convened to cheer the hometown hero in Fenway Park.


A Tiger’s tale

About seven weeks later came the announcement that Pena was going to Detroit, in a three-way deal that sent Yankee pitcher Ted Lilly to the A’s. Talking about the trade, Oakland general manager Billy Beane told the news service MLB.com that Pena had a bright future.

“I know the question is going to be, ‘Did you give up on Carlos?’” Beane said. “No—that’s not even close to the case. But every time you acquire a player of talent, you’re going to have to give up something.”

Detroit general manager Dave Dombrowski expressed pleasure with his end of the deal, telling the Detroit Free Press that Pena was “a very talented player, both on offense and defense.” (Coincidentally, the Tigers a month earlier had snatched up another Husky—junior Luke Carlin, a catcher—in the tenth round of the draft. Carlin has signed a contract to play with Detroit’s single-A team in Oneonta, New York.)

As luck would have it, Pena’s debut in a Tigers uniform happened in Fenway Park, where he punched out 3 hits in 4 at-bats and knocked in 2 runs, including the game winner, in a 9-8 victory over Boston.

“I look at this trade as something that can be positive for my career,” Pena told the Free Press after his inaugural performance. “Today was a good day, and I feel like I’m a Tiger now. But the way things have gone, I’m not going to take anything for granted.”

Will he make it? Many who have played alongside him have no doubt. “Everyone knows he’s extremely talented,” says pitcher Mike Venafro, the former Ranger traded with Pena to Oakland, now playing with Sacramento. “It’s just going to be a matter of time.”

Gary Libman is a freelance writer and teacher living in Los Angeles. He is a former Los Angeles Times reporter and Minneapolis Tribune sports editor.