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Any premature death is tragic, be it a former baseball phenom like Andy Marte, a 30 year old man trapped inside his Mississippi trailer home in yesterday’s tornadoes, a 23 year old Stradivarius of a pitcher named Jose Fernandez, or a 25 year old kid named Yordano Ventura.
Many of remember how distraught Ventura was when his close Dominican friend Oscar Tavares, a rising star with the Cardinals, died in an automobile accident back home in October, 2014, and how Ventura pitched one of his greatest games in a memorial to Tavares. Yordano often pitched at 78 RPM, sometimes too emotionally and reactive, but he was seemingly as good as he was blessed with an arm that touched 100 MPH and had won 38 regular season games and started nine more postseason games for Royals teams that won two straight pennants, made it to the 9th inning of Game Seven in one World Series and blew away the Mets the next October.
When the Royals pitchers and catchers arrive in Surprise, Arizona weeks from now, there will be somber reminders of the fragility of success, of comradery, of the shared competitive nature of their profession. There will be a huge weight on the shoulders of Salvador Perez, and Eric Hosmer and Chris Young, a weight that, fortunately, will be shared and modulated by two exceptional men named Dayton Moore and Ned Yost. Maybe they will talk to Mike Hill and Don Mattingly and Giancarlo Stanton about how they became the centrifugal forces binding the Marlins after Fernandez’s death, because there will be many players in Surprise who will be constantly reminded of what they shared with Ventura on days that weren’t so good, and one very special 2015 day that was the best.
Sometime in the next ten days, they will all begin thinking about how they fill Ventura’s role in a treacherous 2017 season, after which they could lose Hosmer, Mike Moustakas and other players to free agency, thus forcing a post-championship rebuilding process two years after that incredible parade in Kansas City. Moore got Danny Duffy signed away from joining that free agent group. They have Ian Kennedy, Jason Vargas, Nate Karns, Young. They have two big arms on the immediate horizon in Josh Starmont and lefthander Matt Straum, and it could be that Luke Farrell can step into the bullpen with one of them to make up for the trade of Wade Davis. Maybe Kyle Zimmer eventually bounces back from Thoracic Ougtlet Syndrom surgery.
Five or six weeks from now, they’ll begin that thought process.
Immediately, we should revisit the Royals era in which Ventura was so important. They won two pennants and a world series in one of the smallest markets in the sport. They set franchise attendance records. They shattered television ratings. They did it with defense, they did it with contact and baserunning, they did it with exceptional baseball instincts combined with intensity, best personified by Hosmer. They did it with dignity befitting the city they represented.
Recently there has been scattered criticism of Moore, stemming back to his 2015 pennant race trades and some drafts; Zimmer got hurt, Bubba Starling has yet to work out. But not only did trading for Ben Zobrist and Johnny Cueto—the types of players they never could have signed as free agents—cement their run to their first championship in the post-George Brett, post-John Schuerholz franchise era, but the way Moore handled those deals prompted Billy Beane to praise Moore “as one of the general managers with the most integrity with whom I’ve ever worked.”
At the time of the deadline deals, Moore said, “you don’t negotiate with proven winners like Walt Jocketty and Billy Beane without treating them with respect.” At the time, he told the Royals scouting and development people who’d worked so hard in his administration, “someday Sean Manea is going to come back to beat us. Sometime Brandon Finnegan and Cody Reed are going to come back and beat us. But this is our now, and we have to try to do whatever we can to make now our time.” Which he did.
Almost as much as he is focused on the 2017 season, Moore is focused on the opening of the state-of-the-art Baseball Academy that will open this spring, then be finished and up and running fully on August 1. It is different from the Kaufman Baseball Academy in Sarasota in the seventies. It is an urban academy, right near the Negro Leagues Museum in downtown Kansas City.
The Glass Family have invested $18.5M in the project, and through fundraising and additional family investment will likely double that this year, and contribute $500,000 over the next decade.
Moore is using his entire organization’s development and teaching staff. There will be full educational elements to prepare kids for whatever direction they take after high school, in most cases some sort of college education where they will also be prepared to play baseball if they choose. Immediately, there will be an after school program, as anyone who has worked with inner city non-profits knows that the hours between three and seven p.m. are critical to teenagers. There will be experts in life skills education, in counseling, in online and all technical teaching skills, and beginning in 2018 they will have teams playing in urban leagues.
Moore talks about “baseball as a social starting point.” His passion is reminiscent of Paul Epstein, Theo’s twin brother and one of the great social working leaders in Boston. “This matters says Moore. And somehow Yordano Ventura will be a part of this urban academy project, remembered as part of an organization that when it opens in May will be a center of immense pride to Rob Manfred, for whom with social responsibility is extremely important.
Maybe if Yordano Ventura hadn’t made it out of the Dominican Republic and become a notable pitcher who helped the Royals to those consecutive pennants and the pride they brought to Kansas City, there wouldn’t have been the impetus or funding for the academy.
So three or four years from now, when a kid from Kansas City is playing Fall baseball at some college, I’ll remember Ventura, that he is part of the reason this kid is off the streets and in college and be reminded that baseball’s annual average value can mean far, far more than a dollar sign on the muscle.
