“When you come here and play these guys, runs are going to be at a premium,” Boone said. “They're very good at run prevention. They have a lot of quality arms and they match up really well, so they make it difficult.”
Last licks
Gleyber Torres made a terrific defensive play in the ninth, throwing to third base on a fielder’s-choice grounder to cut down Brosseau for the first out.
The impact of that play was reduced Aaron Judge Jersey, however, when Britton threw a wild pitch past catcher Gary Sánchez and issued a walk to Margot. Britton absolved Sánchez for the wild pitch, saying that “not many guys are going to block that ball,” and instead lamented the sinker that Perez lined into right field.
“I was a pitch away,” Britton said. “If I execute that pitch, I think we get back into the dugout. Then maybe I’d kind of settle down and go back out for another [inning]. I just didn't execute many pitches today. It was frustrating. We wanted to split that series.” It would be poetic, but also unfortunately something of a lie, to say that the first thing you notice about Jasson Dominguez is the line of braces across his toothy grin. Your eyes actually go to his shoulders, somehow wider and broader every time you blink. Then to his biceps, which all but tear through his too-small large shirt. You look at his body, and you see a guy who has never once skipped arm day, whose thighs are as big as midsize sedans.
There’s interesting and there’s remarkable, and Dominguez’s physique is certainly the latter.
And yet, the braces. How perfectly -- metaphorically and literally -- they paint the full picture of this muscular ball of clay, ostensibly starting out on a journey that is, in reality, entering the fourth phase of the Dominican Republic baseball life cycle. He got the braces put on last November, a few months after Dominguez became the Yankees’ $5.1 Million Man (or $5.1 Million Martian, if you prefer nicknames). The braces speak volumes, as does the way he half-spins in the swiveling office chair throughout an hourlong conversation just a few weeks before his 17th birthday.
If Dominguez were in the United State Alex Rodriguez Jersey, he’d be a kid. He would be thinking about getting his driver’s license, maybe picking out a car. It’s reasonable to think that he’d have the same full set of orthodontia. He’d be doing teenager things, while also planning for a future that was bright, but still off in the distance. Admittedly, it’s a bit hard to separate the Jasson Dominguez that your brain thinks should exist from the one who’s sitting before you. The muscles deceive you into thinking that this is a player ready for The Show; the braces pull you back.
And about that reality. … Dominguez is a kid who earned a grown-up paycheck to play a kids’ game. Is that oversimplified, even culturally insensitive, ignoring the realities of the island’s hard life? Perhaps. No doubt, Dominguez’s youth has had more of a professional side than most kids.
“I feel like I have a certain level of maturity,” he says, with Héctor González, the Yankees’ coordinator of cultural development, translating. “It’s probably above average of other kids my age. Since I was a little kid, I feel like I was a little more stable than the majority of the kids my age.”
Excelling as a catcher, a shortstop and an outfielder Aroldis Chapman Jersey, Dominguez has been part of the Dominican baseball machine since age 8, working with different academies before he signed on with noted buscone Ivan Noboa at age 13. All of that was to prepare him for the day -- July 2, 2019 -- when the then–16-year-old would be eligible to sign with a Major League organization. For 16 years, Jasson Dominguez was in the Jasson Dominguez business, and he cashed out with the largest July 2 deal ever offered by the Yankees. On July 3, he was one day older, but $5.1 million richer, and ready to hit a lucrative and exciting, but metaphysically awkward, reset button. Jasson Dominguez, LLC, had ceased operations, merging with the New York Yankees of American professional baseball.
Now that the contract details were done, Dominguez, like so many high school-age kids, could work on perfecting his smile. As for the $5.1 Million Man’s baseball game? His new partners will take care of that -- just on a radically different timetable from what he had ever known.
It’s funny to hear Dominguez talk about the path that led to the July 2 day that changed everything Bernie Williams Jersey. His voice is sing-songy throughout, a roller coaster of acoustic tones. The grin is earned. Real. He was a kid, like any kid, he says, and he sometimes needed a push or a kick to get in gear.
“Especially when I was younger,” he says, stopping himself short to ward off the incredulous response. “I know, I’m still young.
“But when I was younger, sometimes, you would hear so many things that you would just start believing them. And your ego would start to make you think that you were the big man, the big elephant in the room. And that’s when my parents or Ivan would pull me up and yell at me.”
When he signed on with the academy at 13 years old, Dominguez and Noboa made bets on each other. Dominguez saw Noboa’s track record, the Major Leaguers that he had produced, including Nomar Mazara, who earned a then-record $5 million bonus from the Rangers in 2011. He was willing to commit a percentage of his future earnings in exchange for years of training from Noboa and his team of instructors. On the other side, Noboa saw the same things that American teams’ scouts would notice over the next few years. A work ethic and an attitude that, when combined with a body that was advanced far beyond most kids his age, projected to something special enough to be worth one of the three or four spots available at the academy in any given year.
“He wasn’t fully developed,” Noboa says, with González translating. “You could see that he had the hitting ability, but he didn’t have the power. And he was only like 5-foot-4 when I first met him. You could project him, guess that he was going to develop into what he did, obviously with time and work.”
Dominguez would wake up between 5 a.m. and 6 a.m. every day and begin his brutal routine. Mornings were for defense and conditioning, then batting practice before lunch. After some time cleaning the house and a quick nap, he’d head to the gym around 2 p.m. for a full workout Brett Gardner Jersey. Sometimes he’d add in a second afternoon hitting session. School? That was on Saturday.
Within a year or so, Dominguez was racing toward the top of the class, drawing all kinds of attention around the island. Every team was sending scouts.
“You knew,” Noboa says. “There were rumors that he was so good, and that in his class, he was separating himself. The tools that he had were very special. So, we knew that he could project to break a record for Latin American players.
“When you have a talent like that, it’s like once every 20 years. Everyone is going to show interest.”
Donny Rowland runs the Yankees’ international scouting department, and -- in concert with the player development staff in Tampa and the executives in New York -- he carries out the team’s strategy when the league-wide international signing window opens on July 2. These deals -- especially the record-setting marks such as what the Yankees gave Dominguez -- don’t happen in a vacuum. They’re dependent on finding a match between what different teams have available to them, a complex calculation based in part on the amount the team spent in recent years, the team’s record on the field and any international money acquired in trades. And as with any transactions involving 16-year-old kids, a healthy understanding of risk management. As the calendar kept racing toward July 2, 2019, Dominguez was the ultimate prize, the guy everyone wanted. The Yankees, thanks to careful planning and some good fortune, had the resources to match the moment.
Rowland had been getting reports on Dominguez from his lieutenants, Juan Rosario and Edgar Mateo, and the league scuttlebutt was hardly quiet. You didn’t have to be the type of person attuned to the swell of international prospects to pick up on the growing notoriety. When major news outlets started writing about the young Dominican kid who evoked images of Mike Trout and Mickey Mantle, “The Martian” began to permeate the mainstream.
It would seem impossible for a player to match that kind of hype, but this kid was the real thing.
“The first time I saw him, it was evident,” Rowland says. “He’s the kind of player that makes the hair on your arm stand up when you watch him.”
The Yankees had the money in 2019, but they also had fate on their side. Jasson’s father, Félix, had always told Noboa that if the Yankees were in the conversation, then that was the ideal destination. It was something Jasson had been born into, an unimaginable coincidence spanning more than 1,000 miles. As he grew up, Jasson remembers watching Yankees-Red Sox games with his dad, who was constantly looking for work as a day laborer back home in Esperanza, near Santiago on the north part of the island. They would go to a grocery store and watch the games on TV whenever possible. But the bond began even earlier than that.
“When Jasson’s mom was pregnant,” Noboa says, “and Jason Giambi hit a home run in the playoffs, Jasson’s dad put his hand on his wife’s belly and said, ‘This kid’s name is going to be Jasson.’ So Jasson has been a Yankees fan since before he was even born.”
Finally, on July 2, all of the work that Dominguez had put in since he was the age of your typical third grader paid off. The Yankees had never given an international prospect such a big bonus, and for the entire Dominguez family, life stopped and then restarted.
“On July 1, it was only rumors,” Jasson says some six months later. “Nothing was a fact. July 3, it was a fact. … I had a goal, I worked for my goal, I reached my goal. But that’s in the past. I need to set up new goals.
“But also, I was thinking, ‘This is the time. I’m here. I’m doing it.’ And I felt like I had proved to other people that might have their doubts that I could do the things that I knew that I could do.”
Life’s doors open and close all the time, sometimes predictably, sometimes not. Rarely, though, does one phase so quickly and decisively shift to another.
A t the Yankees’ Latin Béisbol Academy outside of Boca Chica, the retired numbers are the first thing you see when you head to the field. You walk out and get smacked in the face by Casey Stengel’s 37. Look left, and there, in a line, you find Gehrig, Ruth, DiMaggio and Mantle. To the right, Bill Dickey, Yogi, Whitey and Thurman. No pressure.