The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com
October 9, 2010
New York Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter (2) congratulates second baseman Robinson Cano after defeating the Boston Red Sox 6-5 in game one of their MLB American League baseball doubleheader at Fenway Park in Boston, Massachusetts October 2, 2010. (Reuters)
The ninth-inning double play that drained the faith from the Target Field crowd Thursday night was scored 6-4-3, as routine as one gets. But far from Minneapolis, in a home on the north side of Newark, the mere television image of Robinson Cano stepping on second base and firing across his body to first immediately unleashed the sweetest of childhood memories.
“You’ll see, I’m going to be turning double plays with that guy someday,” Cano once told his cousin as they sat on the couch, watching the young Derek Jeter hang his imaginary shingle at shortstop in the old Yankee Stadium.
The 14-year-old prophecy was recalled by the cousin — a professional ballplayer in his own right, with a classic stage name, Burt Reynolds — and affirmed by Cano on Friday as the swaggering Yankees prepared for Game 3 of the American League division series against the Twins on Saturday night at Yankee Stadium.
“Yes, I said that,” Cano said, smiling sheepishly at his early teenage temerity. “It was an amazing time for me. Coming here, getting to see the Yankees play on TV every day. I still remember my first game at the Stadium, sitting way up there, the last row behind the plate. Darryl Strawberry hit, like, two homers.”
He could not remember the date or the opponent, but the record shows that Strawberry hit three home runs against the White Sox on Aug. 6, 1996. Details notwithstanding, that was when Cano, who until that summer had only a distant crush on the Yankees, became spellbound by Jeter, an admirer of Bernie Williams and convinced that New York was the only place in America to play major league ball.
Officially, Cano is a child of the Dominican Republic, from the ever-swelling San Pedro de Macorís fraternity of baseball-blessed emigrants. But his family’s decision to move him and his mother to Newark while his father played professional ball in Taiwan would seem to be destiny, or at least a case of impeccable timing.
Cano’s Jersey stay — he was a seventh grader when he arrived and enrolled at the Dr. William H. Horton School on North Seventh Street — just happened to coincide with the rise of a new Yankees dynasty and the coming of Jeter.
Jeter, also connected to New Jersey, by birth and residency until age 4, had a vision of playing for the Yankees like the man who became his double-play partner in 2005.
NEW YORK - OCTOBER 08: Robinson Cano warms up prior to game three, to take place on October 9, of the America League Division Series against the Minnesota Twins at Yankee Stadium on October 8, 2010 in the Bronx borough of New York City. The Yankees currently lead the series 2-0. (Getty Images)
In the Dominican Republic, Cano’s mother, Claribel Mercedes, and Reynolds’s mother, Amantina, always thought of each other as family, as sisters. “We were raised together, always did everything together,” Amantina Reynolds said.
But she moved to Newark after her children were born, settling into a house on North Ninth Street. The invitation to her sister — also Reynolds’s godmother — to join her was open-ended. Eventually, it made sense. The plan was hatched for Cano and his mother to move to the United States and for Jose Cano, Robinson’s father, to join them after the baseball season in Taiwan.
“When Robby’s father came, he always wanted to take us to the park to play baseball,” said Reynolds, who at 22 is five years younger than Cano. “He would say, ‘We’ll go play in about an hour.’ But when Robby came to Newark, he also liked playing basketball in the street. He’d say, ‘Let’s go hide,’ and we’d go in the backyard or under the bed. I just followed whatever he did.”
Cano finished eighth grade and enrolled at Barringer High School, but he failed to make it through his freshman year or to play an inning of high school baseball in New Jersey.
“He was having a lot of trouble,” Jose Cano said in a telephone interview from Puerto Rico. “They had fights, turf wars, Dominican kids against black kids, and he started to have all kinds of trouble.”
Jose Cano was alarmed by what he heard and saw, by the number of detentions his son piled up. Wanting him to play baseball, he was unhappy with what the game had become, a one-season pastime on the sandlots of Newark.
“Do you want to play baseball every day in the Dominican or go to school up here?” he said, loading the question to induce the desired answer from a 15-year-old.
Not long after that, when Reynolds left the house one weekday morning and walked by the tree where the cousins had carved their names, he glanced back at Cano lounging on the porch.
“You’re not going to school?” he said.
“Nah, my father’s sending me back to the Dominican,” Cano said.
Robinson Cano watches a solo home run against the Boston Red Sox during the third inning of game one of their MLB American League baseball doubleheader at Fenway Park in Boston, Massachusetts October 2, 2010. (Reuters)
With 20/20 hindsight, father and son agree that Robinson Cano might not have become an American League Most Valuable Player contender for his breakout 2010 season, his 29 home runs and 109 runs batted in. He might not have become Jeter’s double-play partner or even a major league ballplayer at all.
“No, I don’t think he would,” said Jose Cano, who made it to the majors as a pitcher for six games with the Astros in 1989. “He needed to play all the time. He needed to go home.”
Back in San Pedro de Macorís — a place major league scouts tend to frequent more than Newark — Cano was offered a six-figure bonus by the Yankees in 2001. Jose Cano was wary, uncertain the Yankees were the right fit.
“They always traded for veterans or signed free agents,” he said. “I was thinking that Robby might never get a chance.”
There was no talking the young man out of it, not after he had experienced a World Series run and felt the metropolitan area pulsate with Yankees pride after 18 championship-less seasons.
Cano climbed through the Yankees system, somehow avoiding being thrown into the deal for Alex Rodriguez, or others made or proposed. At this point, he and his cousin would insist it was fate.
“When I watch Robby on television I always think back to that day on the couch when he said he would play with Jeter,” Reynolds said. “It actually feels a little overwhelming that he did it. I guess it was just meant to be.”
With the proper incentive, Reynolds became a star at Bloomfield Tech High School and then a late-round draft pick of the Washington Nationals. He is now with the Tampa Bay organization. Having recently finished a season of Class A ball as an outfielder with Bowling Green (Ky.) in the Midwest League, he will await the end of the long Yankees season, and head down to the Dominican Republic with Cano for a winter of workouts and sun.
Before he goes, he will enjoy the family’s prominence.
“I’ll be around in Newark and someone will say, ‘This guy is Robinson Cano’s cousin,’ ” Reynolds said. “And I’ll say, ‘Yeah, he used to live upstairs in my house.’ ”
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