October 12, 2003

Boys Who Made Good, and One Who Made Great

anny Ramirez had just gotten his first hit of the American League Championship Series, an infield single, at Yankee Stadium. In the sweltering basement of a bodega in Washington Heights, eight men, some with the thickening midsections of former athletes moving toward middle age, burst into cheers. They watched on television as Ramirez, the Red Sox slugger, ran to first. They had seen it before.

"It's the same swing," said Carlos Puello.

"He's the same guy," said Nestor Payano.

They should know. Mr. Payano, 30, Mr. Puello, 31, and Joaquin Checo, 31, who was also in the basement, grew up playing ball with Manny Ramirez in Washington Heights, starting with the Alex Ferreira Little League.

Mr. Payano and Mr. Puello applauded Manny's home runs as his teammates on the winning George Washington High School Trojans. They were hungry for baseball, the game of the Dominican Republic, their homeland, and on weekends they rode the subway together to Brooklyn to play with a city Youth Services sandlot team. Mr. Checo, who played for the rival Kennedy High School, was also on the sandlot team.

By the spring of 1991, when dozens of major league scouts were showing up at their high school games to study Manny's quicksilver swing, his teammates knew he was headed for the big time. (That season the Trojans were the subject of a series in The New York Times.)

At the end of the season the Cleveland Indians drafted Manny, the son of a livery cab driver and a seamstress, right out of high school. His teammates celebrated what they considered his hard-earned, huge windfall: a $250,000 signing bonus.

These days, at 31, Manny is unimaginably rich and famous — his $160 million contract with the Red Sox makes him the second highest paid player in baseball. But the bond between him and the collection of cabdrivers, bread delivery men, hospital boiler room mechanics, driveway paving contractors, teachers and Army privates who were his teammates is still alive.

He visits them in the old neighborhood when the Red Sox are in town. Just a few weeks ago he rented a limousine so they could all ride around the city together.

Mr. Puello still talks about the time he was having trouble paying $1,200 in back rent on his apartment in the Bronx, and Manny told him: "No problem. Go to Western Union." And Mr. Puello said that when he goes to Boston, he stays at Manny's penthouse at the Ritz-Carlton.

His former teammates think of him as a member of their extended family, and his success reflects upon them all. "To see him up there, at least one of us from George Washington made it," said Alex Resto, 29, a former pitcher, who lives a few blocks from Manny's old sixth-floor walk-up on West 168th Street at Amsterdam Avenue. "Every time he goes up to bat, there's a part of Washington that's up there with him. Every time he hits a home run, it's like it's us, too."

Carlos Mencia, a second baseman for the Trojans, says his father tells everyone, "My son played with Manny Ramirez."

But Manny is no fantasy substitute for failed lives. His former teammates have their own successes, too: Jobs that pay $40,000 a year and more. Children they vow will go to college. (And sons they are teaching how to swing a bat.) Apartments in Washington Heights and the Bronx and, a few of them, homes in New Jersey.

"We're doing well — real well," said Mr. Payano, a George Washington High pitcher, who leaves his apartment in the Bronx at 5 a.m. to drive a bread truck.

In the basement of the bodega, a 19-inch color television was wedged on a shelf between stacks of cans of evaporated coconut milk and beans, and bags of rice. Mr. Payano, Mr. Puello, Mr. Checo and the other fans sat on plastic milk crates.

The sports media, and the Boston fans, may see Manny as standoffish and arrogant. But his former teammates, who know him, say Manny is simply shy, and worried he'll say something stupid in public.

"Manny used to hit three for three in the games," said Mr. Payano, who at 31 has grown into the role of neighborhood leader. "He'd come back to the block, and people would say, `What you did?' He'd say, `I didn't do nothing.'

"That's why I love that kid so much," he went on, leaning forward on his milk crate. "He never brags. Plus, he works hard." All of Manny's former teammates, and his high school coach, Steve Mandl, constantly talk about his work ethic.

These days Mr. Payano cannot throw a ball without searing pain in his left shoulder. He dislocated it playing years ago, and surgery has not helped. He stays in the game by coaching a neighborhood men's softball team.

Mr. Puello, Mr. Checo, Jose Corsino and other players from high school all play for the team. Calling themselves the Trojans, after their old high school team, they have won the city championship twice. Manny bought them uniforms, Mr. Payano said, and went with them when they traveled to Puerto Rico two years ago. They will play today for this year's city championship.

"You know what my dream is now?" Mr. Payano said. "I want to be a scout. I want to look for talent in this area."

These days he has his eye on two up-and-coming young ballplayers from the neighborhood, 17-year-old Felipe Mendez, a shortstop for this year's George Washington team, and 15-year-old Frank Pol, who pitches for the team.

Mr. Payano gestured to one of the other fans in the basement. "Where's Felipe?"

Moments later, a skinny six-footer with curly brown hair bounded down the flight of broken stairs from the street.

"He hits the ball with a lot of power," Mr. Payano said, looking at Felipe. "I sent him to Mandl." Steve Mandl, 49, still coaches the high school team — he has high hopes for them this year — and stays in touch with his former players.

When they were in high school, Mr. Payano and Manny's other teammates had their own major league dreams. "The scouts told me they were going to put me in the draft," said Mr. Puello, who holds down the 4 p.m. to midnight shift in the boiler room at Columbia-Presbyterian Center of New York Presbyterian Hospital, and was on his lunch break. "I thought I was gonna do all right. They never draft me. You've got to move on. Not everybody can make it."

Now, Mr. Puello's dreams of upward mobility are more realistic — a refrigeration mechanic's license. "Once I get that," he said, "I'll be set."

It was the fifth inning, and Manny was at bat. The basement of the bodega was quiet as everyone focused on the television. Manny clobbered the ball over the right field wall. His former teammates jumped to their feet, clapping their hands and hollering in Spanish.

It was the same for Manny's home runs back in high school. Back then, Mr. Mandl would drum into them that even if they didn't make it to the big leagues, baseball was still something to hold on to. The game was a way around the drug dealers who controlled the street corners at the time. Go to school and play ball, the coach would tell his team. He urged them to accept baseball scholarships to junior colleges.

College recruiters came to George Washington to see Manny, and ended up talking to the other players. "We owe it all to him," said Adrian Oviedo, catcher, who won a scholarship to Brown Mackie, a junior college in Kansas.

Even though he left Brown Mackie after eight months, feeling isolated and homesick, Mr. Oviedo, 30, looks back on it as a growing experience. Eventually, he earned an undergraduate degree in education at the C. W. Post campus of Long Island University and a master's from Mercy College. He teaches special education at a junior high school in Washington Heights.

Hours before the first game of the playoff series, Mr. Mandl, the coach, was in his basement office at George Washington High School, counseling his brash star catcher, Angel Salome, to go to math class. On the wall, towering over the pictures of Sandy Koufax, Bob Dylan, and the George Washington teams for the past 20 years, was a six-foot-tall poster of Manny in his Cleveland Indians uniform. Manny, who never graduated from high school, had signed it: "George Washington — stay in school."

"I'm proud of all of them," Coach Mandl said, talking about the scores of players he has coached over the years. And now, Manny's teammates realize that the coach was right. "It's not all about making it to the major leagues," Mr. Payano said, watching as the Red Sox went on to victory in their first game. "It's about staying out of trouble and having a future."