http://fredericksburg.com/News/FLS/2006/122006/12202006/245103


PHENOM'SPRESENT IS NATS' FUTURE Much rides on progress of Esmailyn Gonzalez


12/20/2006
By TODD JACOBSON



IZARRETE, Dominican Republic--Esmailyn Gonzalez drives his gleaming white
Cadillac Escalade through the narrow and pock-marked streets of Pizarrete,
stopping often. He is 16 years old, he is almost a millionaire, and he's a
celebrity.

Townspeople wave from storefront bars and fruit stands, approaching the
driver's side window to offer handshakes and greetings. He picks up one woman
and gives her a ride to the bus stop.

And when he pulls into the small plot of land on the edge of sugar cane
fields that has served as home for the last 16 years, his sport utility
vehicle sticks out like a bulldozer in a cornfield.

Gonzalez's family emerges from a humble house to greet him and his visitors.
His house is a three-room concrete structure patched together with corrugated
metal and wood planks.

Laundry sits in buckets near an outdoor wash basin and a relative tends to a
pot cooking on an open fire. Chickens and ducks scurry across the dusty
ground. In Gonzalez's room inside the house there is a stereo, a bed and a
chair--and not much else.

This is home for the Nationals' top Dominican prospect, a switch-hitting
shortstop wooed during the summer with a $1.4 million signing bonus.

For now.

Several miles down the road, workers have started to put tile in the rooms of
Gonzalez's new home, the one he began building for his parents, four sisters
and brother almost immediately after he cashed his signing bonus check.

He also bought the white Escalade--but the house came first.

The concrete structure will have two floors, four bedrooms, two bathrooms and
a garage. It cost about 2 million Dominican pesos, or roughly $70,000.

"This is better for my family," Gonzalez says through a translator while
chewing on a piece of sugar cane plucked from the fields a drag bunt from his
home. "When I get to the major leagues, I'll buy a house of my own."

Like Gonzaelez, thousands of young boys play baseball in the Dominican
Republic, plying their trades in front of a complicated web of coaches,
unregulated agents and major league teams.

Each player dreams of a life-changing signing bonus and a career in the big
leagues.

Gonzalez is the end product for all three competitors in this competitive
player chase, a prospect who thus far has made it.

To the Nationals, Gonzalez represents a rebirth of the franchise's
international scouting presence. His signing, ballyhooed this summer at an
RFK Stadium press conference with Gonzalez's $1.4 million signing bonus near
the top of a team-issued press release, was as symbolic as it was practical,
though Gonzalez has not disappointed on the field.

To Basilio Vizcaino, one of thousands of unregulated "buscones ," or finders,
that search the Dominican Republic for players, train them and show them to
major league teams to earn large cuts of their bonuses, Gonzalez is the
ultimate meal ticket.

For Gonzalez, the signing bonus is a way to finally help his family, to not
have to patch holes in the roof of his family's home during rainstorms or
worry when windstorms sweep through the region.

When asked if he was proud to take care of his parents, brother and four
sisters, he speaks quickly in Spanish and grins from ear to ear. The rough
translation: "Hell, yeah."

"The first thing he asked me was, 'What can I do with my money,'" said Jose
Rijo, a special assistant to Nationals general manager Jim Bowden and the
director of the team's Dominican Republic academy. "I said buy a house. I
told him something happens to you tomorrow, at least you have the land."

'Now I'm more comfortable'
Gonzalez's smile is contagious, and it's not hard to figure out how he's
already developed the nickname "Smiley" among American members of the
Nationals' front office.

On or off the field, Gonzalez approaches life with a bright outlook, and it's
always been that way. By all accounts, his childhood was difficult but not
overwhelming. His family was poor, but his mother, Ana Mercedes, always had
food on the table. There was plenty of family around and there was baseball.

If he reaches the majors and can buy another house, he said he'll stay near
his hometown. He likes the "peace" of the countryside, and doesn't like big
cities.

"My life hasn't changed," Gonzalez said. "The only thing is now I'm more
comfortable."

"He's a tremendous person," Vizcaino said. "He's always happy. He's ready to
do whatever the Nationals want. The contract hasn't changed him at all."

Like many boys in the Dominican Republic, Gonzalez began playing baseball
when he was very young, learning the game in the small patches of grass near
his home and later at a baseball field a 15-minute motorcycle ride away.

His father, Daniel, works in agriculture and played baseball as a child, but
even at an early age, Gonzalez was special. By the age of 12, he had drawn
the interest of buscones , and when he was 14, he was taken in by Vizcaino,
who fed him, trained him at his own baseball academy and showed him to major
league scouts.

In return, Vizcaino would get 20 percent of Gonzalez's signing bonus if he
signed a major league contract. It turned out to be $280,000.

He signed with the Nationals partly because of a long relationship with Rijo,
but also because he said he "liked the team better and has a better future in
the organization."

The Nationals are betting on that being the case.

Not only did Gonzalez's signing bring an immediate top tier prospect to the
franchise's moribund minor league system, it sent a statement across the
island that Washington would again be a player in the international talent
market.

From 2002 to 2004, while the team was based in Montreal, the Nationals signed
almost no Dominican players, and certainly none as high profile as Gonzalez.

"We want every young boy wanting to be a Washington National," Bowden said.

Rijo and new manager Manny Acta--a Dominican resident and the fourth
island-born big league manager--already give the Nationals immediate
credibility, and if Gonzalez pans out, it could help even more.

Moving quickly toward D.C.

The Nationals have set an ambitious timetable for Gonzalez.

After he signed with Washington, he spent the summer at the team's academy in
San Cristobal. He couldn't play in official Dominican Summer League games
because of his age, but he trained with other minor leaguers, began taking
English classes and started on his path to the states.

He still struggles with his English, but on the baseball field, he's
progressed quickly.

"He's come a long way already," said Dana Brown, Washington's amateur
scouting director. "He's getting stronger. I have probably seen him eight
times now."

Gonzalez has a strong arm, excellent range at shortstop and a patient eye at
the plate. He's already an excellent hitter from both sides of the plate, and
scouts expect his body to fill out, bringing more power.

Brown said Gonzalez has been compared to fellow shortstop Miguel Tejada, who
grew up near Pizarrete in Bani, and Rijo said he's better than Nationals
shortstop Cristian Guzman when Guzman was Gonzalez's age.

"Everything you want to imagine Ozzie [Smith] doing with the glove, he does,
yet he can hit from both sides of the plate. [He hits] electric line drives,
shots," Bowden said when the Nationals signed him this summer. "He is a
special talent."

With that in mind, Washington will bring Gonzalez to Viera, Fla., for spring
training in February, and he's likely to start the season at the team's Gulf
Coast League affiliate, if not Single-A--a huge jump for a player who will be
17 at the time.

"I would be worried if he would be like the average Dominican. He's not,"
Rijo said. "His attitude, his temper, it's unbelievable. I don't see the
cockiness. I don't see the big head. It's unbelievable. He's patient at the
plate. It's unbelievable, his quickness."

Gonzalez knows how much is riding on his success, both with his family and
with the Nationals, but for now, he seems impervious to it all.

"I don't feel any pressure because pressure doesn't help me get to the major
leagues," Gonzalez said.