Truckload of Talent

In the Cerrito Blanco section of Barquisimeto, Venezuela, they called her, with some sentimentality, “Goat Face.”

She was a 1954 Chevy pickup truck, blue in the places where the paint still clung to her rotting body, the front end gnarled around sleepy headlights, with a snout-like hood and a grill bent into a half-bleating smirk.

Cesar Izturis would load pineapples and tomatoes and whatever else had ripened into Goat Face’s 35-year-old bed, shift into gear, and set out over the Venezuelan countryside, dropping off and picking up, one open market to the next.

They’d be gone for three or four days at a time, Izturis and Goat Face rattling along on dusty roads toward Valencia or Maracaibo.

When they returned, Izturis was most often tired and alone, baked by the sun and whipped by the wind. Once, however, he arrived with a 2-month-old boy, born along his regular route, by a woman he’d met who was not his wife.

The baby’s name was Maicer. His hair and eyes were brown, like the five half brothers with whom he’d one day share a room, bunk beds shoved against three walls. He was closest in age to Cesar, who only nine months before was born and named after his father, a man with wiry shoulders, strong wrists and a love for baseball.

The elder Cesar and his wife, Elidez, managed the emotional strain of the unexpected arrival, the third of what would become six sons. Last week, almost 25 years later, they traveled to Los Angeles with their youngest, Julio. They went to Dodger Stadium to watch Cesar play shortstop for the Dodgers, and on Thursday night to Angel Stadium to watch Maicer play shortstop for the Angels.

“This,” Cesar, the father, said through a translator, “is too much pride. It is unbelievable the pride I feel. It’s a dream.”

The boys were raised among the groves of pineapples and mangos. Cesar drove his truck and worked at the local farmers’ market. Elidez tended to the four-bedroom home, shooed the boys to school each morning, gathered them at dinnertime.

As they advanced through grade school, young Cesar and Maicer played their baseball in the street, or in the nearby fields, sometimes using bottle caps in the place of baseballs.

When a tattered ball could be taped together again, their father hit them sharp ground balls, slow ground balls, pop flies. One summer, he hung a tire with a rope from a mango tree and painted a yellow line across the tread.

“One hundred swings a day,” he told them.

The Izturis boys were good, better than the other kids in the neighborhood. Their mother told them they had the soft hands of her brother, their uncle, a fine amateur shortstop who had died in an automobile accident.

“Anywhere I went, people were talking about my kids,” Cesar said. “How good they were. And how nice they were, too.”

They played in the area recreation leagues. A local baseball school would recruit the Izturises and waive the tuition. There, they attended classes (though Cesar, in particular, had a habit of sneaking off to the sandlots) and played the game. They traveled through Venezuela, on buses that also carried food and blankets, the children representing the school and the town, the Izturis boys sharing the middle infield.

Cesar, the father, frequently watched practices from behind a fence. His children wore old sneakers. After they batted, Cesar and Maicer borrowed gloves from those who had gone to hit, then returned them and wore the gloves left behind by the next to hit.

The family was growing, a boy at a time, and the senior Izturis had just enough money to feed them all, and chip in for gas and supplies for the buses that took the boys to their games.

“I felt bad,” he said, “because I was their father. They didn’t have what the other kids had.”

What he had was Goat Face, a job, responsibilities, and too little time. The boys were 9, so young, and encumbered by poverty that was not of their own making. They borrowed gloves. When they could not, they made do. When they could not, they closed their eyes and started over the next day, and then went off to make do again.

“My kids,” Cesar said, “were always the worst-dressed kids. It was agonizing.”

So, he made a deal with his brother, who had a pickup truck of his own.

He would go to work for him, lugging fruit and riding on the passenger side.

Cesar sold old Goat Face, got the equivalent of $60 for her, and one afternoon the boys got home from school and the blue pickup truck was gone. Their father sat in the house.

“I’ve got a surprise for you guys,” he said.

He held out two brown leather baseball gloves and four shoes with cleats.

Cesar Izturis, an All-Star shortstop, sat 16 years later in the dugout at Dodger Stadium. He smiled as sweetly as he might have the afternoon he stopped using other kids’ gloves.

“The smell,” he said. “It was new.”

Maicer Izturis sat 16 years later in the clubhouse at Angel Stadium, in front of a locker whose floor was stacked with stiff leather gloves that had never been touched by a baseball. He could recall only joy, and one thought: “Now, we can catch at the same time other kids practice.”

Maicer turned and pointed.

“Now I’ve got, look, nine gloves,” he said. “That’s why I take everything back to Venezuela and give it to the kids that need it.”

They softened those gloves under their mattresses and by playing catch on dirt infields well into dusk. They played for years with those gloves, into the baseball academy FundaLara, into high school, when their hands grew too large and the balls came too fast.

Cesar Izturis, the father, stood 16 years later outside of a radio booth at Angel Stadium, hearing questions in English, then in Spanish. When he laughed, the lines near the corners of his eyes crinkled, and Angel broadcaster Jose Mota laughed with him. When he told the story of Goat Face, Mota’s face went blank, and Cesar nodded, raising his forefingers to the top of his head, the goat’s horns.

“The real payoff,” he said, “was not that they made it to the big leagues. The real payoff was that day. Even if they never made it, I’d do it again.”

In 1996, when he was 16, the younger Cesar attended a tryout held by the Toronto Blue Jays. He signed several days later for $40,000. Two years later, Maicer signed with the Cleveland Indians for $7,000.

Cesar played 46 games for the Blue Jays in 2001, then returned to Venezuela that winter. On a hot afternoon, he drove his father to a car dealership. They walked through the lot, the son leading the father, through rows of new cars, and to a row of new pickup trucks, and finally to the shiny, flawless blue one, bought and paid for.

Cesar stood back and smiled at his father.

“There’s your car,” he said. “There’s Goat Face.”

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Slick bunch

Shortstops with the best fielding percentages in the majors (minimum 300 chances):

*--* Player TC E PCT Omar Vizquel, San Fran. 360 3 992 Rafael Furcal, Atlanta 448 6 987 Orlando Cabrera, Angels 304 4 987 Jack Wilson, Pittsburgh 407 6 985 Michael Young, Texas 333 5 985 Royce Clayton, Arizona 327 6 982 Cristian Guzman, Wash. 312 6 981 Neifi Perez, Chicago (N) 308 6 981 Adam Everett, Houston 331 7 979 Alex Gonzalez, Florida 439 9 979 Jimmy Rollins, Philadelphia 352 8 977 Cesar Izturis, Dodgers 334 8 976 Angel Berroa, Kansas City 363 9 975 Derek Jeter, New York (A) 379 10 974 Miguel Tejada, Baltimore 407 11 973 David Eckstein, St. Louis 397 11 972 Juan Uribe, Chicago (A) 322 9 972 Jose Reyes, New York (N) 341 11 968 Jhonny Peralta, Cleveland 300 10 967 Julio Lugo, Tampa Bay 434 15 965 Edgar Renteria, Boston 340 17 950

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Note: Maicer Izturis has played in 17 games. He has a fielding percentage of .985.

Source: mlb.com