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“You get paid here, you have to do everything right, and there are more fans,’’ he says. “People want to see something they’ve never seen before.”
The right-handed hitting Diaz showed them plenty, belting 25 homers his rookie season and 30 the next year.
Lightning Bolt from the Paperwork Gods
He was putting up solid numbers for Double-A San Antonio midway through the 1999 season when the commissioner’s office suddenly voided his contract, ruling that the Dodgers had illegally signed him.
Major League Baseball fined the Dodgers $200,000 and prohibited the team from re-signing Diaz and fellow Cuban Josue Perez after the club was accused of holding secret tryouts inCuba and arranging the players’ defections.
Diaz, 23, was out of a job.
“It was scary,’’ he says. “I didn’t know what was going to happen.”
A Visit from Pain and Panic, the Minions of Disaster
He signed with Boston as a free agentin the spring of 2000, receiving a $100,000 signing bonus.
Diaz belted 28 more homers in three minor-league stops, but his season came to a sudden end for the second consecutive summer.
While playing for Triple-A Pawtucket, he fractured his right ankle sliding into second base in Ottawa.
“That was hard to take, because I was having such a good year,’’ says Diaz, who has two young sons with his wife, Adalgiza.
He hit 20 homers for Pawtucket in each of the next two seasons.
Big Thunder
Diaz finally reached the Show, playing in four games, with one homer and a deuce of RBIs in seven trips to the plate for Boston in 2002. Then Red Sox manager Grady Little nicknamed him “Big Thunder.”
“He called me that because I carry too much weigh, but I’m fast for my size,” Diaz says, laughing.
Another Year, Another Club
That moment in the sun passed in 2003. Unsigned by the Red Sox, he joined Baltimore’s Double-A club in Bowie, Maryland, in mid-May.
He hit 14 homers in 68 games for the BaySox. He wasn’t connecting with the Orioles, who were holding a lot of player inventory at his position, so last January, he signed with the Twins.
The Farm Gods Reach Down.
For any ballplayer, the difference between a Hall of Fame career in the majors and the pergatory of the Triple-A glass ceiling are as much about the organization and who’s in line to the prime spots, how they were signed (bonuses, a skipper’s pick), and how smooth your ride has been through the system.
Diaz’ career road has had more potholes than a Havana street. Injury can affect your place in the pecking order of an organization. Immigration problems can sink a career.
Still, there are those scouts and farm directors who see the “diamond in the rough” who might have the right fit. It’s the stuff of which happy endings and great career turnarounds are made. The Twins’ Jim Rantz saw that kind of promise.
“We felt he had a lot of power and could help our Triple-A club, if not us,’’ farm director Jim Rantz says. “He’s a big guy, so there’s a lot to see.’’
“He has completely filled the DH role for us,’’ Red Wings manager Phil Roof said of Diaz last season.
Through 37 games with Rochester, the 6-foot-2, 290-pound designated hitter with hitting .277 with 11 home runs and 24 RBI. It appeared, for the first time in his career, as if Diaz might have found a home with an organization for which he could be a role player. Then the gods shook the sky once again.
Wrath of the Visa Gods
Last year, visa problems prevented the burly Cuban slugger from leaving the Dominican Republic.
Diaz joined the long line of players fighting for work visas. If you aren’t on a forty man roster (See "For Everyone Else There’s VISA "), then you’re in a constant struggle to obtain one every year. Teams help, but even farm directors lack pull to get them.
“The Cuban American Friendship Act” sitting in this session of Congress promises to provide work visas to Cuban ballplayers still in Cuba. Diaz, in the Dominican Republic, would likely not be eligible for one, even though his passport is from Cuba.
Being Cuban has no more pull in major league baseball. Cuban defectors are commonplace, with 21 cases in the past 13 years. Had Diaz done as Rene Arocha did, and defected on July 4 in 1991 perhaps he’d have been high profile.
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