Practice your humble: Now living the good life, Eduardo Escobar never forgets his hungry, painful pa

The T-shirts have been mistranslated.

That was no accident. The proper translation of practica humildad sounds boring. “Practice humility” is a stern chastisement, not a peppy catchphrase, and Eduardo Escobar’s mantra needed to be a bit catchier. Something to better match his energetic and fun-loving personality. So, the shirts he handed out to his Diamondbacks teammates in spring training favor a slight distortion on the front: “Practice Your Humble.”

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The phrase fits the 30-year-old third baseman to, well, a tee. Teammates sometimes greet him with it in lieu of hello. “Hey, practice your humble!” they’ll exclaim. “Practice your humble, man!” he’ll respond. But to Escobar, it’s far more than just a pithy reminder to keep your ego in check before the game of baseball checks it for you. To him, it is the weightiest of commandments, a vital directive to appreciate every single thing he has in life.

And he has a lot. These days, Escobar is a multimillionaire. He signed a three-year, $21 million extension with Arizona this last October, joining the relatively exclusive club of professional baseball players to earn a long-term guarantee. He seems to dine nearly daily at Fogo de Chão, the pricey Brazilian steakhouse where they literally bring you meat until you ask them to stop. (The backs of those shirts read “Fogo Power!”)

But he remembers when he had almost nothing at all. The nights going hungry in his poor neighborhood in Venezuela. How his father left when he was a toddler and how his mother worked to support her six children. How he started working for anyone who would pay him when he could count his age on his fingers, just to make sure there was enough money for food.

When he reflects on his journey to and through professional baseball, it seems to him a miracle.

“Every time I open my eyes,” he said, “I’m so happy.”

The house of Adela Coronado wasn’t small. Amador Arias, the White Sox scout who signed Escobar as an amateur, remembers that Escobar’s mother owned a decent-sized lot with a spacious backyard. But the house itself was typical for the poor La Pica neighborhood of Maracay – haphazardly constructed, and not particularly sturdy-looking.

“It wasn’t very solid,” Arias said by phone from Venezuela. “We’re very happy we don’t have hurricanes and tornadoes and stuff like that. Because if a tornado or hurricane came a mile away from the house, it would have brought it down.”

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Inside were a kitchen, a living room, two bedrooms and a small third space, with no walls to divide it from the rest of the house, that contained a small bed. On the walls, Arias remembers, were the faces of some of Venezuela’s great major-leaguers of the era – Miguel Cabrera, Omar Vizquel, Andrés Galarraga – their photos clipped from local newspapers and stuck on the wall. Coronado would rather spend her money on food than paint.

Coronado worked as a housekeeper and did her best to feed seven mouths, including her own, but it wasn’t always enough. Often, when Escobar would join her at a home she was cleaning, she would sneak him food from the kitchen. “Secret, every time,” he said. There were nights he went to bed having only rice for dinner, or only plantains. There were nights he ate nothing at all.

When he was seven, he started working whatever jobs he could find. Shining shoes, cleaning patios, bagging groceries. He delivered homemade empanadas for his neighbor, Regina. He went to the supermarket with Regina’s daughter, Luzbel, who sold tortas. Whatever he could make went on the dinner table.

Nobody in La Pica was well off, but people in the neighborhood tried to assist as much as they could. To talk to Escobar about his youth is to hear a stream of names, people who helped him along the way. “A lot of people gave me food, a lot of people helped my mother, too, sometimes,” he said. “It’s a dangerous area, but a lot of people took care of me there.” Friends gave him cleats and equipment so he could play baseball. Christmas was rough, so his neighbors would give him some money for work and save a similar amount for him to have in December.

As hard as it was on him, it was harder on his mother. Her hands and feet ached from constant work. One day, when Escobar was about 13 or 14, he dropped in on her at work and saw her crying. She was just so tired, and it broke her down.

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At that moment, Escobar made her a promise.

“You know what, I’m going to be a professional baseball player,” he told her. “Because I don’t want to see you working anymore.”

Keeping such a promise wasn’t completely unreasonable, but it was far from a sure bet. Escobar had shown enough talent in his early teens to catch the eye of a local coach named Juan Baloa, who plucked him from playing ball in the street and dropped him into his first true youth baseball setting, fetching Escobar from his house every morning at 5 a.m. to train. Under Baloa’s tutelage, Escobar earned the opportunity to play for his state, Aragua, in a national tournament as a pitcher and center fielder.

But there was little about him that was projectable. He was short and was lucky to weigh 130 pounds. Amador noticed a 15-year-old Escobar only when he came to a game to scout a catcher on the other team. He liked Escobar’s style. “The way he carried himself on the field, he acts like the other team wants to kill him so he needs to do it first to have success,” Arias said. “That’s the way his mind is.” Arias also saw some surprising pop in his bat for a kid his size. But he wasn’t going to be a pitcher and he wasn’t fast enough to play the outfield in the pros. If he was going to go anywhere, he needed to play the infield.

After a few months of following Escobar, Arias told him as much. He also set him up with a private coach named Juan Escobar – they are not related – who focused on teaching Eduardo shortstop for the promise of 10 percent of his eventual signing bonus, a common arrangement among private trainers in Latin America. When Arias checked in a few months later, he noticed marked improvement in the field, but was distressed to see that Juan Escobar had begun to teach Eduardo to switch-hit. “I wasn’t really too happy about it because I really liked his right-hand bat,” Arias said. “But I just left it like that. It was a great idea, because he ended up being better from the left side.”

In 2006, shortly after Escobar’s 17th birthday, Arias was given the clearance to offer the young Escobar a signing bonus of $25,000. It wasn’t much by signing bonus standards – although Escobar hardly had an idea of the heights such bonuses could reach – but the money sure helped. His mother stopped working, and Escobar spent some of the bonus  on renovating the house. He felt like he’d made it. The minor leagues can be a low-paying, struggling-to-make-ends-meet ordeal for players, but Escobar it was close to heaven. It was a grind, especially not speaking English, but for the first time in his life, he had three meals a day in his stomach. If he got frustrated, he’d step back and reflect.

“This is a good life,” he’d say to himself. “Never forget where you came from.”

One day in 2008, during an off day in the spring training schedule, White Sox manager Ozzie Guillén popped over to the backfields at Tucson Electric Park to watch his son, Oney, play. But he soon found himself enamored of the young, short, skinny kid that was Oney’s backup. “Wow,” Guillén thought, “out of all the kids I’ve seen here, he’s the one I like the most. He’s a real ballplayer.”

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Guillén began talking Escobar up to other folks in the organization, hoping they’d take a firmer interest in his development. When the big-league team needed extra players for Cactus League games, Guillén tried to make sure Escobar was included. He got a kick out of how excited the young infielder was to receive the $75 in meal money that comes with joining the big-league club.

And while Oney didn’t play past that 2008 season, Escobar kept progressing. He didn’t hit much in A-ball in 2008 or 2009, when he repeated the level, but he found his stride at High-A in 2010 with a .285 average and .730 OPS. He reached Double-A by the end of the year, after which he was set to go to the Venezuelan Winter League for the third straight offseason.

But Guillén felt it was vital to keep Escobar in the U.S. He knew La Pica, and it was dangerous. That’s a word Escobar has used to describe his neighborhood, although he downplays the danger of violence there, suggesting that Guillén was worried he’d go hungry. But it was more than that. “You talk about dangerous?” Guillén told the Twin Cities Pioneer Press last summer. “Four of his family members were killed.”

It’s a subject Escobar is hesitant to discuss, the only thing that quiets him during a nearly hour-long conversation about his upbringing. “Ozzie’s known me for a long time,” Escobar said, “so everything he’s said is true.” That’s about as much detail as Escobar will give. “Tragedy has been a part of my life,” he said, noting that his goddaughter, Nayluz, also had been killed in a car accident earlier this year. But other losses in the family — which the Pioneer Press said Guillén’s oldest son, Ozzie Jr., confirmed with a grim “throat-slashing gesture” — are a subject Escobar said he “doesn’t really like to broach.”

“Painful circumstances have been part of my life, but it’s my duty to keep forging forward to be a professional and do my job and keep providing for my family,” Escobar said. “No matter what, I know that God is going to be there for me and help me get stronger and remember the loved ones that I lost.”

Guillén managed to keep Escobar stateside that offseason by asking White Sox general manager Kenny Williams to find the infielder a spot in the Arizona Fall League. It was a less-than-intuitive fit – the AFL is meant to feature the best prospects in the game – but Williams made it happen. Escobar hit .300 with an .889 OPS in 119 plate appearances for the Peoria Saguaros. Midway through, he was added to Chicago’s 40-man roster, placing him on the doorstep of a big-league call-up.

That call came the following September. Inserted late into a blowout loss against the Tigers in Detroit, he collected his first hit on a weak single to first base. Cabrera, the fellow Venezuelan whose image adorned the walls of his childhood home, fielded it and saved him the ball. Even more fittingly, the game was carried on TV back in Venezuela. Escobar had been promising his brothers that he’d be playing on TV for years.

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The following July, in 2012, he was traded to the Twins as part of a package for Francisco Liriano. Arias remembers Escobar’s mother calling him in tears about the trade, and recalled being surprised at how down Escobar was about it, too. The scout explained that it would be good for him, that the Twins would give him more opportunity to play. And opportunity there was – Escobar provided Minnesota a steady utility bat, and started hitting for power the past two seasons. When he was traded to Arizona last summer, it felt just as bittersweet as his departure from Chicago.

“For him, the best team in the world was the Chicago White Sox when he was there,” Arias said. “When he got to Minnesota, the Twins were the best team for him. Right now, for him, the best team in the world is the Diamondbacks. He’s going to give 150 percent on the field for the Diamondbacks and that’s because of his heart.”

Late last October, Escobar called Guillén for guidance. The Diamondbacks had offered the extension, a guarantee of which represented nearly double what he’d made in his career. But he’d played for Arizona only two months, and was just days away from becoming a free agent for the first time. Was that long enough to know he wanted to stay? Could he make more on the open market?

Like the surrogate father he is, Guillén sharpened his protégé’s focus. Did he like it in Arizona? Yes. Did his wife? Yes. Was it about the money? If that was the case, the former manager had some familiar advice: “Remember where you came from.” Escobar signed the deal.

Of course, it’s hardly as if Escobar could forget. While some Venezuelans avoid going back to their turmoil-wracked country in the offseason – a decision Escobar does not begrudge them – Escobar goes back to La Pica every winter with his charitable organization, The Eduardo Escobar Foundation, that he started soon after he got to the majors in order to help people back home. He’s brought professional players to put on a clinic for kids and play a softball game. He visits kids in the hospital and provides 3,000 boxed meals for families in need. “When I see one kid who doesn’t have food,” he said, “I remember being in the same place.”

In part because of Escobar’s efforts, La Pica is producing more baseball players these days. Arias said it’s hard to find a player from there that you can sign for less than $300,000. “There are a lot of kids that want to be in professional baseball and want to be like him,” he said. The scout recently took a photo with one prospect he scouted and sent it to Escobar, joking that the teenager would be more famous than Escobar is right now. Escobar replied saying he’ll be happy if that happens.

“The most important thing in life is when you die, other people remember you as a good person,” Escobar said. Because the Bible says to honor thy father, he reconnected with his estranged dad several years ago and is now working on getting him a visa to come to the U.S. “I forgot what my father did to me when I was young, leaving when I was one year old or two years old,” he said. “Now, I’m a professional baseball player and now it’s my time to take care of my father.”

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Most of all, he wants to be a good example for the five children, four sons and one daughter, he has with his wife, Eucaris. They’ll have it much easier than he did, which is the ultimate goal of parenting. There are no hungry nights at his house, just regular feasts at Brazilian steakhouses. But they need to remember how lucky they are. There’s a certain something – he may have seen it on a T-shirt somewhere – that he wants them to practice.

“You need to be a good person, no matter if you have money or no money,” he tells them. “And stay humble. Never forget who helped you.”

(Top photo of Escobar: AP Photo / Elaine Thompson)

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