It was the last week of May 1998, a fortnight before the draft. There was little doubt that Northeastern University junior Carlos Pena was going to be one of the first dozen players selected, and ESPN producer Bill Fairweather and I drove to Haverhill, Mass., to interview Pena and his family.
Carlos and I walked around the outside of the house where they first lived when they arrived in Haverhill from the Dominican Republic, in January 1991. It had all come as a surprise at the time. Felipe Pena was a successful electrical engineer in the Santo Domingo. They lived near the ballpark where Licey, a local team, played its home games, and since the power often went out in their residential neighborhood, they used the light from the stadium to study and read.
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Fifteen years earlier, Felipe’s brother, Frank, who moved to Long Island, convinced him to apply for a visa. In 1990, a letter came informing the Penas they had been cleared and could begin the process of moving to the United States.
“My dad asked us what we thought,” said Carlos. “I said, ‘Dad, it’s cold there in the winters. They have snow. We have baseball right down the street here in the winter.”
What about playing baseball?
“Dad said, ‘The major leagues are in the United States,’ and I said, ‘Let’s go.’”
So they did, first to cousin Frank’s residence on Long Island, then to Haverhill on the recommendation of another relative.
Haverhill is one of several industrial towns that sprouted along the Merrimack and Nashua Rivers on the Massachusetts-New Hampshire border. They were mill towns, vestiges of the Industrial Revolution, homes for immigrants that came to the U.S. from Europe, then, in the second half of the twentieth century, from the Caribbean and Africa and Asia.
Carlos stood outside that white three-decker and remembered how the Penas adjusted from the warmth of the island to the frigid New England winter, six Penas living in the two rooms of the attic of an unheated three-family house. They were shown the house, went upstairs, their uncle pulled on a rope, a ladder came down and they climbed the ladder into the unheated attic.
Welcome to your new home.
Felipe, Juana Marisela, 12-year-old Carlos, Pedro, Omar, and sister Famires lined up mats and slept in their winter coats on the floor of the attic. “Looking back, it was a great, bonding experience for us as a family,” said Carlos. “We had one another. We were close. We shared. We instinctively knew not to look back, just to look forward every day. But, man, it was cold. A long way from Licey playing Escogido.”
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But closer to Northeastern University. To the Cape Cod League. To Fenway Park, where he fulfilled those winter dreams by playing as a collegian and where his extra-inning homer helped take the Tampa Bay Rays to their only World Series 17 years later.
Felipe and Juana Pena, who had been an engineer and teacher, respectively, in the Dominican, worked five jobs between them to feed their four children and eventually moved into another house, a three-decker with heat and comfort. Felipe is warm but tough, self-educated in Francisco de Macorís. He required his children to learn English by sitting down every night and figuring it out, rather than allowing English as a second language assistance. “I told them, ‘Sit there with your books until you get it,’” Felipe said that May in 1998 in that ESPN interview. We talked over a dinner of rice and beans and chicken and plantains his wife fixed so we were all fed before the cameras rolled. (Still the best plantains I’ve ever tasted.)
Seven years after they began learning English, their oldest son was a junior at Northeastern University with a 3.7 grade-point average in engineering and about to be a first-round draft choice (The No. 12 pick by the Texas Rangers).
The neighborhood where they lived in that attic had jagged edges. Felipe would take Carlos down the hill to the YMCA, where they would go into a racquetball court and he would throw the racquetballs as hard as he could and Carlos would try to hit them. Halfway to the Y was a Chinese restaurant, known to locals not for the fried rice but for drugs. One day father and son were walking past the restaurant when a police car, siren blaring, lights flashing, pulled over and ordered Felipe and Carlos to put their hands on their heads and backs against the wall. “I was terrified,” Carlos remembered. “My dad told me to do what they told us. Don’t argue.”
Felipe, as usual, was right. Soon the police realized it was mistaken identity. Felipe and Carlos moved on to the Y to hit racquetballs.
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On that May 1998 evening, as we interviewed Carlos in his family’s living room, I asked him if he looked back at how difficult it had been to reach this point. “We came here because of the American dream,” Carlos replied. “Nowhere is it written that the American dream is supposed to be easy.”
Earlier this winter, Bill Fairweather and I talked about that interview and agreed that Carlos Pena’s answer to that question might be our favorite from our decades of interviews. This past week, a producer at MLB Network asked me if I could ever have imagined that 20 years later Carlos would be one of the industry’s most respected television analysts.
“Not at all,” I replied.
Understand, Carlos and Pamela Pena, with their three children, reacted to a disaster in Haiti by doing fundraisers all around the Orlando area to raise money. They have several foundation interests and fund a special school in the Dominican Republic for at-risk, homeless and orphaned children.
Understand, after retiring from a job with the Haverhill Waterworks, Felipe Pena went back and got his college degree. He and Juana now live in Southern Florida, and both still work. Brother Pedro, who Carlos believes was the best ballplayer in the family but whose career was cut short by a misdiagnosed broken hamate bone, is a Ph.D. and actually discovered a gene that helps kill cancer cells. Sister Famiras danced with the Boston Ballet, later helped young girls learn to dance as she graduated from Boston College and is now an executive with a cruise line company. Omar graduated from college, played nearly a decade in the minor and independent leagues and is now coaching a high school team in California.
This is the family who slept on mats on the floor lot of an unheated attic in their winter coats, then went to school, learned English on their own.
The road from Haverhill High School to a first-round pick of the Rangers wasn’t a red carpet. It was a learning process at Northeastern. He couldn’t get a guaranteed slot in the Cape Cod League, so he went as a Temp—a temporary fill-in—and ended up the league’s MVP.
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Like his college career, Pena’s professional ride had its hilltops and its valleys. The Rangers brought him to the big leagues in 2001, gave him 22 September at-bats, then traded him the following January to the Oakland Athletics. Now, there was one side benefit to that trade; 2002 was the season portrayed in “Moneyball,” so Carlos can tell his grandchildren that Adrian Bellani played him in the movie version of Michael Lewis’ book.
He was traded to Detroit on July 6 of that 2000 season and hit 27 homers in 2004, but when he struggled in 2005 and had a poor spring training in 2006, he was released by the rebuilding Tigers. He signed a minor league deal with the Yankees. And was released. He then signed a minor league deal with the Red Sox and even got a cameo with his hometown team—hitting a game-winning homer—but was released.
He never gave up and signed with Tampa Bay and had five terrific seasons there, with 163 homers. His extra-inning homer in September at Fenway was one of the Rays’ biggest hits of the season, the spark that helped the Rays to their only World Series.
He hit 46 homers in 2007, followed by 31, 39, 28, 28 and 19, and when he finally finished playing in 2014 he’d completed 14 seasons and hit 286 home runs. That’s more than Hall of Famers Larry Doby and Ryne Sandberg, not to mention Will Clark and Eric Karros.
It was a remarkable career, but, more important, Carlos and family define the American dream.
It was almost 30 years ago that Felipe Pena got the letter informing him that he could apply to bring his family to the United States. Baseball and this country are fortunate that when Carlos expressed reservations about moving to a place where there was snow instead of a Licey-Escogido game, Felipe said the magic words: “The major leagues are in the United States.”
(Top photo: Mike Ehrmann/Getty Images)
