A Hero Beyond Words
By Derek Glanz
2003 Gameday Magazine - No.5
World-renowned Colombian advocate and entrepreneur Pedro Medina remembers inviting Edgar Renteria to make a marquee appearance at the opening of the first McDonald's restaurant in the shortstop's hometown of Barranquilla, on the country's Caribbean coast.
"Renteria didn't want to enter through the front door," recalls Medina. "He entered through the back door, sat down with the employees, I served him a Big Mac and later, silently, he left."
Yet surely this is not a ballplayer who shies away from limelight. How could someone with Renteria's ability have the impulse to hide from attention?
As the National League's reigning Gold Glove winner for fielding excellence, and the reigning Silver Slugger honoree as the most productive on offense at his position (his second such award), he's on record in the minds of baseball's voting managers and coaches as the best shortstop in the league both in the field and at the plate.
This season, he earned selection to the All-Star Game for the third time. And the honor of starting the game - as determined by the voting of fans - carried special significance for Renteria, as he became the first player from Colombia to be accorded that honor. And no less an observer than Chicago Cubs manager Dusty Baker has called him the smartest player in the league.
So how, indeed, could Renteria shy away from the limelight?
At 22, in just his second season in the big leagues, Renteria immortalized himself by delivering the Florida Marlins' game-winning hit in Game 7 of the 1997 World Series against the Cleveland Indians. In his rookie season he batted over .300, after never accomplishing the feat in the minor leagues. These days he accessorizes his birds-on-bat uniform with a pair of diamond earrings that shimmer in the Busch Stadium lights and a necklace that flops up around his chin as he launches himself off second base to avoid barrowing baserunners.
On the team's interleague trip to Boston, Renteria completed a backhand stop with an around-the-front flip of the ball from his glove that drew oohs and aahs from the Fenway Park faithful, a creative play few could recall having seen a shortstop make.
Despite such talent, a comparably trifling moment spent with Renteria is equally memorable because of what it reveals about his character. Following a rare interview session with the media, coming after he delivered a game-winning hit on the last day before the All-Star break in 2001, Renteria turned and asked in Spanish:
"How was my English?" From the look on his face and the sound of his voice, Renteria was not looking for an honest reply. He sought encouragement.
Which is nothing compared with some of the lore from Renteria's early minor league days that speaks to core innocence. In 1992, goes the story, he was passed a peculiar looking piece of paper. Dumfounded, he called his brother, Edinson, a veteran minor leaguer. Edinson laughed and told him, yes, the paper is important; hold onto it. It was Edgar’s first paycheck.
After 12 years in the United States, Renteria's still-humble demeanor is appreciated by Cardinals manager Tony La Russa, who says Renteria maintains as a good balance between the personal and the professional sides of baseball life as any player he has seen.
Renteria is equally at ease putting in his pregame fielding work as he is palling around with notorious funnyman and Cardinals reliever Steve Kline. Spend time around the park and you notice that his closest friends are some of the most disparate Cardinals personalities. The serious La Russa and Albert Pujols, the zany Kline, the affable Fernando Vina, and the cryptic Eli Marrero all gravitate to the Colombian shortstop. Renteria seems to be maturing into one of the game's leaders.
"He's a very popular guy on our team because he's a good person and he cares about his teammates," say La Russa. "He's a lot of fun to be around."
Stateside, it is difficult to appreciate the significance that Renteria's success and his modest persona have taken on for his Colombian countrymen. Some perspective: When Renteria and his Marlins teammates were invited to the White House after winning the World Series, the young Colombian enjoyed a privilege his country's own president could not enjoy. Ernesto Samper had been denied a U.S. visa for receiving campaign financing from drug traffickers. Drugs and kidnapping are two of the top industries in Colombia. Edgar is a beacon in a society that struggles to find good examples, though it has finally found a political leader deserving of respect in President Alvaro Uribe. Says Medina, who dedicates himself to the "Yo Creo En Colombia/I Believe In Colombia" organization, for which he tours the world's higher educational institutions, extolling the achievements and natural wonders of Latin America's oldest democracy: "Edgar is an example of the Colombia that can succeed."
Every December, Renteria returns to visit family in Barranquilla, where he is greeted by mobs of admirers. His humility is not lost on his ebullient countymen. When I told friends in Colombia I would be interviewing Edgar, the e-mails rolled in: "Tell Edgar I love him, that I adore him, that he is gorgeous." "Tell Edgar he's the pride of our country." "Tell Edgar he is precious." "Tell Edgar all of us in Colombia are with him every step of the way."
One of those gushing utterances came from my own girlfriend in Bogota. Kidding, I told Edgar I didn't think I should introduce them again. As Colombians do when they want to give you a chance to recant, he scrunched his brow and said, "What?" "Nada," I said. While deception plagues Colombia like social disease, the norms of trust between close friends and family are heightened.
After becoming only the fourth Colombian major leaguer (after shortstop Jackie Gutierrez, 1983-88; shortstop Orlando Ramirez, 1974-79; and second baseman Luis Castro, 1902), Renteria has handled his fame and hero's status gracefully. He is admired for being the same person in every respect as the gangly kid who once preferred soccer to baseball growing up in Barranquilla. (Again, it was his brother who pointed out what success could mean for their family.)
"People recognize me in Colombia and I get along well with them," Edgar says. "I have to be an example, always carry myself well on the field and off the field. Don't get into trouble and make myself accessible and everything will turn out fine."
On the diamond, Renteria has accelerated his maturation the past two years. Despite winning his first Silver Slugger award in 2000, Renteria underachieved in 2001, both in the field and at the plate. He hit a career-low .260 and failed to improve his defense. People questioned whether he would fulfill his potential in a Cardinals uniform, prompting trade rumors that visibly bothered the promising antesalista.
Clean in conscience and refocusing his personal aspirations, Renteria turned things around in 2002. He batted .305 - the first time over .300 since his rookie season - won another Silver Bat, drove in a career-best 83 runs and turned in his highest on-base percentage, at .364. Even more impressive, he earned his first Gold Glove. He has fared even better in 2003. Seeing him exploit all his natural gifts, baseball fans rewarded Renteria his first All-Star Game start. He batted .331 with nine home runs, 60 runs driven home and 23 stolen bases before the break.
Renteria's friends and family have even higher dreams. "Ask Edgar about the Hall of Fame," suggested Ulises Frias Galofre, a family friend who has known Renteria since he was a boy.
"No, no, I can't think about that." says Renteria. "I can just keep playing. When one is playing he can't think about that, right?"
"I think (the achievements were) a result of work. I've worked hard the last two years. Winning the Gold Glove and Silver Bat was a function of work. They were definitely goals. Going forward, the goals are to keep working and help the team. The next goal is to bring a World Series championship to St. Louis."
When Cardinals hitting coach Mitchell Page joined the club during the 2001 season, he saw a different Renteria than he sees today.
"What I'm seeing right now is he's taking advantage of his ability to use all fields," says Page. "He's hitting line drives into gaps, occasionally hitting home runs, but having good at-bats and not trying to do more than he's capable of doing."
"Since 2001, I think the biggest change is slowing his front foot down, keeping him behind the ball. I think watching him he was trying to pull the ball; he picked up a bad habit of pulling the ball and developing a home run swing, (maybe) because the deepest part of the ballpark is center field and right-center field. The last couple of years he's becoming a hitter, not a swinger.
"Right now he's really low-maintenance for me. He might come in, take his 15 swings. He's very low maintenance because he had an idea of what it takes to hit .300 plus. Most of the time he got himself out by his approach. He was hitting too many fly ball outs. Now he knows how to use his hands and get on top of the ball, so he hits line drives. When he hits the ball the other way he's on top of it, so he hits a line drive or ground ball. Most of the time, if you get on top of the ball you have a chance to get a base hit."
Renteria's offensive success is quite a feat for a guy once projected by one of his minor league managers to be a "Walt Weiss type" hitter - that is, a player destined to be a defensive star while merely surviving as a batter. Renteria just hit .203 in Class A in the Marlins organization in 1993, his first full year in professional baseball.
"He came over (from Florida) a good player and because of experience and intelligence, the more experience he gets the better he gets," says La Russa, recalling the deal that brought Renteria to the Cardinals on Dec. 14, 1998, in exchange for minor league pitchers Armando Almanza and Braden Looper, and shortstop Pablo Ozuna, who had just been named the organization's Minor League Player of the Year.
"Now he's a great player. He's just got a feel for the game. He understands defensively what has to be done to stop runs from being scored. He knows how to handle the bat. He's just very smart. He handles the game the right way. Every game is different and he makes adjustments."
Indeed, in the locker room following his World Series-winning hit in 1997 off of Cleveland's Charles Nagy, Renteria gave a glimpse into the thinking player he had quickly become: "He threw me a slider for the first pitch, I took it for a strike," Renteria said, of his single in the 11th inning. "I knew he was going to throw me another slider and I hit it. Too many breaking pitches."
His career management well in hand, Renteria still keeps an eye on Colombian baseball. With Edinson, he founded Team Renteria in 1999 to promote and develop Colombian baseball, the key component of which is the re-establishment of the Colombian Winter League as a legitimate Caribbean league with official MLB relations. Though he leaves nearly all the responsibility of running the team to Edinson, Edgar is far and away the chief financier behind the operation.
Colombia's three current major leaguers - Edgar, Orlando Cabrera of the Montreal Expos, and Jolbert Cabrera of the Los Angeles Dodgers - have played in the winter leagues. In addition, 86 Colombian prospects play stateside in the summer, stocking minor leagues and, for the most part, independent league rosters. The Colombian league itself fields Class A-level talent, drawing some players from the independent leagues. Team Renteria and the rest of the Colombian league struggle to forge ties with Major League Baseball, a relationship that has been slow in coming due to perceived dangers of violence in the region. Before MLB pulled out of Colombia in 1984, players such as Willie McGee, Mariano Duncan, and Cecil Fielder had spent winters there.
An increasing number of Colombians were signed by major league clubs following Renteria's World Series emergence, but Colombian baseball officials lament that were it not for tough visa quotas arranged between the U.S. Government and MLB, more Colombians - and other foreign born players - would get the opportunity to play in the minor leagues. Furthermore, while a handful of teams employ part-time scouts in Colombia, fear and the uncertain safety of placing staff in that country continue to inhibit the growth of Colombian prospects playing in the U.S. As for visa issues - it seems hypocritical that the world's leading free-market nation restricts the quality of professional baseball by restricting the flow of talent that would otherwise enter this country.
The Cardinals, of course, hope to keep their Colombian star in the Redbirds' red, white and navy blue when his contract is up after the 2004 season. Renteria, likewise, wants to remain a Cardinal. But some of the innocence, the naivete of a teenager who did not recognize his own paycheck, has indeed been whisked away by the realities of the entertainment industry.
"Me gustaria quedarme/I'd like to stay here," he says, "pero tu sabes que eso es business/but you know this is a business." As much as he prefers speaking in Spanish, he chooses the English word for "negocio," perhaps to distance his passion for baseball from the realities of the game.
Derek Glanz has covered winter league baseball in Latin America, and reported on the Cardinals for Major League Baseball's Web site operations.
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