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hurl-ing an imaginary ball.
    He can remember his fi rst home run, when he was six. It was a ball he ripped over the third baseman’s head and down the line.
    As Alex rounded third, he recalls, “I was almost crying, I was so happy.”
    He started playing organized ball that year— he was small and the youngest player on his team, so the coaches decided that second base was the safest place to put him. There he wouldn’t need a strong arm, just an accurate one.
    Joe, Alex and Victor would talk about the mental part of the game, strategy, as well as the stats of the game and critique the um-pire’s calls. They bonded over the love of baseball, but Victor didn’t pressure Alex to play. “You never saw his father out there running with him,” Susy explains. “He’d pitch to him with a whiffl e ball or beans, but he wasn’t pushing him to play. He wasn’t one of those parents.”
    Victor would have been proud of Alex no matter what path he’d chosen. It just happened to be a base path. Victor says he was amazed by Alex’s speed and baseball acumen at such an early age: “When he was seven years old, I said to his mother, ‘Someday you’re going to see him be a superstar playing in the major leagues.’ ”
    Young Alex lived a charmed, middle-class life in the Dominican, but in 1980 the family fi nances began to crumble and it was time to move on. The Washington Heights shoe store, which Victor had left in the care of relatives, went under. An investment he’d made in a pharmacy in the Dominican wasn’t paying off, and Joe and Susy, about to graduate from high school, were eager to go back to the United States for their college education. Lourdes didn’t want to remain in the D.R. without Joe and Susy, so by 1981, it was time for the family to fi nd their way back to America.
    This time they settled in Miami. Victor found a rental in suburban South Miami, a white cinder-block ranch home. The neighborhood had sidewalks and palm trees and plenty of grass. At night, Alex would listen to the breathing of his parents lying in the bedroom next to his. He would know by the sound of it— heavier, slower, getting heavier and slower— when he could sneak in, wiggle in between them and fall asleep in a human sandwich. “When we woke up, there was Alex,” Victor recalls.
    Even though they were scratching out a living, Alex’s parents made sure their son went to a good school. “I always sent him to private schools,” Victor says. “I think public schools didn’t give enough attention to children.”
    One day, when Alex was eight, he watched a team practice on a fi eld next to his elementary school. The coach, Juan Diego Arteaga, a warm man with a thick mustache, saw Alex sitting alone next to a tree.
    “Hey, kid, do you want to play?”
    “What do you want me to do?’
    “Have you ever caught before?”
    Although his father had been a catcher, Alex had never played behind the plate. But since it was Victor’s position, Alex knew enough to fake it. “Sure,” he said. “I’m a good catcher.”
    That day, Alex caught a beautiful game, even though he was playing with boys two years older than he was. Arteaga’s son J.D.
    was on that team. They lived two blocks from Alex. The two boys became close friends and played in every youth league Mr. Arteaga could fi nd for them.
    A year went by. Alex was still skinny but now tall with angular facial features, his xylophone ribs showing through his skin and his elbows as sharp as arrowheads. He idolized Baltimore Orioles All-Star Cal Ripken, Jr., and wanted to be a shortstop, just like Cal. If one of his idols swung a black bat, Alex would use shoe polish and a felt-tip pen to blacken his own bat. In one boyhood photo, Alex is wearing red shorts and a dark cap, smiling at the camera but batting left-handed. His favorite player that week must have been a lefty. Alex liked imitating his idols.
    His father felt joy at his son’s passion for the game. “He knew more than I