Remembering Jose Fernandez

Jose Fernandez was born in the inland province of Villa Clara, Cuba. He learned to play baseball with rocks and sticks. He tried to flee the island for the first time at age 14. He was caught and he was sent to jail to sit among murderers. A year later, he finally escaped. Out at sea, a fellow refugee fell out of his boat and into the water. Fernandez dove in and swam through the waves to save her, only to realize later that the person he was saving was his mother.

He made it to Mexico. Then across the border into Texas. And finally to Tampa, Florida. He learned to pitch from an eccentric Cuban expat who made him swing an axe and push tires in the summer heat. He became a U.S. citizen. He became an All Star. In his final major league game, he pitched eight shutout innings against the Washington Nationals and struck out twelve. Barry Bonds, the Marlins hitting coach and perhaps the greatest hitter baseball has ever seen, gave him kisses in the dugout. He announced to the world that he was going to have a daughter.

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Less than a week later, Jose Fernandez’ boat struck a jetty in the early morning Miami darkness. He and two other young men, Eduardo Rivero and Emilio Macias, died in the accident. Fernandez was 24 years old. His short life was extensively chronicled. First in glowing magazine profiles, as he ascended into stardom. Then in somber obituaries.

We know Jose Fernandez in death better than we knew him in life. Better than we were ever meant to know him. He was a brilliant and charismatic pitcher—a person who loved baseball and kids and especially his grandmother; who overcame great hardship to build a life for himself in the United States. If the boat never hit the jetty, then that’s still all we likely would know about him.

Jose Fernandez is gone. And so we are left to reckon with his absence, and with the fact that he was troubled in some forever unknowable way. He was troubled enough to make the series of decisions that led to his death and to the deaths of Eduardo Rivero and Emilio Macias. The alcohol, the cocaine, the late night boat ride.

“José Fernández is my only child,” his mother wrote in an open letter a few days after her son’s death. “I shared him with an entire community who also loved him. My pain is profound. I know yours is, too. You loved him like a son, grandson, brother and friend; even those who never met him. You valued him as a baseball star, but regarded him as one among you.”

Jose Fernandez was indeed one among us—and for all his greatness, he was as vulnerable as any of us who watched with awe as he pitched. His life was short but full. His 24 years tracked tectonic changes in the country of his birth and in the game that endeared him to millions of people. Baseball gave him purpose and direction in a foreign place as a teenage refugee. It also gave him the means of his own destruction.

Jose Fernandez was born on July 31, 1992 during the Barcelona Summer Olympics—the first Olympics to feature baseball as a medal sport. The Cuban team went 7-0 in Barcelona, beating the United States twice and sweeping its way to gold. The victory was the culmination of a decades-long national project of building a dominant and entirely non-commercial baseball infrastructure in Cuba.

Talent funneled upwards from every province, from cities and from rural communities, molded every step of the way until it reached the Serie Nacional, Cuba’s national league, and finally, perhaps, its national team. Fidel Castro believed that sport was a lynchpin of the revolution, “a measure of the character and the will and the strength of our people.”

Baseball has been the national sport of Cuba since the country won its independence from Spain. And it has been a means of revolutionary propaganda since Castro took power in 1959. But 1992 would be the pinnacle of Cuban baseball—the culmination of Castro’s goal of turning baseball into the pride of the revolution. The Cuban Olympic team that year featured stars like Lazaro Vargas and Hector Linares and young pitchers like Orlando Hernandez and Rolando Arrojo.

Arrojo, like Jose Fernandez, was from Villa Clara. Arrojo was the best pitcher on the island in the early 1990s. He won the Serie Nacional’s version of the Cy Young in 1993, 1994, and 1995 pitching for the Naranjas of Villa Clara. Then, on the eve of the 1996 Olympics, he was gone—defected from the team hotel outside Atlanta. The Cuban team would win gold without him. But El Duque would soon follow. So, eventually, would Jose Fernandez.

Jose Fernandez was a state champion pitcher in high school. He was a first round draft pick by the Marlins in 2011, and he was dominant in the minors immediately: Kissimmee, Jamestown, Greensboro, Jupiter. Major league spring training. By 2013, he was on the Marlins opening day roster, having skipped both Double-A and Triple-A.

In his first big league start, against the Mets in New York, he struck out eight in five innings and allowed just one run. In his second, against the Phillies at home, he threw six shutout innings. He was 20 years old. He was the National League Rookie of the Year in 2013, but even the award sells his first season short: by September, he was already one of the best pitchers in baseball. In his final game of the year, he hit a deep line drive to left field at Marlins Park, flipped his bat, and watched the ball soar into the seats. He watched it a little too long for Braves catcher Brian McCann and third baseman Chris Johnson’s tastes, and sparked a benches-clearing brawl.

There was urgency to the way Fernandez played baseball. It would be silly and overwrought to say that he played like he knew something was coming for him. All baseball careers are short. Any baseball career can end abruptly. Fernandez snapped an elbow ligament in his second season. That could have been an ending in itself. But he made it back, as dominant and exciting as ever. He had an easy delivery that found him slowly falling off the mound to his glove side, his right leg swinging around behind him as hitters flailed at his stuff. He was as close to perfect as anybody doing anything has a right to be.

Jose Fernandez was born during the Special Period—a decade-long famine in Cuba brought about by the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Special Period was a time of declining birth rates and shortages of everything: not just food, but gasoline, building supplies, all of the raw materials that allow a society to function. It was also the time when the Cuban baseball establishment began to crack. It turned out that without the Soviet Union, Cuba could not support its baseball program the way it had in the 1970s and 80s. There was less money to pay for equipment. Simply keeping the athletes fed a nutritious diet became a challenge.

In his essay The Nation in the Strike Zone and Reality at the Bat: Bodies, Voices, and Spaces of Cuban Baseball in Sport Documentaries, Juan Carlos Rodriguez discusses how policy changes during the Special Period would ultimately undermine Castro’s ideal of Cuban baseball. In order to stave off economic stagnation, the Cuban government invited Western businesses to invest in the country. On the island that had been so sealed off from the world, a door was suddenly creaking open. Meanwhile, Cuban families turned to the black market to put food on the table.

“I spent my days picking tomatoes and onions and selling them door to door,” Fernandez told Dan Le Batard of the Miami Herald during his rookie season. I would make a lot of money. Four dollars. That’s a lot of money over there. I was really, really poor. But compared to others? Not so poor. I’d walk the 30 minutes to and from the stadium on the street in my cleats because I had only one other pair of shoes, and I didn’t want to ruin my going-out shoes.”

The wave of defections began in 1991, a year before Fernandez was born. Arrojo, Ordonez, Orlando and Livan Hernandez, Jose Contreras. Million-dollar contracts and greater competition beckoned. As Cuba gradually opened over the course of the nineties and oughts, more players began to make their way to the United States.

Jose Fernandez’ salary in his final season was $2.4 million. Because he went to high school in Florida and was selected in the amateur draft, he was subject to different rules than the ones that governed his Cuban peers who defected after school age. Fernandez debuted in the middle of a boom of Cuban defectors. Yasiel Puig, who also debuted in 2013, had signed out of Cuba for $42 million over seven years. Jose Abreu, who signed before the 2014 season, got six years and $68 million.

Puig and Abreu were relative mysteries compared to Fernandez, who came up through the same pipeline that American prospects do. But timing is everything. Now, Cuban prospects under 25 are subject to strict signing limits. It feels crass to write about money in a story about Jose Fernandez, but the money matters. The money is one of the things that separated his life in America from his life in Cuba, selling produce door-to-door.

Of course money wasn’t the only thing Fernandez got in America. He got a community. He was as Cuban as Puig, Abreu and company—with a harrowing story of defection and friends and loved ones still back home on the island who remained unreachable no matter how much money or influence he had. But he was also Cuban-American. A citizen. Part of an ex-pat community that had been blossoming in Florida for sixty years as Fidel Castro led their homeland, just ninety miles away, deeper into socialism and authoritarianism.

But even that began to change in recent years. While Fernandez was pitching for the Marlins, the American and Cuban governments were finally beginning to dismantle the decades-old embargo. People and goods were beginning to travel more easily back and forth. When Fernandez was a kid, he couldn’t watch MLB games. Now Cubans can jerry-rig satellites to pick them up from Florida, or buy USB drives in the street with the previous week’s slate. And if they wanted to watch their countrymen, they had to. A generation of Cuban baseball talent was departing the island en masse—leaving the Serie Nacional in its own Special Period.

Castro lived to be ninety. He changed the course of human history. He killed people and he turned Cuban neighborhoods into dens of spying and mistrust. He built schools and hospitals and the baseball machine that produced Jose Fernandez. When Castro passed away earlier this month, plenty of people still believed the myth that he himself had once been a promising pitching prospect, a myth Castro did not exactly try to dispel.

Jose Fernandez was not a myth. He was real. He was born in Villa Clara in 1992. He died in Miami this year, 2016. He lived the best and worst of Cuba and the best and worst of America. He was a ballplayer who was born as Cuban baseball—insular, mysterious, sui generis— reached its summit, and lived as Cuban baseball slowly became something the entire world could behold. He was a magnificent and joyful pitcher. He was, by all accounts, a loving person and a beloved one. We didn’t love him as his mother, and we didn’t feel the pain she did at his loss. But she was right: we did love him. That’s all anyone can do.

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