Raffy

Rafael Palmeiro Returns To His Childhood Neighborhood and Reflects On His Early Years

“This is where I started, Patrick.”

Rafael Palmeiro is standing in the baking Florida sun next to a baseball diamond in Roberto Clemente Park in North Miami. He is talking to his oldest son, Patrick.

Roberto Clemente Park is within two blocks of the three different homes that Palmeiro, his mother and father, and his two brothers lived in shortly after they fled to the United States from Cuba more than three decades ago, when he was six.

The park was the epicenter of Palmeiro’s universe as a boy. It’s where the Oriole first baseman learned the game of baseball and honed his extraordinary skills under the benevolent tutelage of his father, Jose.

“This is what I knew for my childhood,” he says of the baseball diamond. “This is all I knew. Baseball. Baseball and school.”

Palmeiro hadn’t been back to the field of his youthful dreams in many years. His son had never been there.

The park has changed since Palmeiro blasted home runs off of older boys, swatting balls over a row of trees and onto the rooftops of houses about 300 feet away as a kid of 12. The diamond has been reconfigured and turned around 90 degrees. Basketball courts have been moved away from the road. A street that once ran through the park has disappeared. Murals commemorating the life of the great Clemente have been painted on the side of a building in the park. But the grocery store once owned by Palmeiro’s cousin still stands across the street from the field.

And the rough, red infield dirt where Palmeiro originally donned his first baseman’s mitt at the urging of his sage father still looks the way it did when he was a boy.

“See how beat up this is,’ he says of the field to Patrick, who has had the luxury of practicing with his father in major league parks like Camden Yards. “You’re used to fielding on big league fields where it’s nice and smooth. I learned how to play on this kind of stuff right here.”

The North Miami neighborhood where he was reared might still be considered low income, as it was when the Palmeiros resided here, but it is clean and comfortable and relatively safe, populated by Cuban and Puerto Rican immigrants who live in small, stucco bungalows.

When Jose Palmeiro arrived on U.S. turf with his wife and three boys, he brought nothing with him, save the clothes he wore and the desire to give his sons a chance to grow up free.

“We had nothing,” says Rafael. “We weren’t allowed to bring anything but what we had on our bodies. No clothing. No money. Nothing. Everything my dad had, we left behind. As far as I can remember, we were pretty well off [in Cuba]. We weren’t poor, and we weren’t rich, but my dad made it happen. And we had food on the table all the time.”

But Jose Palmeiro was not happy with the political climate in Cuba, so he decided to move to a place where he felt his sons would have a better chance to prosper, even if it was a country where he couldn’t speak the language.

“He opposed Communism,” Palmeiro says of his father. “He opposed what Fidel Castro was bringing. He knew that for us to have any type of chance in life, we had to come here, to this country. He understood that.”

Jose Palmeiro took a job as a construction worker upon his arrival in Miami. And he taught his sons to play baseball.

Young Raffy, the second born, thrived on those lessons from his father. It was what he lived for. He’d return from school to the little white house his family rented on 33rd Street and eagerly await his father’s arrival from work so they could trek the two blocks to the diamond at Roberto Clemente Park to play ball.

“I can remember it like it was yesterday,” Palmeiro recalls. “I’d wait for him outside the house on the front steps with our baseballs and gloves and bats. He was soaking sweat, full of cement all over the place, under the sun for eight hours. If it had been me, it would have been hard for me to come home and go back out again like he did. I don’t know if it was his dream, or if he just enjoyed it or wanted us to — this is not the greatest neighborhoood, as you can see — if he wanted us to stay focused on baseball, and not be in tthe streets like a lot of our friends. A lot of the kids in school were getting into trouble with drugs, getting shot and stuff. I guess that was his thing: ‘Let’s keep them in baseball. I want to show them how to play the game, see if they get interested in it, and keep them off the streets.’”

Jose’s approach succeeded, especially with Raffy. The only street his son really knew was the one that rounded the bases of the diamond at Roberto Clemente Park.

When he was very young, he and his brothers played ball on the tiny front yard of their home on 33rd Street, or in the road in front of another of their homes on 33rd Street, on the other side of the park. But a home run then merely meant hitting a ball about 20 yards into the neighbor’s property. Raffy quickly outgrew those dimensions.

Jose would hit balls to his sons in the field, mostly fly balls. But he had a sneaking suspicion that one day Raffy might eventually become a first baseman, so he also hit grounders to him at first base. Jose was prescient in a way that only a parent can be. Palmeiro was always a center or left fielder, throughout his days in Little League, at Miami’s Jackson High, at Mississippi State, in the minor leagues, and at the beginning of his major league career with the Chicago Cubs. It was only when he went to the Texas Rangers in 1989 that Palmeiro became a regular first baseman. But his father had had that inkling, back in the early 1970s. So he prepared his son for the day he thought he would become a first baseman.

Jose also must have known, somewhere in the nether reaches of his mind, that Raffy one day would be a Baltimore Oriole, because his baseball ethic was akin to that of the Oriole Way — practicing fundamentals over and over and over again.

“I tell Patrick all the time,” Palmeiro says, “that when I came to practice — I came to pay attention and to learn and to get better. And I tell him that the more you do it and the more focused you are now, the easier the game becomes later...And I always tell Patrick, ‘You can’t practice half speed, because when you play in a game, the game’s played at full speed. So if you don’t prepare at full speed, you’re not going to be ready. So why practice at a slower speed. Because then you get in a game, everything is so fast, you’re not going to be able to handle it.’ I always practice like it was a game. When I was taking batting practice, and my dad was pitching, I always imagined myself in a game, where I was hitting balls. In my mind, I was in a stadium hitting. So when I played in a game, it was like practice.”

For Palmeiro, practice made perfect.

He quickly was playing ball with boys much older than he was. Baseball became easy for him. The mellifluous swing that he has used to belt more than 500 home runs and almost 3,000 hits in his major league career is the same swing he first started using at Roberto Clemente Park.

“My swing — I don’t really have videotapes, but as far as I hear from my brothers and my dad and everybody else, the swing is still the same,” he says. “I had the same swing when I was 10. I was lucky that I stumbled onto it. I think my dad helped me with it, but it was one of those things where I stumbled onto something good, and I worked on it and I developed it. My dad understood what I was doing, and he made sure I stayed the course.”

His father, in fact, was the only coach the young Raffy learned from. “My dad was really the only one who understood what he was doing, what he was teaching me,” says the son. “A lot of coaches that I played for didn’t touch me. They understood. They said, ‘We’re not going to touch him.’”

When Palmeiro was a pre-teen, his father had earned enough money in his construction job to afford to purchase a little house in the neighborhood, on nearby 32nd Street. It was a one-story duplex. The Palmeiros lived in the back and rented out the front unit.

His mother, Maria, provided stability in the Palmeiro house. She was home every day and cooked meals for the four males in the family every night, after they returned from the ball field.

“My mother was always there for us,” says Palmeiro. “I know a lot of kids, even today, who come home and they don’t have a mom or dad there. I was fortunate. We didn’t have any money. My dad worked every day. My mom was home with us, making sure we had something to eat, clean clothes — just being a mom. We never ate out. Even today, my mom calls me every day [when the Orioles trained in nearby Ft. Lauderdale]. ‘Are you coming over,’ she’ll ask. ‘What can I fix for you tonight? What do you want to eat?’ And to me, anything she makes is great.”

Jose and Maria Palmeiro still own the duplex on 32nd Street, but they no longer live there. A few years ago their son, a major league star with a salary his Cuban-immigrant parents could never have fathomed when they came to the U.S., bought them a house on Biscayne Bay in the tony Miami Shores section of town, just a few miles north of Roberto Clemente Park.

There is perhaps some ironic harmony in the fact that Palmeiro began playing baseball in a park named in honor of a Hall of Fame player, one of the greatest ever to grace a baseball diamond. Clemente, a Puerto Rican, is the first Latin American player ever inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame, on August 6, 1973. Many suspect that Palmeiro will join Clemente in Cooperstown once his playing days are over.

When he was a boy, though, Palmeiro really didn’t know much about Clemente. His knowledge of the major leagues was focused on the team whose uniform he now wears, the Baltimore Orioles. Palmeiro and his brothers used to walk from their home down to 27th Street to Miami Stadium, which in those days was the Orioles’ spring training home. “We’d go to the ballpark till the sun went down,” he remembers. “I used to climb up the big old light towers and hang over the wall and watch batting practice. My brothers and I would take turns. If the balls went over the fence, we’d catch them. And those were the baseballs that we used to practice with.”

In those days Palmeiro would get his first glimpse of major league players, people like Eddie Murray and Cal Ripken, whom he would end up playing with in Baltimore, and Mark Belanger, Mike Flanagan and Scott McGregor.

He could learn from watching them and admire their skills. But they weren’t really heroes to him. Palmeiro, the boy, didn’t need to have heroes on a baseball diamond. He had one at home.

“People ask me all the time, who’s my hero or my idol growing up, and people think it’s a baseball player,” he explains. “It was my dad. I didn’t understand it, really, until I grew up and understood what he did. I don’t know if I could have done it. If I had to leave, going into a different country, not knowing the language, not knowing anybody, not having any money, with three little kids, no job, no where to live. I mean that takes a lot of guts, I think.”