Atlanta Braves’ Adonis Garcia is My Homeboy
By Colby Wilson
Adonis Garcia might be my favorite member of the current Atlanta Braves.
His skill is not commensurate with my admiration. Garcia is an undersized masher, a modern-day Matt Stairs if Stairs was right-handed, hadn’t broken into the big leagues until he was 30 years old and fudged his height (if Adonis is 5-9, I’m 7-2).
An eight-year old behind the wheel of a Maserati would be less adventurous than Garcia when he mans third base for the Braves, and his walk-rate is so soul-crushingly distressing that he makes Jeff Francoeur look patient by comparison.
I don’t care.
Sometimes he does this, and this is everything.
Adonis wasn’t supposed to be here; third base was supposed to belong to someone else this spring, only Adonis kept chugging along and hitting
jussssst
well enough to keep the wolves at bay and flashing the surprising power potential you wouldn’t expect from his (listed at) 5-9 frame that will occasionally bring grown men to tears.
His story is pretty, pretty good, to quote Larry David.
Garcia and a handful of other MLB hopefuls left Cuba in 2010, heading toward Cancun with a plan to set up shop in Nicaragua, establish residency and then latch on with a big-league ball club. Then…
"After some time in Nicaragua, according to Onelki Garcia, trouble arose when he and Adonis Garcia attempted to cross back into Mexico from Guatemala, in the Mexican border town of Tapachula.“We were given passports to get across the border in Guatemala,” he said, “but we had to run for many, many miles across the border in Guatemala. We were left on our own to face authorities. Another headache.”It got worse. Onelki Garcia said he and Adonis Garcia were taken to a motel in Tapachula and held at gunpoint by two men he believed were sent by (Miami-based agent Bart) Hernandez.“Every day was the story, `We’re going to pick you up tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow.’ We spent almost a month in that hotel,” he said."
Adonis and Onelki would later be stopped by border patrol, where the fake U.S. residency cards given to them by a different, non-MLB certified agent who also helped extricate them from the holed-up-in-a-Mexican-motel-at-gunpoint fiasco, would be confiscated. The duo would spend around 10 days in jail and wouldn’t make it to Miami, where Adonis’ wife was living and his pseudo-agent awaited, until six months after he left Cuba.
Ten days in a Mexican jail after being caught with a fake residency card is just about the most terrifying travel misadventure I can imagine that’s not been featured in an Eli Roth movie. I’d never leave the country again.
But that’s not stopping Adonis. In February, repping Tigres de Aragua from Venezuela, Adonis faced off against his younger brother Jose Adolis, who still represents Cuba, in this year’s Caribbean Series in the Dominican Republic. It was the first time the two had seen each other in nearly six years.
Appreciate Adonis Garcia for what he is—the maximization of low expectations. The Braves aren’t supposed to be anything in 2016; Adonis Garcia was supposed to be a Quadruple-A player for the duration of his career, a career that he scraped together after fleeing his homeland and enduring nomadic hell trying to get to America. That he’s even a big-league starter is an amazing accomplishment.
Next: Measuring Julio Teheran for Red Sox fans
He’s a flawed, imperfect, joyous player straight out of the Juan Uribe playbook and I love him.