The seamed leather ball is thrown so fast, the air hisses in its wake.
From the lightly gnawed fingertips on Ricky Romero’s left hand to home plate, it travels 60 feet, 6 inches. Feet and inches. No metric conversion in this game. Baseball is as American as apple pie and imperial measures. Or in Romero’s case, as American as carne asada and chain migration.
For the 26-year-old Blue Jays pitcher, that distance isn’t simply the path to a ball or strike.
Each time Romero — who speaks Spanish at home and English on the mound — winds up and steps toward a batter, it’s as if he’s completing a journey his father began 31 years ago when he bolted, undetected, from Mexico into Texas. A very different field of dreams.
At 17, Ricardo Sr. paid a smuggler to drive him and a few friends into El Paso before catching a bus to California.
“It was crazy, with my dad crossing illegally,’’ Romero says. “My dad’s goal was to come to the United States for a better life. So when he got that chance, he wasn’t going to let go of it.”
Neither would his son squander chances.
Ricardo Romero worked hard — labourer, sewing machine repairman, trucker. He married young and raised four athletic children with wife Sandra in the unincorporated township of East Los Angeles. The infamous — and misunderstood — East L.A.
It’s a city of 126,000, nearly all of them Hispanic, a quarter of them living in poverty. Ricky Romero would defy the odds — and the guns-and-gangs stereotype — to earn a college baseball scholarship, represent his country overseas, crack the major leagues, sign a multimillion-dollar contract, romance Miss USA and in his spare time, visit schools to promote education and physical activity.
“It sounds ridiculous,’’ says anthropologist Alexandro Gradilla, associate professor and chair of Cal State Fullerton’s Department of Chicano and Chicana Studies, marvelling at Romero’s success.
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