How the Pirates landed Starling Marte, and the White Sox missed out

Juan de La Rosa poses with his children. (Michael Henninger/Post-Gazette)

That smiling face above belongs to Juan de La Rosa, the man who coached Starling Marte for 10 years in the Dominican Republic, who tried desperately to get a major-league team to take interest in this overaged and underfed kid back in the mid-2000s.

Marte’s mother died when he was 9, and his father worked day and night in a slaughterhouse in their town, Villa Mella, Dominican Republic. Marte and his sisters moved in with his grandmother. de La Rosa, who everybody calls “Pelotero,” helped build Marte into a ball player.

Finally, in 2007, Pelotero found Ramon “Papiro” Genao, a buscone (Dominican trainer/agent), who was willing to try to get Marte signed by a major-league organization. Marte already was 18, two years older than the ideal signing age. But Papiro managed to get him a tryout for a Chicago White Sox scout.

At that tryout, a former vengeful rival buscone walked up holding a gun ...

“I was scared, and I was crying,” Marte says, “because that was my opportunity, and I did not know if I would get another one.”

For the rest of this story, and how the Pirates signed Marte two weeks later, click this or the image below to read J. Brady McCollough’s masterpiece that dives into the Dominican baseball machine, a circus centered on risk and reward and boys playing baseball. There’s so, so much to learn. The story went online today and is running all week in the pages of the Post-Gazette.

Click the image above ​for our special multimedia presentation: J. Brady McCollough's and Michael Henninger's 10-day journey inside the Dominican Republic baseball machine. ​​(​Photo by Michael Henninger; design by Ben Howard)