Here's a story about a baseball player. A good one. Ubaldo Jimenez learned how to play ball on a dirt field, with nothing more than a few friends, a rock wrapped in socks and a tree branch. Now, the 26-year-old Dominican pitches for the Colorado Rockies and makes millions. His fastball consistently hits 96 miles per hour, the highest velocity in the major leagues. He is a contender for the Cy Young Award, the highest honor given to a Major League Pitcher.
You're no doubt wondering where this fits in on the School Notebook Blog. When he was 16, Jimenez turned down a signing bonus of $20,000 offered by the New York Mets so he could finish his education, a rarity in the Dominican Republic.
From Jeff Passan of Yahoo! Sports:
His father, Ubaldo Sr., drove a city bus. His mother, Ramona, worked as a nurse. In the impoverished Dominican Republic, this was life-changing money, the sort nobody turns down.
"My parents said no," Jimenez said. "They didn't want me to sign until I finished high school. I always respected my parents, and I knew it was for my own good, so I didn't sign. I always figured I was going to be a doctor anyway."Today, the Colorado Rockies hurler throws a baseball harder than every other starter in the major leagues, and his nonpareil arm isn't nearly his most intriguing aspect. That would be who Jimenez is in spite of - and perhaps because of - where he grew up.
The Dominican is an educational wasteland. Less than half the country's children attend high school, and a significantly lower number graduates. The country spends a little more than 2 percent of its gross domestic product on public education, about 60 percent less than the United States. The culture swallows up generations of youth, and the poverty cycle continues unabated.
Baseball offers an escape for boys who now see that more than 10 percent of Major League Baseball players are of Dominican descent, and so it's nothing for a buscon - a talent agent of sorts - to snatch a 12-year-old out of school, place him in a baseball academy for four years and farm him out to teams as a 16-year-old international free agent. Though no official statistics are kept on high-school graduation among Dominican players, it's safe to say at most a handful of the 128 who played in the major leagues last year earned a diploma.
