‘Look where I am right now’: How Franmil Reyes became a big-league slugger — and the ‘Fun Guy’
Zack Meisel 3h ago 3
As Roberto Pérez changed into dress clothes in the corner of the visitors clubhouse, Franmil Reyes took center stage. Before an audience of teammates gorging on the postgame spread, Reyes stood up from the dinner table and acted out a sequence from that night’s game.
Reyes, a 6-foot-5 behemoth who ranks 346th in the majors in sprint speed, had the clubhouse howling as he mimicked the disappointment Pérez demonstrated about failing to advance a base on an errant pitch.
Reyes has always been the biggest. He has often been the loudest. And he has usually been the one enjoying himself the most.
Yasiel Puig and Carlos Santana poke fun at how much Reyes covets his canary yellow Lamborghini and at how much he talks, his booming baritone echoing throughout the clubhouse on a daily basis. They cackle when he squeezes into his denim shorts that stop a couple of inches shy of his knees. In San Diego, Reyes developed a reputation for targeting the high notes in Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You” in the dugout.
“You see a guy like that and you don’t really think ‘teddy bear’ right off the bat,” said Indians reliever Phil Maton, who also played with Reyes on the Padres. “He’s just a huge dude, a ton of power, very intimidating. But you couldn’t find a nicer guy.”
He pumps his fist when he trots around the bases after one of his signature scoreboard-spooking homers. He laughs at himself after he hustles down the line for an infield single, only to be replaced by a pinch-runner. He smiles when Puig’s taunting interrupts his train of thought as he reaches the climax of a harrowing family tale.
And on his way home from the ballpark, Reyes dons a white T-shirt that reads: “Fun Guy.” Given his journey, there’s no reason for him not to relish every moment of big-league life.
“All the sad moments, the hard moments that we went through,” Reyes said, “everything is in the past.”
As early as 4 a.m., Reyes’ mother, Dominga, would leave the house with her sister and her best friend’s mom. They rode a bus four hours to a province on the other side of the Dominican, near the border of Haiti, where markets imported avocados, beans, clothes and other goods from Miami and sold them for a pittance. The women shopped there, lugged all of their purchases home and Dominga peddled them in her town to turn a small profit.
On the return trip one day, they reached Azua, hometown of big-leaguers Maikel Franco and Franchy Cordero — Reyes’ former Padres teammate and one of his closest friends. The bus stopped as they arrived at a heated protest. As Reyes described it, people weren’t peacefully marching while toting signs. Instead, they lit wheels on fire and placed them in the street to block traffic.
So with the bus at an impasse, Dominga called her husband, Federico, who ditched work and drove about two hours to retrieve them. They were heading home on a highway with one narrow lane running in each direction. As they went around a curve, a truck veered across the dividing lines. Its left wheels spun up the side of their car, killing Reyes’ dad and aunt. Dominga and her friend’s mom were unharmed.
Reyes sports a tattoo of his father’s first name (which is also Reyes’ middle name) on each arm. Reyes and his wife, Marian, are expecting their first son — their fourth child — in November. That news prompted a wave of father-son memories to flood his mind.
“I’ve been waiting for my baby boy,” Reyes said, unable to hold back a smile.
Reyes can recall walking to a nearby river with his dad to wash the family’s clothes when they didn’t have running water in the house. He fondly remembers how his father would buy a big box of soda cans from the market and preside over dancing competitions. The kid in the neighborhood who displayed the flashiest moves earned a soda.
At Federico’s funeral, Reyes’ aunt was bawling as she asked, “How’s it going to be? Your father was a good person.” Reyes was 5 at the time and his younger brother Franklin — now a minor-leaguer in the White Sox system — was only 2. Reyes occasionally spotted his mother in tears, but she made a point to shield her emotions and to smile and laugh so her children would follow suit.
“She was always happy and laughing,” Reyes said. “I would say all of my happiness comes from my mom. She is my big inspiration.”
(Ken Blaze / USA Today)
After school, Reyes would walk to his grandpa’s house, situated beside the neighborhood’s main attraction, its baseball field. Kids in Sabana Grande de Palenque wanted to preserve their uniforms for their weekend games, so they convened at the field for weekday pickup games in clothing they didn’t mind dirtying. Usually, that meant just the bare essentials: nothing but boxer shorts. No shirt. No shorts or baseball pants. No shoes.
Reyes stood out back then, but he never figured baseball would become his career, even though longtime major-leaguer Juan Uribe once told the town’s mayor: “That little boy right there is gonna be big. He’s gonna be somebody in the future.”
Reyes regularly hung around the Padres’ Dominican complex, but only because it sat about five minutes from his home. He played baseball because it was fun and provided an escape from the harsh realities of a difficult upbringing, not because he ever thought he would launch home runs beyond the bullpens at Petco Park.
The day Reyes auditioned for the Padres, when he was 16, they offered him $700,000 to sign.
“Coming from a very poor family,” he said, “it was a big opportunity for me and for my family to start a new and better life.”
Uribe proved clairvoyant with his early praise, even though Reyes had his doubts, as recently as two years ago. He overhauled his hitting approach at High A in 2016, when he realized he didn’t have to yank every pitch to deposit the baseball over the fence. Pitchers constantly attacked him with offerings on the outside part of the zone, so he started to flex his muscles and drive the ball to the opposite field.
Reyes slugged a career-high 25 homers at Class AA San Antonio in 2017, but the Padres opted to leave him unprotected prior to the Rule 5 draft. Any team could have snagged him.
No team did.
“I was really sad,” he said. “I was really disappointed about baseball. I didn’t want to play anymore.”
His mother’s advice kept him motivated, and a few days later, the Padres called to invite him to big-league camp.
“You worked hard for it,” Dominga told him, “so when you go there, you can show them that they’re wrong. Don’t show them that you’re upset about it. Work hard and be prepared for the opportunity.”
That spring, Reyes smacked a pair of homers in his first 11 at-bats, but he suffered a bone bruise in his hand when he slid into third base during a game. So, he started the 2018 season at Class AAA El Paso, where he posted a 1.180 OPS over six weeks to earn his first promotion to the majors. The guy nicknamed “La Mole,” or “beast,” finally had a chance to showcase his elite power.
The Padres were the only organization Reyes ever knew, their roster stocked with friends who were also beginning their big-league odysseys. Reyes never had a chance to bid farewell to his teammates when he was traded this summer. His agent told him he was bound for either Cleveland or Tampa, so he stayed behind in San Diego and waited for the official word while the Padres traveled to Los Angeles for a series.
It didn’t take long for Reyes to fit in with a new group of teammates. About a week after the trade, following a win in Minnesota, Reyes, Puig, Pérez and Lindor engaged in a playful shouting match, in which everyone was teased at some point, in the center of the clubhouse.
“Franmil’s going to get along with just about anybody,” Maton said.
Adam Cimber, another former Padre, referred to Reyes as “a big goofball.” Terry Francona said Reyes reminds him of David Ortiz.
“When you walk in the room,” Francona said, “the smile or the laugh immediately puts you at ease. It’s that big teddy bear. He has a lot of resemblance to David at that age.”
Wrestling star John Cena paid the Padres a visit in support of his friend Logan Allen, another passenger on the San Diego-to-Cleveland transit. When he learned about Cena’s presence, Reyes urged the Padres to allow him to meet the WWE icon.
“When I saw that guy,” Reyes said, “I almost cried.”
Reyes detailed to Cena how WWE programming would air in his hometown every Saturday and Sunday. Kids would pray for their baseball games to end in swift fashion so they could sprint home and watch wrestling, often packed like sardines into one of the few living rooms in the neighborhood that contained a TV.
“John Cena in the Dominican is a big, big deal,” Reyes said. “I told him, ‘Growing up as a kid in the Dominican and seeing you on TV, I never thought this was going to happen.”
It required a persistent belief in his own ability, which contributed to his rise to the majors. And now, the Indians are banking on him pelting the center field trees at Progressive Field with home run balls for at least the next five years. That sounds like fun to the Fun Guy.
“Look where I am right now,” Reyes said, smiling and spreading his arms wide. “I never thought I was going to be a professional baseball player.”
