Drayer: Mariners’ Manny Acta details difficulties many young players in baseball are facing now
Apr 20, 2020, 4:04 PM | Updated: 5:52 pm
Manny Acta estimates he has spent 15 summers away from his family due to baseball. (AP)
(AP)
Being home for the first time in April for many, many years, Mariners third base coach Manny Acta is going through a lot of the same feelings and emotions many in baseball are experiencing.
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Like others he’s watching Netflix, taking the extra time to re-engage with his passion in reading and getting in his workouts. And like his fellow Mariners coaches, he has been assigned a number players to check in with on a regular basis with the emphasis on calling, not just texting or communicating via social media.
These conversations are different from conversations he would have during a season or even during an offseason. He is grateful the priority has been put on going beyond digital with the correspondence.
“It’s the human element of it, which is great,” he said Monday morning from his home in Florida. “You are reaching out, finding out what’s going on with them, if their family has been affected, and I think it goes a very long way.”
Unlike his fellow Mariners coaches, Acta has a second, much longer list of players to keep track of as vice president of baseball operations of the Estrellas Orientales of the Dominican Winter League, a team he is also a minority owner of. These players spread out over the globe, some in the DR, others with teams of various leagues throughout the world this time of year. For those who play for MLB clubs and the Latin American Mariners, he is concerned about what happens when baseball restarts.
“A lot of those guys had to go home, which is probably a tougher situation than we have here in the states,” he said. “What happens when they come back from all these countries? Will they have to be quarantined for another two weeks and fall behind? Hopefully we can clear this hurdle and these guys are going to be OK.”
Acta has long been an advocate for the Latin American ballplayer. I remember first talking to him about the challenges they faced when he Washington Nationals manager and came to Seattle for an interleague series in 2005. Back then, well before the days of organizational language labs, Acta was emphasizing the importance of young Latin Americans learning English. While a lot has changed since then, some things have not.
“I’ve been hearing a lot of people bring up the subject if we have to play and be quarantined or be away from our family for three or four months, how many guys won’t be able to do that?” Acta said, referring to a potential plan where baseball would isolate in Arizona later this summer in order to get some sort of season in.
“I just look back at every single one of those guys,” he said, referring to the Latin American players. “Every single one of them has gone through that.”
Acta estimated that he himself once spent 15 summers in a row away from his family, five as a minor league player and the others in organizational coaching jobs.
“It’s not that I wanted to, it was the situation,” he said, admitting that he felt guilty for the time away from his family. “A lot of players come over here and play in the minor leagues, they don’t see their mom and dad, you are not gong to be able to fly your kids. I’m not saying it’s good or it’s nice for everybody but that’s the same thing that we have to go through from Day 1 in baseball… I hope this brings some empathy to those guys that have been going through that in the minors.”
The Mariners have kept a small group of young Venezuelan players in Arizona because of not only the coronavirus outbreak but also the political situation at home. Acta hopes to see a level of empathy in particular for these players.
“They don’t know when they are going to see their mom and dad,” he said. “This gives them the best chance to stay healthy, stay in shape, but it’s really hard. We all went through that and I just hope it brings awareness to what somebody goes through in this business.”
In addition to looking out for his group of players, Acta has been busy filming public service videos encouraging people to stay home in his native DR. While there is a quarantine rule and 6 a.m. to 5 p.m. curfew in place, Acta reports the government has had trouble getting people to respect the orders. The situation is quite different there than in the US.
“A lot of people have to come out today just to get their bread of tomorrow,” he said. “It’s easy for me to stay here hunkered up with my family, buy groceries and not go out for 15 days. You can’t ask people who live in poverty to close yourself off in a small house with six kids, not get a paycheck and not having any food to eat.”
Acta said that for many reasons the orders are being ignored. Some in the country don’t understand the severity of the virus or even the term “pandemic.” Others don’t believe what they have heard about the disease, or are just ignoring it because of their personal situation.
“I’m afraid what can happen there the next couple of weeks,” Acta said. “I have empathy for a lot of those people because I grew up over there and saw the poverty in some of those families. It’s not easy, but in the same token we are all going to have to make sacrifices in order to stop it.”
For now, his sacrifice is easy. Staying home isolated with his wife and books for a month has given him the realization that he will do OK in retirement, he said to reporters with a laugh. He is also heartened by the approach that he has seen the Mariners take in this situation particularly with the young Venezuelan players in Arizona and a small group of Dominican players that were kept in the US as well.
“Those kids could be in a really tough place,” he pointed out. “It’s the right thing to do. Our organization is top notch. The way John Stanton, Kevin (Mather) and Jerry (Dipoto) and Scott (Servais) deal with our coaches and the people, the human being, it’s outstanding. We could have said, ‘Hey, go home, we are closing it all down,’ but the human part of the game, these guys take it to the next level and I’m proud.”
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