Rene Gayo is a mountain of a man in many ways, as big as Santa Claus and, to some, no less generous. As the Pirates' director of Latin American scouting, he is empowered to dramatically change people's lives -- exponentially, almost unimaginably -- with a mere handshake.
But it takes little to make this mountain melt. Ask Gayo, for instance, his most memorable moment in eight years in this role, including three with Cleveland.
"I'll never forget Rafael Perez," he recalls of the current Indians reliever he signed as a 19-year-old on Jan. 25, 2002, but had just seen the previous day. "There were some teams that had sent him away. The Yankees. The Marlins. So I go out and see him pitching one day against Edinson Volquez."
Perez threw a devastating slider, "the best I'd ever seen," a 70 on the scouting scale of 20-80, and Gayo approached him immediately afterward.
"I said, 'What do you want? Tell me the number.' And he said to me, 'I want $20,000.' I came back, 'Well, I'm going to give you $30,000.' And he hugged me ... "
Seems almost unimaginable now, but Gayo, the 46-year-old, American-born son of Cuban immigrants and a godfather-like figure in the large baseball component of this region, never even visited the Caribbean until after the Indians named him Latin director in 2000.
His Spanish is impeccable, and his gregarious personality a perfect fit for the fun-loving Latin culture. He can boom out a song in a crowded restaurant, stop his car to encourage dancing on a random street corner, and he can offer a saying or spin a tale for just about any situation he encounters.
Among his favorites: "In America, we live to work. Here, we work to live."
Gayo's boyhood home in Chicago was filled with Cuban refugees taken in by his parents, often dozens at a time, so the culture and language came easily. But his upbringing would become very much American, including a dabble of hockey to go with his baseball, and, at St. Mary's University in San Antonio a degree in economics.
Gayo often says that "I'm not God," but it surely must seem he is close to that in the eyes of some. The median income here is $2,850, and even a relatively low bonus of $10,000 for a failed stint in the Pirates' academy can make a life-changing difference.
"I don't look at it that way," he says. "If you look at it without emotions, yeah, I've got a lot of power in my hand everywhere I walk here. But I look at that as something to be very careful with. As soon as that creeps into your mind, you'll lose sight of what we're really doing here. I have to find people with ability, as well as people who have something inside the cap."
Gayo can oversee as many as six hours' worth of workouts in a day, within a nomadic itinerary that sees him flying alone to check out fledgling baseball countries such as Nicaragua or, in the hotbeds, getting driven to remote regions by his national scouts in hopes of finding a player no other team has seen.
(E-mail Dejan Kovacevic at dkovacevic(at)post-gazette.com)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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