IN MEMORIAM
Two weeks before Pedro Gomez embarked on a historic and emotional journey to Cuba, his father drew him a map from memory.
It was 1999, and Pedro was about to cover the first-ever game between a Major League Baseball team and a Cuban All-Star team, a bit of baseball diplomacy aimed at thawing the Cold War chill that for four decades had isolated the United States from the proud island nation just 90 miles off the coast of Florida.
Pedro himself was born of the island, but not on it. His parents left everything behind – every photograph, every family heirloom, every piece of jewelry – and fled to the United States so their son could be born free from Fidel Castro’s communist regime. His mother lied, saying she was six months pregnant, not nine, so she would be allowed to make the trip. Pedro was born three weeks later in Miami.
Now he was about to become the first person in his family to return to Cuba, and his father had drawn him a map to their family home in case Pedro got a chance to visit.
Pedro loved the game of baseball, not just for its history and its intrinsic beauty, but also because it bridged his family’s new culture and their old one and because, in cases like this, it could bring people together and make the world a little smaller.
Baseball, along with his family, were his life’s passions, and both worlds were left reeling by his unexpected death at age 58 at his Phoenix home Sunday.
As a seasoned baseball writer and columnist for The Arizona Republic, Pedro was confident in his ability to cover the balls and strikes of the Cuba story as well as the historic, political and cultural implications. But as a journalist he was somewhat reluctant to become a part of the story.
But in many ways, his story was the story.
I was his editor at the time, and I can still hear the emotion in his voice as he dictated one of his stories to me over the phone. I remember thinking, here is the son of Cuban refugees calling from a once-forbidden island, talking with the grandson of Italian immigrants to put a story in a newspaper guided by the First Amendment.
It felt like the most American thing in the world, and somehow it did seem as though we were indeed making the world a little smaller.
“I woke up this morning in Havana, an alluring city I have dreamed about all my life for one special reason — if not for a matter of days, it would have been my birthplace,” Pedro wrote.
“Immediately, my thoughts were consumed by my two sons (his daughter had not yet been born) and wife. I could barely contain myself as I viewed my first Cuban sunrise, for this is a land where my roots are deeply embedded.
“I thought back to my grandparents and parents, who made this their home before fleeing Fidel Castro’s communist regime in the early 1960s. How they must have grappled with so much pain and personal anxiety as they abandoned their homeland 36 years ago when John F. Kennedy’s administration offered an alternative in the United States.
“The knot in my stomach tightened as the thoughts raced through my mind. The dawn’s light solidified in my mind how fortunate my family is to have been given the chance to pursue dreams in the United States, where hard work makes a difference.”
Growing up, Pedro had heard stories about the old man who lived in the apartment upstairs from his parents in Cuba. The man was a fervent communist.
“The old man, as they remember him, mockingly asked my young parents, ‘’Why are you leaving Cuba?’
“My mother, then pregnant with me, scornfully told him, ‘Because I want this baby inside of me to know what it is to live in a land that is free.’ The neighbor then told my mother that by the time I reached kindergarten the world would be dominated by communism.
”’I’ll never forget how I cried the day you went off to kindergarten,’’ my mother, Marta Elena, has told me often. ‘I remember every detail of that man’s face and the exchange we had. Leaving was absolutely the right decision, one we never looked back at.’”
Using his father’s map, Pedro was able to not only find the home his parents had left 36 years earlier, but to talk to the old man, Rodolfo Fernandez-Guzman, who by then was 84.
”All I said was that the child inside your mother might grow up to be a great scientist, a ballplayer, a good communist, or whatever,” Guzman told him. ”But that the child should be able to decide for itself. Now look at you, you’re a grown man with a family of your own…The world gives us so many different turns, sometimes it works for some and not for others. For you, it seems to have worked fine. But who knows where you would be if you had been born here?”
Pedro knew the answer to that, and he pulled no punches.
He was appalled by the poverty and disparity between the haves and have nots, and he even crafted one of his columns in the form of a personal letter to President Bill Clinton, asking him to lift the embargo that had punished the Cuban people for so long.
“Having witnessed the way their lives are a shell of what a human being deserves is cause enough for any person to want the same liberties and chances we enjoy for the rest of the human race,” he said.
Pulling punches was not in Pedro’s DNA. As a journalist, he believed in telling the truth, even if the truth was not popular. Especially if the truth was not popular.
On the eve of Game 7 of the 2001 World Series, Gomez used his column to call out Arizona Diamondbacks ace Curt Schilling for his selfishness.
“The past few days also have offered the country insight into Schilling’s little secret, the one baseball insiders have known for years, but one that has rarely surfaced publicly,” Pedro wrote.
“Schilling is something of a con man, someone more intent on polishing his image through whatever means available, which usually has meant attaching himself to certain members of the media and leaking insights he wants in the open.”
The column infuriated Schilling, as well as a lot of Diamondbacks fans.
Years later, when Pedro spoke to a group of Republic summer interns I supervised, I asked him about why he felt it was important to write that column at that time.
He said that somebody, somewhere always knows what the truth is, and they’re waiting to see if you as a journalist are willing to tell it. If you do, they’ll respect you, and if you don’t, you’re just another hack. In the end, you have to be able to look at yourself in the mirror and live with who you see.
Those were inspiring words to that group of young journalists, many of whom said meeting Pedro was the highlight of their internships.
Many of the tributes since his death on Sunday have mentioned the impact he had on young people, whether it was speaking to a college class or giving a young journalist just the compliment he or she needed to keep them going.
When my wife became a teacher at a Title I school in Mesa, where almost all of the students were sons and daughters of immigrants — or even immigrants themselves — and many spoke Spanish in their homes, my wife asked if he’d consider coming and talking to her fourth-grade class.
That a man who looked like them – or at least their fathers and tios – and who grew up speaking Spanish the way they did, could become famous and be on TV, was more than just an inspiration. It was proof that they could do the same thing if they worked hard enough.
To them, he was their bridge to a better life, and building bridges is something that Pedro did best.
In 2013, Yoenis Cespedes, an outfielder with the Oakland A’s just in his second full year in the majors, won the Home Run Derby by beating the best hitter in the game, Bryce Harper. It was the first time the derby had been won by a player who hadn’t been selected to play in the All-Star game.
Cespedes, who had just defected from Cuba two years earlier by taking a harrowing 23-hour speedboat ride to the Dominican Republic, was still struggling to learn English.
For Pedro, who was covering the Derby for ESPN, this was a problem with an easy solution, though difficult to pull off on the air. He would act as both interviewer and translator. He would state his question in English, translate it into Spanish for Cespedes, then translate Cespedes’ answer back into English for the audience.
It was the most American thing in the world, the son of Cuban immigrants helping a Cuban refugee tell a story of triumphant joy, a story that should have made — and in many ways did make — the world seem a little smaller.
Not everyone saw it that way.
The backlash from the racists and the nativists was horrific.
Years later when I asked him about it, he shook his head and said it was sad.
In the end, he said, people forget that baseball is just a game, and the players are all human.
And in the end, it was Pedro’s humanity that set him apart from any other journalist I’ve known.
After Pedro left The Republic for ESPN, we stayed in touch. When my son was considering a sports management career, we went to lunch with Pedro, who told him that all the best minds in sports had degrees in economics, so that became my son’s major at the University of Southern California. When Pedro would be in LA covering a story at USC, he would text Jack and even take him to lunch.
When Jack graduated with his econ degree, I texted Pedro to thank him for allowing my son to say that his father had at least one cool and famous friend.
When Pedro’s son Rio signed to play baseball at my alma mater, the University of Arizona, he texted me almost pitch-by-pitch updates from his games. I thrilled with him as the Wildcats won six elimination games in the 2016 College World Series, and my heart sank with his as they lost the seventh and final game. And then my heart soared again as Rio took the mound with the Boston Red Sox minor league organization, something any father would be proud to claim.
Over the last year or so we texted every now and again to check up on each other and see how we were coping with the pandemic. The last time I actually spoke with him was January 2020, when he called to compliment me on a series I’d written about a young Black man who’d been unjustly singled out for prosecution in a high school football hazing scandal.
That something I did would earn the respect of a truth-teller whom I respected so much meant the world to me. I’m still trying to process the fact that he’s gone, but this I know:
Pedro Gomez didn’t just make the world smaller. He made it better. The lives he touched with the truth will swear to it. And there’s nothing more American than that.