Tovar poised to be Rockies’ next star at short
Ezequiel Tovar was a budding baseball prodigy when he left his hometown of Maracay, Venezuela, hopped on an airplane for the first time and flew to Margarita Island.
That’s where he attended the Roberto Vahlis Baseball Academy — one of Venezuela’s premier youth baseball training grounds.
Tovar was all of 12 years old.
At 13, as political and economic turmoil erupted in Venezuela, Tovar flew 1,200 miles from home to live and train at Vahlis’ new academy in the Dominican Republic, hoping to be seen and evaluated by major league scouts. Now the gifted player, mature well beyond his 21 years, is poised to lead a wave of young talent the Rockies hope will transform them into contenders in the coming years.
As spring training opens Wednesday in Scottsdale, Ariz., Tovar is slotted as the club’s starting shortstop. More than that, the hope is he will follow in the footsteps of Troy Tulowitzki and Trevor Story and become an all-star.
“With Tovar, you see a high level of confidence and self-assurance of who he is as a player,” said manager Bud Black, who usually tempers his comments regarding young players. “It’s somewhat rare to see somebody that young play with that ease of comfortability, knowing that he’s a talented player.
“Physically, he has the tools to play a demanding position. And we all think the bat will play at the big league level. He’s got developing power and we think the bat-to-ball skills are there as well.”
Tovar made his major league debut Sept. 23 vs. San Diego and played nine games, slashing .212/.257/.333. He hit his first home run in Game 162, at Dodger Stadium off future Hall of Famer Clayton Kershaw. At 21 years and 53 days old, Tovar became the youngest position player to make his debut in franchise history and the second-youngest overall. Righthanded pitcher Marcus Carvajal made his debut at 20 years, 230 days in 2005.
Tovar is acutely aware he’ll be in the spotlight this spring.
“I feel all of that but I don’t want to call it pressure, I want to look at it as an opportunity,” he said during a recent phone interview from the Rockies’ complex in Boca Chica, Dominican Republic, where Rolando Fernandez, vice president of international scouting and development, translated.
“I know (spring training) is a small window, so I have to compete, I have to earn that position,” Tovar continued. “I want to do it the same way I did it in the minor leagues. Enjoy the process and be fearless and compete. I want to have fun.”
He certainly had a ball last year in his first bigleague camp. Tovar was 11 for 20 with two doubles, three home runs and seven RBIS in 10 Cactus League games, earning the Rockies’ Abby Greer Award, given to the spring training MVP.
Fernandez has seen Tovar blossom from a kid into a young man.
“I went to the Roberto Vahlis Academy in the Dominican with our scout Frank Roa,” Fernandez recalled. “We went to see another, eligible player. Tovar was just 14 and he was just 5-foot-8, 145 pounds at the time. But Roa told me that he had been following Tovar and he was the best player in the academy.
“We decided to stay close to him and continued to evaluate him until his eligible age.”
Fernandez signed Tovar for $800,000 on Aug. 1, 2017 — his 16th birthday. Tovar stood 5-11 and 165 pounds. He’s now 6-feet, 190 pounds.
“When he was so young, Ezequiel had the signs of becoming a (good) player, and his fielding skills were elite, but you never know what a kid will become when he’s that young,” Fernandez said. “But he showed a lot of baseball IQ and instincts and he was very professional for such a young kid. When we scouted him, we knew he was mature, but in reality, we didn’t know how advanced he was.”
Rockies general manager Bill Schmidt, then the club’s director of scouting, first saw Tovar play when he was just 15. Tovar reminded Schmidt of a young Omar Vizquel, the 11-time Gold Glove shortstop from Venezuela, who just so happens to be Tovar’s role model.
At 16, facing players usuallytwo years older than him, Tovar slashed .262/.369/.354 in 35 games in the Dominican Summer League. He was a switch hitter at the time but the Rockies decided to have him hit exclusively from the right side.
At 17, playing for the short-season low-a Boise (Idaho) Hawks, where the average player is nearly 21, Tovar slashed .253/.318/.313. The power was absent — he hit just two homers in 243 plate appearances — but his fielding remained top-notch, and it was clear the Rockies had something special.
“When I saw Tovar in Boise, I was like, ‘Wow!” Schmidt recalled. “We knew he could field, and we thought the bat had a chance.”
All of Tovar’s travels and experiences, on and off the baseball diamond, have seasoned him.
Tracy Poff, a longtime high school teacher in Boise, played a significant role in Tovar’s development. Poff, along with her sons, Mason and Landon, hosted Tovar when he made his American professional debut with the Hawks in 2019.
Poff calls Tovar “a special person” and is convinced he’ll become a special player.
“He’s quietly confident and he’s charismatic,” said Poff, whom Tovar calls “My American mom.”
“He’s been away from home since he was 12 and he’s worked so hard, so there is no one more deserving. I can see the confidence. Just watching him playing in those MLB games last season, he looked like he’d been there for 20 years.”
Last year, Tovar married Laura, his longtime girlfriend. The two began dating when he was 16 and Laura just 15.
“Ezequiel has this fun-loving, gentle side,” Poff said. “He’s such a sweetheart.”
But on the diamond, Tovar turns tough. And last year toughened him up some more as he experienced the first major setback of his career. He slashed .318/.386/.545 with 13 home runs through 66 games with Double-a Hartford but then suffered a groin injury that led to more than two months on the injured list.
The injury tested his patience and demanded that he make some changes.
“I’m 100% healthy now,” Tovar said. “I had to learn more about my body and work in rehab and do things I had never done before. I had to strengthen my body and work the smaller muscles.”
During his brief stint with the Rockies last fall, Tovar didn’t set the majors on fire, but he made a strong impression.
“He’s a very mature 21-year-old,” Black said. “You know that there is just something that’s within him. He’s focused and determined. It’s refreshing to see someone so young go about his business in such a professional way.”