The brief, fearless life of Yordano Ventura
He was fearless. All of those years mired in heartbreaking poverty, his father half a world away, the other boys bigger and stronger and better at playing the game he loved – they shaped Yordano Ventura into what he was up to the moment he died early Sunday. His choice wasn’t binary. He could’ve been a million things. He chose fearlessness, in every aspect of his life, on the baseball field and off, because nothing else felt quite as right.
Fearlessness gave a 5-foot-10, 140-pound child who quit school at 14 to help his mother pay the bills the chutzpah to show up at a tryout with the Kansas City Royals. And once they bet the pittance of $28,000 on his right arm, fearlessness drove him through his insecurities and the doubts of those who disregarded him because he was a runt. And by the time he made the major leagues, where he introduced himself by throwing a fastball harder than any starting pitcher ever had been recorded doing so, fearlessness became Yordano Ventura’s raison d’etre, for worse on occasion, mostly for better.
Because from the fights he instigated to the moments shared with friends in which his utter lack of damns given made the night, Ventura was the person so many want to be, unencumbered by others’ expectations, driven purely by his own. Some thought it selfish. Those who knew him just saw it as Yo being Yo. And it scared them because they feared he was prone to situations like Sunday, when he was driving a white Jeep down a Dominican highway late at night, an activity best suited for the fearless.
Nobody knows whether Ventura was speeding or drinking or where he was going or what played a role in the accident that took his life at 25 years old. Just that the Jeep wound up on its left side, the front windshield caved in, the top ripped open, Ventura’s body in a swath of grass on the side of the road, another baseball player taken too early, another one-vehicle tragedy with devastating consequences.
They called it Black Sunday in the D.R. Andy Marte, once among the finest prospects in the game, died in a crash, too, at 33 years old. A former major leaguer and a current one, separated by 40 miles as the crow flies, gone in separate accidents. After Jose Fernandez’s death in a drunken-boating accident in September. And Oscar Taveras’ in a drunken-driving accident in 2014. Frequency makes it no easier, no more palatable. There is no salve for young men dying needlessly. Only the instinct to celebrate the life as though it might numb the pain.
It’s what the Royals did Sunday. Fans gathered at Kauffman Stadium, where they found Danny Duffy and Christian Colon, two of Ventura’s teammates, offering hugs. Dayton Moore, the general manager who signed Ventura as a teenager and thought so much of him he guaranteed him $23 million in a contract extension less than two years ago, celebrated Ventura’s willingness to sow chaos as a character trait that made everyone better, because it forced the organization and those who knew him and loved him to understand what drove him.
“He’s always had a zest for life,” Moore said. “A freshness. A fearlessness. He’s really been the same guy from Day 1 as far as his character traits and what made him special. A very passionate human being. Loved to compete. No doubt he challenged us, but that made us better.”
Even more, Moore said, “Yordano had a great gift.” His right arm, physiologically speaking, didn’t make a whole lot of sense. Ventura never grew to 6-foot. The leverage that regularly accompanies triple-digit fastballs didn’t exist. When Ventura threw a baseball, the velocity looked so easy until the end of the delivery, when his pitching arm would recoil and his drive leg would swing around and almost turn him sideways. Orthodoxy never suited him particularly well.
He refused to oblige anyone’s customs. It’s why so many in baseball thought him a punk. Cursing out Adam Eaton, plunking Manny Machado, beefing with Jose Bautista – no sacred cows existed with Ventura, a bold place to be in a sport that’s a veritable bovine factory. Ventura had no time for that. He came from a place accessible by dirt roads, laden with potholes, wreathed with shacks, ravaged by poverty. His father split up with his mother and left for Germany when he was young, leaving him to play dutiful male. He made it, then he became rich, then he lived his life like he thought a rich man should. He could drink plenty, according to two friends who knew him, and as is customary in the D.R., where there are nearly 30 deaths per 100,000 people in car accidents per year – the highest number in the Western Hemisphere – he would drive.
If that weren’t the case Sunday – if it’s simply a terrible accident with no extraneous circumstances – that still doesn’t bring Ventura back. It still doesn’t lessen the loss, the shock, the sadness, the gut-wrenching truth that a man who’d seen the earth for but a quarter century deserved to see more.
In those 25 years, he left plenty of indelible moments by which to remember him. The world knows him for the seven scoreless innings he threw in Game 6 of the 2014 World Series, with a tribute to Taveras written in white on his royal-blue cap. Inside baseball, it’s more of the little moments, like in 2012, when on a backfield in Surprise, Ariz., the stars of the future for the Royals and Texas Rangers, who share the spring training complex there, pitted multiple teams against one another.
There were scores of future major leaguers on those fields, a half-dozen at least, maybe more, top prospects and future All-Stars, names we’ll know for years to come. And yet on that day, Yordano Ventura stood atop the mound, and it was like he was the Pied Piper. All the scouts and executives focusing on the prospects at the other fields heard a literal buzz over on Ventura’s field and meandered over to see who was creating it. They unsheathed their radar guns and saw the fastball tickling 100 and the major league-ready curveball and the changeup on which they could dream. And they knew they were staring at something special. They didn’t know what. Nobody could. But they knew the kid was different.
That’s how Yordano Ventura will be remembered inside baseball. He was little in a sport that deifies the big, loud in a sport that rewards submissiveness, self-assured in a sport designed to beat down even its best. After an inconsistent 2016, Ventura dedicated himself to a big 2017. In a conversation before Christmas, he told Moore he would win 18 games this year with 10 of the complete. He was bold. He was brash. He feared nothing. That’s why baseball loved Yordano Ventura. And that’s why baseball lost him.
Royals pitcher Yordano Ventura dies in car crash in Dominican Republic
Yordano Ventura, the hard-throwing and fearless right-hander who was a crucial part of two pennant-winning teams for the Kansas City Royals, was killed in a car accident in his native Dominican Republic on Sunday, the team confirmed on Sunday.
Ventura was 25.
Ventura was killed on the Juan Adrián highway in San Jose de Ocoa, according to Colonel Jacobo Mateo Moquete, director of communications for the military and police of the Dominican Republic.
Moquete said Ventura was the lone passenger in the vehicle.
Ventura started 93 games in his career with the Royals, posting a 38-31 record and 3.89 ERA, and going 27-18 in 2014-15, when the Royals won back-to-back American League pennants and the 2015 World Series. Ventura made nine postseason starts in those seasons.
Reporter Cristian Moreno, who cited the Dominican police, was the first to report the news.
Yordano Ventura, the hard-throwing and fearless right-hander who was a crucial part of two pennant-winning teams for the Kansas City Royals, was killed in a car accident in his native Dominican Republic on Sunday, the team confirmed on Sunday.
Ventura was 25.
Ventura was killed on the Juan Adrián highway in San Jose de Ocoa, according to Colonel Jacobo Mateo Moquete, director of communications for the military and police of the Dominican Republic.
Moquete said Ventura was the lone passenger in the vehicle.
Ventura started 93 games in his career with the Royals, posting a 38-31 record and 3.89 ERA, and going 27-18 in 2014-15, when the Royals won back-to-back American League pennants and the 2015 World Series. Ventura made nine postseason starts in those seasons.
Reporter Cristian Moreno, who cited the Dominican police, was the first to report the news.
Ventura pitched Game 6 with Taveras’ initials and uniform number on his cap.
In an odd coincidence, former major league infielder Andy Marte, 33, also died in a car crash in the Dominican over the weekend. Ventura was the starting pitcher in the final game of Marte's career, in August 2014.
Perhaps generously listed at 6 feet and 195 pounds, Ventura bedeviled hitters with a fastball that averaged 96 mph and an often devastating slider. Yet he became perhaps best known for not backing down from opponents, a mentality that created on-field confrontations with the Chicago White Sox and Oakland Athletics, a mound-charging battle with Baltimore Orioles All-Star Manny Machado and a staredown at home plate with a much larger Mike Trout.
That attitude was both his salvation and, occasionally, his downfall.
Ventura won 14 games during his rookie season and was part of their playoff rotation. But in 2015, he was getting hit hard by batters and inciting occasional chaos on the field in response to his performance. The Royals optioned him to the minor leagues, recalling him in July when fellow starter Jason Vargas needed elbow surgery.
He returned a better pitcher, going 11-4 and striking out 98 batters in 91 innings as the Royals ran away with the AL Central. He started five postseason games, the Royals winning both of his starts, including the Game 6 clincher, in their conquest of the Toronto Blue Jays in the AL Championship Series.
"I know at times you were tough," infielder Christian Colon wrote in a posting on Twitter, "but I knew you were just misunderstood."
Ventura went 11-12 with a 4.45 ERA in 2016, earning $1 million in the second season of a five-year contract that guaranteed him $23 million. His death will create a signficant void in the Royals rotation, although the club's greater concern Sunday, of course, was remembering their fearless starter who developed from a skinny 16-year-old signed for a mere $28,000 to one of their key cogs in a glorious chapter in franchise history.
"Our prayers right now are with Yordano's family as we mourn this young man's passing," Royals general manager Dayton Moore said in a statement. "He was so young and so talented.
"We will get through this as an organization, but right now is a time to mourn and celebrate the life of Yordano."
Yordano Ventura Was a Joy to Watch
One thing I’ll always remember about Yordano Ventura is his follow-through. It seemed impossible that Ventura, a skinny 6-footer, could crank out a 100 mph fastball, but there was nothing subtle or restrained about his delivery. Ventura cranked the ball out of his hand like it was a rusted screw with a stripped head, or the Big Wheel spinning on The Price Is Right. Ventura often finished off his pitches by hopping onto his left foot, swinging his right leg around, and throwing his hands up with a theatrical flourish.
The other thing I’ll remember about Ventura is his propensity for starting fights: with Manny Machado, Mike Trout, Adam Eaton, and Brett Lawrie, just to name a few. Ventura’s combativeness was of a piece with the way he threw a fastball — aggressive, fearless, and unencumbered. While Clayton Kershaw exudes calm control on the mound, Ventura needed to get up to pitch well, and that made him a joy to watch. It was plain to see, watching Ventura, how tense and exciting baseball can be, the agony of believing that every single pitch mattered. Ventura had a nearly unparalleled flair for the dramatic.
Ventura died in a car crash in his native Dominican Republic on Sunday morning. He was 25 years old.
Hours before news of Ventura’s death broke in the U.S., it was reported that former Indians third baseman Andy Marte, 33, had died in an unrelated car accident in the Dominican Republic.
It’s tempting at this point, when the shock of Ventura’s death is so new and our emotions are so raw, to attempt to draw larger conclusions, to find consolation elsewhere. While the cause of each crash is under investigation, some will likely focus on the circumstances that make the Dominican Republic’s roads so dangerous, as Jorge Arangure did at Vice when Oscar Taveras died in 2014. Others will discuss how sorely Ventura’s charisma and talent will be missed, as countless columnists did when José Fernández was killed in a boating accident last fall.
Those stories have been told over and over. They’ve become as routine as game recaps now — the look back at the player’s career, links to shocked teammates’ reactions, the sly reference to A.E. Housman, and the search for Larger Meaning. But it seems that nothing ever changes: confident young men still press their luck instead of calling a cab or heading home early; police still enforce DUI laws haphazardly; and the world wakes to another heartbreaking early morning news story. There is no Larger Truth to be gleaned, no redemption or enlightenment to be gained from suffering.
The death of an athlete causes many different kinds of sadness: There’s the personal, private grief of friends and family who’d feel just as devastated if Marte and Ventura had been bus drivers instead of ballplayers. There’s the sorrow of people who knew or followed Ventura and Marte only through their work, but learned to love them just the same. And there’s the loss to the sport, particularly in Ventura’s case, as an unusually talented young man isn’t allowed to finish his career in a usual fashion.
Once again, an athlete who represented an idealized future for baseball died long before his time, replacing hope with now-haunting images of Ventura’s tributes to Taveras and Fernández, and a memory of that follow-through. We’re left to sort through even more heartbreak, and after so many tragic deaths it’s hard to feel anything but numb.
Fearlessness gave a 5-foot-10, 140-pound child who quit school at 14 to help his mother pay the bills the chutzpah to show up at a tryout with the Kansas City Royals. And once they bet the pittance of $28,000 on his right arm, fearlessness drove him through his insecurities and the doubts of those who disregarded him because he was a runt. And by the time he made the major leagues, where he introduced himself by throwing a fastball harder than any starting pitcher ever had been recorded doing so, fearlessness became Yordano Ventura’s raison d’etre, for worse on occasion, mostly for better.
Because from the fights he instigated to the moments shared with friends in which his utter lack of damns given made the night, Ventura was the person so many want to be, unencumbered by others’ expectations, driven purely by his own. Some thought it selfish. Those who knew him just saw it as Yo being Yo. And it scared them because they feared he was prone to situations like Sunday, when he was driving a white Jeep down a Dominican highway late at night, an activity best suited for the fearless.
Nobody knows whether Ventura was speeding or drinking or where he was going or what played a role in the accident that took his life at 25 years old. Just that the Jeep wound up on its left side, the front windshield caved in, the top ripped open, Ventura’s body in a swath of grass on the side of the road, another baseball player taken too early, another one-vehicle tragedy with devastating consequences.
They called it Black Sunday in the D.R. Andy Marte, once among the finest prospects in the game, died in a crash, too, at 33 years old. A former major leaguer and a current one, separated by 40 miles as the crow flies, gone in separate accidents. After Jose Fernandez’s death in a drunken-boating accident in September. And Oscar Taveras’ in a drunken-driving accident in 2014. Frequency makes it no easier, no more palatable. There is no salve for young men dying needlessly. Only the instinct to celebrate the life as though it might numb the pain.
It’s what the Royals did Sunday. Fans gathered at Kauffman Stadium, where they found Danny Duffy and Christian Colon, two of Ventura’s teammates, offering hugs. Dayton Moore, the general manager who signed Ventura as a teenager and thought so much of him he guaranteed him $23 million in a contract extension less than two years ago, celebrated Ventura’s willingness to sow chaos as a character trait that made everyone better, because it forced the organization and those who knew him and loved him to understand what drove him.
“He’s always had a zest for life,” Moore said. “A freshness. A fearlessness. He’s really been the same guy from Day 1 as far as his character traits and what made him special. A very passionate human being. Loved to compete. No doubt he challenged us, but that made us better.”
Even more, Moore said, “Yordano had a great gift.” His right arm, physiologically speaking, didn’t make a whole lot of sense. Ventura never grew to 6-foot. The leverage that regularly accompanies triple-digit fastballs didn’t exist. When Ventura threw a baseball, the velocity looked so easy until the end of the delivery, when his pitching arm would recoil and his drive leg would swing around and almost turn him sideways. Orthodoxy never suited him particularly well.
He refused to oblige anyone’s customs. It’s why so many in baseball thought him a punk. Cursing out Adam Eaton, plunking Manny Machado, beefing with Jose Bautista – no sacred cows existed with Ventura, a bold place to be in a sport that’s a veritable bovine factory. Ventura had no time for that. He came from a place accessible by dirt roads, laden with potholes, wreathed with shacks, ravaged by poverty. His father split up with his mother and left for Germany when he was young, leaving him to play dutiful male. He made it, then he became rich, then he lived his life like he thought a rich man should. He could drink plenty, according to two friends who knew him, and as is customary in the D.R., where there are nearly 30 deaths per 100,000 people in car accidents per year – the highest number in the Western Hemisphere – he would drive.
If that weren’t the case Sunday – if it’s simply a terrible accident with no extraneous circumstances – that still doesn’t bring Ventura back. It still doesn’t lessen the loss, the shock, the sadness, the gut-wrenching truth that a man who’d seen the earth for but a quarter century deserved to see more.
In those 25 years, he left plenty of indelible moments by which to remember him. The world knows him for the seven scoreless innings he threw in Game 6 of the 2014 World Series, with a tribute to Taveras written in white on his royal-blue cap. Inside baseball, it’s more of the little moments, like in 2012, when on a backfield in Surprise, Ariz., the stars of the future for the Royals and Texas Rangers, who share the spring training complex there, pitted multiple teams against one another.
There were scores of future major leaguers on those fields, a half-dozen at least, maybe more, top prospects and future All-Stars, names we’ll know for years to come. And yet on that day, Yordano Ventura stood atop the mound, and it was like he was the Pied Piper. All the scouts and executives focusing on the prospects at the other fields heard a literal buzz over on Ventura’s field and meandered over to see who was creating it. They unsheathed their radar guns and saw the fastball tickling 100 and the major league-ready curveball and the changeup on which they could dream. And they knew they were staring at something special. They didn’t know what. Nobody could. But they knew the kid was different.
That’s how Yordano Ventura will be remembered inside baseball. He was little in a sport that deifies the big, loud in a sport that rewards submissiveness, self-assured in a sport designed to beat down even its best. After an inconsistent 2016, Ventura dedicated himself to a big 2017. In a conversation before Christmas, he told Moore he would win 18 games this year with 10 of the complete. He was bold. He was brash. He feared nothing. That’s why baseball loved Yordano Ventura. And that’s why baseball lost him.
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| Yordano Ventura spent the entirety of his brief career with the Royals. (AP) |
Royals pitcher Yordano Ventura dies in car crash in Dominican Republic
Yordano Ventura, the hard-throwing and fearless right-hander who was a crucial part of two pennant-winning teams for the Kansas City Royals, was killed in a car accident in his native Dominican Republic on Sunday, the team confirmed on Sunday.
Ventura was 25.
Ventura was killed on the Juan Adrián highway in San Jose de Ocoa, according to Colonel Jacobo Mateo Moquete, director of communications for the military and police of the Dominican Republic.
Moquete said Ventura was the lone passenger in the vehicle.
Ventura started 93 games in his career with the Royals, posting a 38-31 record and 3.89 ERA, and going 27-18 in 2014-15, when the Royals won back-to-back American League pennants and the 2015 World Series. Ventura made nine postseason starts in those seasons.
Reporter Cristian Moreno, who cited the Dominican police, was the first to report the news.
Yordano Ventura, the hard-throwing and fearless right-hander who was a crucial part of two pennant-winning teams for the Kansas City Royals, was killed in a car accident in his native Dominican Republic on Sunday, the team confirmed on Sunday.
Ventura was 25.
Ventura was killed on the Juan Adrián highway in San Jose de Ocoa, according to Colonel Jacobo Mateo Moquete, director of communications for the military and police of the Dominican Republic.
Moquete said Ventura was the lone passenger in the vehicle.
Ventura started 93 games in his career with the Royals, posting a 38-31 record and 3.89 ERA, and going 27-18 in 2014-15, when the Royals won back-to-back American League pennants and the 2015 World Series. Ventura made nine postseason starts in those seasons.
Reporter Cristian Moreno, who cited the Dominican police, was the first to report the news.
Ventura pitched Game 6 with Taveras’ initials and uniform number on his cap.
In an odd coincidence, former major league infielder Andy Marte, 33, also died in a car crash in the Dominican over the weekend. Ventura was the starting pitcher in the final game of Marte's career, in August 2014.
Perhaps generously listed at 6 feet and 195 pounds, Ventura bedeviled hitters with a fastball that averaged 96 mph and an often devastating slider. Yet he became perhaps best known for not backing down from opponents, a mentality that created on-field confrontations with the Chicago White Sox and Oakland Athletics, a mound-charging battle with Baltimore Orioles All-Star Manny Machado and a staredown at home plate with a much larger Mike Trout.
That attitude was both his salvation and, occasionally, his downfall.
Ventura won 14 games during his rookie season and was part of their playoff rotation. But in 2015, he was getting hit hard by batters and inciting occasional chaos on the field in response to his performance. The Royals optioned him to the minor leagues, recalling him in July when fellow starter Jason Vargas needed elbow surgery.
He returned a better pitcher, going 11-4 and striking out 98 batters in 91 innings as the Royals ran away with the AL Central. He started five postseason games, the Royals winning both of his starts, including the Game 6 clincher, in their conquest of the Toronto Blue Jays in the AL Championship Series.
"I know at times you were tough," infielder Christian Colon wrote in a posting on Twitter, "but I knew you were just misunderstood."
Ventura went 11-12 with a 4.45 ERA in 2016, earning $1 million in the second season of a five-year contract that guaranteed him $23 million. His death will create a signficant void in the Royals rotation, although the club's greater concern Sunday, of course, was remembering their fearless starter who developed from a skinny 16-year-old signed for a mere $28,000 to one of their key cogs in a glorious chapter in franchise history.
"Our prayers right now are with Yordano's family as we mourn this young man's passing," Royals general manager Dayton Moore said in a statement. "He was so young and so talented.
"We will get through this as an organization, but right now is a time to mourn and celebrate the life of Yordano."
Yordano Ventura Was a Joy to Watch
One thing I’ll always remember about Yordano Ventura is his follow-through. It seemed impossible that Ventura, a skinny 6-footer, could crank out a 100 mph fastball, but there was nothing subtle or restrained about his delivery. Ventura cranked the ball out of his hand like it was a rusted screw with a stripped head, or the Big Wheel spinning on The Price Is Right. Ventura often finished off his pitches by hopping onto his left foot, swinging his right leg around, and throwing his hands up with a theatrical flourish.
The other thing I’ll remember about Ventura is his propensity for starting fights: with Manny Machado, Mike Trout, Adam Eaton, and Brett Lawrie, just to name a few. Ventura’s combativeness was of a piece with the way he threw a fastball — aggressive, fearless, and unencumbered. While Clayton Kershaw exudes calm control on the mound, Ventura needed to get up to pitch well, and that made him a joy to watch. It was plain to see, watching Ventura, how tense and exciting baseball can be, the agony of believing that every single pitch mattered. Ventura had a nearly unparalleled flair for the dramatic.
Ventura died in a car crash in his native Dominican Republic on Sunday morning. He was 25 years old.
Hours before news of Ventura’s death broke in the U.S., it was reported that former Indians third baseman Andy Marte, 33, had died in an unrelated car accident in the Dominican Republic.
It’s tempting at this point, when the shock of Ventura’s death is so new and our emotions are so raw, to attempt to draw larger conclusions, to find consolation elsewhere. While the cause of each crash is under investigation, some will likely focus on the circumstances that make the Dominican Republic’s roads so dangerous, as Jorge Arangure did at Vice when Oscar Taveras died in 2014. Others will discuss how sorely Ventura’s charisma and talent will be missed, as countless columnists did when José Fernández was killed in a boating accident last fall.
Those stories have been told over and over. They’ve become as routine as game recaps now — the look back at the player’s career, links to shocked teammates’ reactions, the sly reference to A.E. Housman, and the search for Larger Meaning. But it seems that nothing ever changes: confident young men still press their luck instead of calling a cab or heading home early; police still enforce DUI laws haphazardly; and the world wakes to another heartbreaking early morning news story. There is no Larger Truth to be gleaned, no redemption or enlightenment to be gained from suffering.
The death of an athlete causes many different kinds of sadness: There’s the personal, private grief of friends and family who’d feel just as devastated if Marte and Ventura had been bus drivers instead of ballplayers. There’s the sorrow of people who knew or followed Ventura and Marte only through their work, but learned to love them just the same. And there’s the loss to the sport, particularly in Ventura’s case, as an unusually talented young man isn’t allowed to finish his career in a usual fashion.
Once again, an athlete who represented an idealized future for baseball died long before his time, replacing hope with now-haunting images of Ventura’s tributes to Taveras and Fernández, and a memory of that follow-through. We’re left to sort through even more heartbreak, and after so many tragic deaths it’s hard to feel anything but numb.
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