Watching Tony Fernandez turn a double play is amongst the most beautiful things I have seen in my life. He would run, scooping down towards third base, pick up the ball, and then rising high in the air, twist his body and whip the ball to first. It was balletic and Fernandez’s lanky body seemed delicate. He participated in six to seven hundred double plays with the Toronto Blue Jays in the late-80s, early-90s, and I must have seen quite a few of them while sitting in the cheap seats at Exhibition Stadium.
“I didn’t really think about what I was doing,” he told me one afternoon in a suburban hotel. “It just came naturally. I always thought short-stop was an artistic position.” Fielding came naturally to him; and that gift awarded him four consecutive Golden Gloves.
“I always had very good hand-eye coordination but I had to work on my hitting,” he said when I asked him about his impossible stand at the plate, the bat high above his head, twirling, twirling. Again there was a delicacy to his movements. “I learned that from watching Rod Carew. And, I didn’t realize how much we had in common till I met him many years later.”
Fernandez was born in San Pedro de Macoris, Dominican Republic, amongst the youngest of 11 children. His father was a line or shift supervisor at various plantations by day; in his spare time he was a co-pastor. Growing up, Fernandez wanted to be either a pastor or a baseball player. By his teens he was scouted by the Blue Jays and joined them fulltime in 1985. “In my town in the 1970s, every kid played baseball. We dreamed of playing baseball. To get out of our poverty.”
And then there was that other theme in his life, his faith, expressed by his parents. They worked hard — he watched his older brothers and father lift impossible loads of sugarcane on their backs — and they prayed and sang. They prayed for their daily bread. We spoke at some length about the connection between a hardscrabble life and a prayer for redemption.
After two decades in baseball, Fernandez is rich and famous. “I need prayer now more than ever. I pray differently — I don’t have to worry about the daily bread anymore, but I have to think about not losing my way.” Fernandez is studying to become a minister. “I am very lucky, God has granted me both of my wishes.”
He was in Toronto speaking at MissionFest, an annual Christian trade show, to promote the Tony Fernandez Foundation, which amongst its other activities provides Christian care and mentoring (along with a baseball clinic!) to the myriad underprivileged youth in the D.R. The foundation (tffoundation.com) is a manifestation of his childhood prayer, to get out but then to come back and to share the gifts he had received. It has taken him around the world (he had only recently returned from Africa and the experience had shaken him in many ways) to be both an ambassador and a pastor.
Needless to say, meeting Fernandez was a thrill and doubly so to meet him in the context of our shared faith. He spoke eloquently about maintaining his faith through his ball career, with its many temptations off the field, and the machismo in the locker room, especially amongst his fellow Latin players. Our conversation kept returning to his childhood and youth, to the strong evangelical faith he absorbed. He signs himself a servant of the Lord Jesus Christ on his website and his story is a testament to the glories and challenges of that servitude.
Entering his 50s soon, he describes himself as a more seasoned Christian, giving testimony to the fact that this faith of ours is a constantly growing, maturing concern.
