A blast from the future

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — Oh, no, he didn’t. He couldn’t have. Did that really just happen?

Sure enough, Luis Robert sent a home-run ball up, up and impossibly away — over the wall in left, over the oak trees that towered above it, over the sun (or so it felt) that shone on a ballpark in Santa Clara, Cuba, where baseball players chased dreams of stardom with exhilaration and innocence.

Robert blew minds, including his own, that day at the stadium named for long-ago Cuban baseball icon Pedro “Natilla” Jimenez. At least, that’s how he remembers it. With one mighty swing of the bat, a tall, strong-handed boy from the town of Ciego de Avila, about two hours from Santa Clara, got the attention of everyone in that park. He was 9 years old.

OK, it was an estadio infantil — a children’s stadium — but still.

Charles Rex Arbogast/AP Photo

“A long home run,” Robert said through translator Anthony Santiago (brother of former White Sox pitcher Hector Santiago) last week at the home of the Birmingham Barons, the Sox’ Class AA affiliate. “That was the first time.”

The first time he hit a ball so high and so far, he made men and women in the stands gasp in amazement and players on both sides lose their cool on the field and in the dugouts.

It happened again at the start of this month at Regions Field in Birmingham, where it’s 320 feet to the foul pole in left and another 40 feet or so to the base of a giant scoreboard. The video board alone is 25 feet by 42 feet, requiring 98,880 watts of power to operate, and it’s 54 feet from the ground to the top of a scoreboard that has been hit by well-struck baseballs more than once. But cleared, straight over the clock that marks the scoreboard’s highest point? No one recalls that happening until Robert blasted one into the blackness of the night sky.

Barons outfielder Blake Rutherford described it as a “laser that just kept going until it disappeared.”

“I almost didn’t believe it, but it really happened,” said Barons manager Omar Vizquel, the former longtime major-league shortstop. “I don’t know where that ball landed, but it took off like a rocket. He hit another one in Chattanooga, kind of similar, but this home run here? To see that power here in this league is so rare.

“I know guys were impressed in my dugout. Guys were so excited. But then I looked in the other dugout. I looked at the other guys, and they were all like, ‘Oh, my God, what just happened? Where did that thing land?’”

The question Sox fans have about Robert, a five-tool outfielder rated as the No. 1 prospect in an organization rich with promising ones, is more about “when.” When will the 6-3, 185-pound, lightning-fast 21-year-old land at Guaranteed Rate Field?

Robert, who, six months after defecting from Cuba, signed with the Sox as the No. 1-ranked international amateur in May 2017, opened the 2019 season at Class A Winston-Salem and hit .453 — with an obscene 1.432 OPS — in 19 games. That hastened a promotion to Birmingham, where he entered the Southern League All-Star break hitting at a .307 clip, with 20 extra-base hits and 10 stolen bases, in 41 games.

At the All-Star Game on Tuesday in Biloxi, Mississippi, Robert put on a show, going 2-for-3 with a double, a triple, two RBI and a run. He was honored as the game’s MVP.

“I’m definitely happy to be part of the Double-A All-Stars,” he said on the day he left Birmingham for Biloxi. “I’ve been an All-Star in Cuba, but this is special to be in my first one here in the United States. I’m going to keep trying, no matter what league I’m in, to get as many All-Star [appearances] as possible.”

But again, when will the call to Chicago come? If it happens next year, so be it. If it happens in September, Robert promises he’ll be “grateful.” If it happens sooner than that, well, suffice it to say he’ll pack his bags and go where he feels he belongs.

Of course, some time at Class AAA Charlotte can be expected, based on the Sox’ handling of other elite prospects — Yoan Moncada, Michael Kopech, Eloy Jimenez, Dylan Cease.

“If he continues to do in the Southern League something similar to what he did in [Winston-Salem] and he forces our hand in terms of moving him again this year, that’s just fine,” general manager Rick Hahn said. “That’s good trouble.

“[But] it wouldn’t be in the least bit a disappointment to me if he winds up having a nice, solid year in Double-A and spends the rest of the year in the Southern League. That’s just fine from a developmental path to still put him on a really, really good path to being an impactful big-leaguer.”

A long way from home

Robert’s walk-up music these days is the song A Veces by the Cuban rapper MC Chocolate, featuring countryman Lenier. The title translates to “sometimes” and the chorus to, roughly, “Sometimes I feel you’re far away, sometimes I feel you’re here; sometimes I feel you, sometimes I feel like I lost you.”

An overeager Sox fan might be tempted to interpret that as an ode to Robert’s big-league aspirations. It probably has a whole lot more to do with a young man flung far from home.

Robert — who was born in Guantanamo, though many websites incorrectly identify his birthplace as Havana, and moved to Ciego de Avila at 3 months — dearly misses his friends in Cuba. He misses the food, the music, the culture and the sounds of Spanish everywhere.

He has not yet met his 11-month-old daughter, Crisbell, in person, though he sees her on FaceTime and in photos. As of last weekend, he’d lived alone in a Birmingham hotel but had just signed a lease on an apartment, and his parents, sister and an uncle were inbound for a visit.

English is, for now, something of an opponent. Robert speaks it only sparingly. This isn’t always the greatest thing in the Deep South, where it’s “always tough outside the ballpark,” he said. Hotel check-ins on road trips cause Robert particular angst. It’s hard enough sometimes to gather the gumption to approach the front desk. When a clerk starts in with questions, things have a way of going haywire.

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“Definitely in the beginning, it was tough to come over here and not know anybody, not to understand, and hearing people talk and not understanding what they were talking about,” he said. “But I’m starting to get a lot more comfortable. I’m able to understand a lot more things. I feel a lot more comfortable with my teammates, being able to communicate with them more.”

When the Barons are at home, Robert studies English every other day at the ballpark with teammates Luis Basabe, Luis Martinez and pitcher Mauricio Cabrera at the direction of local instructor Lindsey Sanchez, who was tabbed for the job by Sox minor-league education director Erin Santana. The players take comfort in one another’s shared efforts, laughing at mistakes and encouraging progress.

Robert is not as advanced as his classmates, according to Sanchez, but he receives additional one-on-one tutoring to help get him up to speed and is a hard-working, prepared, agreeable student. The Sox’ goal: “To teach him as much English as we can, as fast as possible,” Sanchez said. Everyone involved knows the clock is ticking on his time in Birmingham.

“He’s very bright and very dedicated to learning, and very competitive with himself,” Sanchez said. “One of the first days he came, he’d had other responsibilities and was a little late to class. The next time, he had all his notes with him and had learned everything — 40 to 50 words and phrases.”

Robert — his full name is pronounced LOO-wees and Robert, like the American name — isn’t yet ready to speak English with reporters, but the clubhouse offers him a safe haven. There, he’ll go for the gusto.

“When he comes to the clubhouse every day after English class, he’s so excited he learned new words that he’ll make sentences at the wrong time — out of context every time — just so he can use the words,” Barons first baseman Gavin Sheets said with a hearty laugh.

Rutherford shared a story of Robert singing Justin Bieber’s “Baby” as it blared over the Legions Field public-address system during a rain delay.

“He’s not afraid to mess up with us,” Rutherford said. “The main chorus tripped him up, but he was singing and jumping around. It was awesome.”

But Robert is 21. A Cuban in Alabama with a language barrier. It’s not always easy.

The South Side beckons

One can safely assume there was a text exchange between Robert and Sox slugger Eloy Jimenez after the rookie belted a home run to beat the Cubs on Tuesday at Wrigley Field. The pair of stud batsmen text all the time — gleefully after, for example, Jimenez’s two-homer game last weekend against the Yankees. And they texted on the day Robert was promoted to Birmingham, with Jimenez advising him: “Keep working. Don’t change anything you’ve been doing. Hopefully, we can play together this year.”

“Eloy is a good friend,” Robert said — the only sentence he spoke in English during a 30-minute interview with the Sun-Times.

Jimenez is a fan.

“He’s going to be really good,” he said of Robert. “He works hard every single day, and I think that’s one of the reasons he’s doing what he’s doing right now. When he comes here, he’s going to be good, too.”

Coming out of Cuba, Robert didn’t necessarily have a preferred major-league team to sign with — the Padres, Cardinals, Astros and Reds, among others, were hot for him — but countrymen Jose Abreu and Moncada helped get the Sox over the top. Both were present at a dinner at which the Sox wooed Robert.

“Come sign here with us,” Robert recalled them saying. “We’ll welcome you with open arms. The three of us can be together and win championships together.”

On an iPad, Robert watched a virtual-reality tour of Guaranteed Rate Field. And he was invigorated by these words from manager Rick Renteria: “We need you here so we can win the World Series.”

Indeed, Robert can help with all that. He can be the difference-maker for a team that’s already on an incandescent rise.

“He can be the one who puts the White Sox over the top,” Vizquel said. “You could tell from the day we got him here that he was special. He hits line drives all over the place. He makes every play. He’s got a great arm. He can steal. He has every instinct of the game, and he’s still raw. I still think he has a lot of room to learn and get even better.”

And then there are those double-take-inducing home runs, which are nothing like the one hit by Basabe last weekend during a Barons game. Basabe’s fluttered and wheezed and barely reached the front row of the bleachers.

But who was the most excited teammate of them all — the one who greeted him on the top step of the dugout?

It was Robert, who, not to make too much of it, was in an 0-for-14 slump at the time.

“It’s nothing,” Robert said. “I’m a good teammate.”

That alone should, when the time comes, get him off to a good start in Chicago. The massive talent will do the rest.