Baseball Has Been Very Good To Him Indeed

And now the bittersweet story of minor-league catcher Brayan Pena, who defected from Cuba 10 years ago by jumping out a bathroom window in Caracas, only to end up with the Royals.

Sure, perhaps there's a little more to it than that. Here I am cracking jokes about the Royals, while Pena has worked his ass off to learn English, the American Way, and — rather awesomely — become an honest-to-God US citizen. As Getting To First Base puts it,

What I didn't know was that Pena had to evade security guards and slip out of a bathroom window in Caracas when he was a teenager; that he left his beloved family behind to pursue a hope of a better life as an American ballplayer. That was ten years ago. He's a newly-minted American citizen now, a happy ending to a dangerous defection.

Still, I can't help but wonder if David Glass is really much of an improvement over Fidel.

[ MLB.com, via Getting To First Base]