Beyond My Wildest Dreams
Sandy Leon and Tom Hager
In partnership with Athletes For God
I will never forget the day I decided to move to Boston.
I have now called this place home for three years, but back in the summer of 2016, my wife and I were making one of the bravest decisions of our lives.
Moving here seemed like a crazy idea at the time to me, but my wife has a faith unlike anybody I've ever met. She knew we needed to be here, and even though we had been married for only a few months, I believed in her as much as she believed in God's plan.
I am so glad I listened to her.
At the time I followed her advice, I hadn't become a regular major league player, and I certainly hadn't ever batted .310 in a season. But when you put your faith in God, it's amazing what can happen. Many people would use the word unbelievable to describe God's miracles, but my wife believed in this miracle before I ever envisioned it for myself.
When I got called up to the Red Sox that June, I tried to downplay my wife's expectations. I'm only going to be here two weeks, I would tell her, before they're going to send me back down to the minor leagues.
She wouldn't listen to any of it. And looking back, I'm so thankful.
My home at the time was in Providence, Rhode Island, just down the road from our Triple-A team in Pawtucket. I had a temporary place to live in Boston for my brief stint, but my wife said we need to move to Boston. We can't, I explained, because it's only going to be two weeks. Are we going to drive back and forth from Boston to Pawtucket every day after that? It's too much.
No, she insisted, we have to move. You have to have faith and just move with your faith. So that's exactly what we did. With no idea what the future held, we got our own place to live. Regardless of what happened next, we were now going to be Bostonians.
What happened over those two weeks – and really what has happened over the last three years – is nothing short of miraculous.
In my first game it didn't look like I was going to get an at-bat, but when the game went extra innings, I got my chance. I hit a double to start the 10th inning, and my teammate Xander Bogaerts hit a two-run single to win the game 5-3.
Then in my next game, against the Minnesota Twins, I had one of the best games of my life. I went 4-4 with a double as we won 15-4. I went 0-1 in my third game, only to bounce right back. I went 1-3 against the Orioles, then 3-4 against the Mariners.
In those two weeks with the team I hit .692.
My manager at the time, John Farrell, told me the news I was hoping to hear ever since we made the big move. I was staying in the big leagues with the Red Sox.
It's moments like that when you know the power of God is unbelievable. There is nothing that is impossible for Him.
I called my wife, and she began bursting into tears. Our dream had turned into a reality.
I shouldn't have been surprised my wife had that level of confidence in God's plan. After all, it wasn't the first time we had taken a wild chance that worked out.
People may be surprised to hear me say this, but I like to tell people that being sent down to Triple-A in 2014 was one of the best things that ever happened to me. It made me hungrier to eventually play in the big leagues again, but it also allowed me to play with an old teammate in Jhonatan Solano.
And because of him, I got to marry my best friend.
I actually met my wife back in 2007, when Jhonatan and I were just starting our minor league careers with the Nationals organization. The only thing was, I didn't know she would be my wife at the time. Getting sent down to the minors in 2014 changed that for me.
Jhonatan's girlfriend had a sister that I met all those years before, and we had been friends since that time, but it was only in 2014 that I became really close with her. We would go to dinner, talk all the time, and text each other. I could also relate to her, because she was also making the transition from South America. I was from Venezuela trying to make it as a baseball player, while she was from Columbia trying to make it as a soccer player.
But just as my career was beginning, hers was about to end. Soccer wasn't working out the way she had hoped, and in August of 2014 she told me she had to go back to Columbia. I was sad to see her go, but I knew she was going back to a supportive environment. Both of her parents are pastors in their local church, and she even played music during the church services.
I saw her in Venezuela after the baseball season ended, but that would be the last time I would see her for over a year. We continued to text back and forth, but during the 2015 season I didn't get to see her at all.
The Nationals traded me to the Red Sox that year, and although I got to play on the big league roster for five months, I didn't have a girlfriend to share that experience with. I was eventually sent down to the minors later that season, and at one point, we stopped talking for two months.
That December, everything began to change.
We began talking again, and texting soon turned into calling. By January of 2016, after a few weeks of rekindling our friendship, I knew what I had to do.
I had to go to Columbia.
That February I made the trip to talk with her parents. I wanted a real relationship, something serious. I was so happy that she wanted the same thing.
So I asked her to marry me, and she said yes. We were engaged for exactly three days before we had the wedding ceremony. I don't know how, I don't know why, but I showed up in Columbia without a girlfriend and came back with a wife.
From that point on, I learned that sometimes the bold decisions can turn out to be the best ones.
When I went to Columbia in 2016, something happened to me that changed my life forever.
My first relationship with God was in 2014, but I wasn't passionate about it. I wasn't focusing my energy and desires into my faith. That all turned around completely in one day.
Shortly before we got married, my girlfriend and I went to church together, and I felt something like a vision. When I was praying, I felt a fire inside of me that I had never felt before. Being that connected to God, it was beautiful. It changed my life, and how I viewed the world. I changed the way I see the game. It changed the way I see fans, reporters, teammates, everyone. It even changed the way I see the game.
After that moment, whether I went 0-4 or 0-10 at the plate, I still had a belief in myself. And yes, I still feel down if I have a bad game, but now I had something more important in my heart. It was my relationship with God, and He didn't care how bad I played.
It just so happened that once I committed myself to God, there weren't many bad days that season.
Things just took off, and by the time I went 2-4 against the Yankees on July 16, I was 27-59. I was a lifetime .238 hitter in the minor leagues, and yet here I was hitting .458. Kids starting asking for my autograph, and when I would go to the mall, people began recognizing me. These were the same fans who had seen players like Pedro Martinez and David Ortiz, and yet for some reason they wanted my signature.
For a kid who came from a small town in Venezuela, it was still hard to believe.
What people don't know, however, was just how close I came to never being a baseball player at all.
I was introduced to baseball at a pretty normal age, and began playing little league ball when I was four or five, but unlike most kids I honestly didn't dream about becoming a professional baseball player. It was only when I was like 16 and I was trying to get signed and doing a lot of workouts that I began to take that dream seriously. The only problem was that I was trying to get my education at the same time, and it felt overwhelming.
I was trying out for teams, doing workouts in the morning and going to school before playing in the field in the afternoon, and at one point I said I can't do this anymore. Either I'll do one or the other, but I can't do both in one day.
And unlike many parents, who only think about the baseball contract, my dad chose my education. You have to go to school, he would say. School is first.
I was on the verge of tears.
So I started going to school, and I still remember having a few people come to my house after two weeks of missing baseball. I started going to practice again, and they talked to my dad.
“You have to let him play baseball because he's going to be good,” they told him. “Just let him play baseball – give him at least two months playing baseball; he is going to get signed.”
My dad relented, and within two or three months I got signed. It was all happening so quickly.
After that, all it took was nine years and over 600 minor league at-bats before I became an everyday player in the big leagues.
After that special 2016 season, I decided to get a few tattoos to honor God. I got one of my wedding date, and one of Jeremiah 1:12, which says “The Lord said to me, 'You have seen correctly, for I am watching to see that my word is fulfilled.' ”
I also got a tattoo on my arm that says “Believe” and one on my neck that says “Faith.” I'm glad I got both of those tattoos because over the last two years God put both of those words to the test.
As well as things were going for me in Boston, things were unraveling in my home country. Oil is a major export for Venezuela, and once that industry collapsed, our economy was turned upside down.
Every time I would watch the news, I would see people getting killed, and others not having anything to eat. Even if people have money, they can't find anything to eat in the supermarkets. My family can go out to any supermarket, but there's nothing inside the store. Sometimes they would go to three different places and still not find anything.
People had no choice but to buy stuff in the streets, and the prices were three times higher than they were in the supermarket. For people who made minimum wage, it was more expensive to buy things than the money they could earn.
It was so hard watching my country fall apart like that. And as I watched my country suffer, my own performance on the field was starting to decline as well.
I ended up hitting .225 in 2017, and split time with my teammate Christian Vazquez. We started splitting time at the beginning of this season as well, but by this point in my career, God has made me a less selfish teammate.
When you start to think about the complexity of God's plan, it's amazing. I still remember playing in the minor leagues with Jhonatan in 2014, and as the two of us were trying to stay on the 40-man roster with the Nationals big league club, we began to bond. Jhonatan and I would go out to left field and work out, just the two of us. We were the only two catchers on the team, and some people were encouraging us to fight for the top spot, but we refused to become enemies.
Perhaps that was because our future wives were sisters. And after watching each other succeed, Jhonatan became like a brother to me.
By the time I started to split catching duties with Christian, I learned to be happy for his success. When he is having a bad game, I feel bad, and when he is making big plays, I feel great.
That's the way God wants us to approach the situation, and right now our team is on fire. We are in a position to compete for the World Series, and just like the tattoos say, I continue to believe and have faith.
After all, look at where it's gotten me so far.