Manuel Oliver doesn’t like baseball. But for two straight summers, he went on a multi-week ballpark tour with his son, Joaquin, assessing which park had the best hot dogs, crowds, atmosphere. By the end, Joaquin had a new favorite — Fenway Park — and Manuel didn’t have much of an opinion, because he still didn’t like baseball.
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But his son liked it — his son loved it — so they started in Detroit, and rented a car to drive to Philadelphia, and then to Boston, and kept adding ballparks to the itinerary, the goal being to make it to all 30. For Manuel, who had moved to the United States from Venezuela in 2002, it wasn’t just a crash course in American culture, but also in patience. “The worst thing that could happen in those days was the extra innings,” he said, with a groan and a laugh.
His son’s love for baseball always confounded him. Manuel worked behind the scenes in the entertainment industry for years; he’s also a graphic designer and a mural artist. His wife, Patricia, never cared much for sports, either. For most of Joaquin’s early childhood, their home in South Florida was full of music — the Sex Pistols, the Ramones, the Clash — not Miami Marlins broadcasts. That quickly changed. Patricia’s father, a former ballplayer from Venezuela (endearingly nicknamed “El Gordo,” or “the plump one”), began to teach the game to his grandson, and he was smitten.
When Manuel thinks of baseball, he doesn’t think of how the expanded playoffs will affect the Yankees’ chances, or who’s leading the AL in WAR. He thinks of family: a grandfather’s passion, a father’s love. So when a representative for the Oakland A’s reached out to Manuel in early September on behalf of Jesús Luzardo, “future Cy Young Award candidate” didn’t come to mind.
In fact, Manuel had never even heard of Luzardo. But Luzardo had heard of Manuel. To the rookie southpaw, Manuel was the face of Change the Ref, a non-profit organization formed in Joaquin’s honor, designed to use “urban art and nonviolent creative confrontation to expose the disastrous effects of the mass shooting pandemic” in America. He was also Guac’s dad.
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“Guac” was an easy alternative to wah-KEEN. Luzardo never had much trouble with his classmate’s pronunciation, but he called Joaquin “Guac” anyway. They got to know each other playing pickup basketball near Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., which they both attended.
“He was good,” Luzardo said. “Even though it was a casual game, he played pretty hard. I personally didn’t know him that well, but I know a lot of people who did. He was a funny guy. Guac was kind of loved by everyone.”
So, one afternoon this month, Luzardo decided to pay him a visit. He’d heard Guac was making his way through a few big league ballparks and wondered if the Oakland Coliseum was one of them. Manuel confirmed that it was. With a little bit of searching, the A’s pitcher found him: section 104, row 26, seat 4. He was wearing a dark green A’s T-shirt, his hair neatly combed to the side, his eyes warm, his smile soft. They snapped a picture together and Luzardo sent it to Joaquin’s dad.
“Two Venezuelans ready to strike out a few,” Manuel wrote on Twitter.
“Blessed to have met your son!” Luzardo responded.
Blessed to have met your son! https://t.co/9plg3AKYU6
— Jesús Luzardo (@Baby_Jesus9) September 10, 2020
There was a time when Joaquin “Guac” Oliver was a lanky, 17-year-old kid, with wit beyond his years, and an insatiable passion for hip hop, grunge rock, poetry, baseball, basketball — a dizzying and diverse amount of topics. That time ended on Feb. 14, 2018, when an active shooter walked onto the third floor of Stoneman Douglas High School and opened fire. Joaquin was shot and killed in a hallway outside his creative writing class. Now, his image graces a cardboard cutout.
Sal Di Martino coached baseball in Parkland for 10 years — played the game himself through college — and had never seen anything like it. He still hasn’t. Kids always said they were out there for fun; but how many of them truly meant it? This was a competitive youth baseball league, his teams were often in the running for district or state championships, and for his players, there seemed to be some ulterior motive involved: a drive to win, to be the best. Sometimes that motive was to not crumble under the pressure of a parent.
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But Joaquin’s motives were always pure, simple. Which, ironically, made the act of coaching him complicated.
“You look for consistencies,” Di Martino said. “So, when you see so much inconsistency, you’ve got to figure out where it’s coming from. How can his highs be so high, and his lows be so low? It came down to, was he in the mood to play or was he not?
“He was my biggest question mark. He was an enigma. His mood could’ve been the difference between winning or losing a game. What am I getting out of this kid today? Am I getting the all-star? Or am I getting the kid who plays right field for two innings and that’s it?”
Di Martino coached Joaquin for parts of six years, from age 9 to 13, and insists that when his outfielder was on, when his heart was in it, he was the best player on the field. He had a strong arm and natural power, even though he was streaky. If Joaquin was on tear, it looked like he was smashing watermelons; he’d rattle off six or seven hits in eight or nine at-bats, and then he would go “0-for-days.”
It wasn’t that he was moody; it was that he lived for the moment. That was what drew him to the sport: the exhilaration of making a game-saving catch, hitting a walk-off home run, nabbing a runner at the plate. The problem is, in baseball, those moments are fleeting. That’s part of what makes them so memorable; you sit through 13, 14, 15 innings, only to see the last guy on the bench hit a ball to gargantuan lengths. The waiting makes those moments sweet.
Joaquin stuck around for six seasons because he loved that feeling. But he wasn’t going to pour as much energy into the moments he didn’t value.
“The running joke was that if it was a Saturday 8 a.m. game, forget it, Joaquin’s not going to play,” Di Martino said. “Friday night, he was watching a movie or doing whatever, and he didn’t care that he had a game the next day, because he was having fun in that moment. And that’s just that’s just how he was, all through his life. All 17 years.”
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And so, the ballplayer with the most God-given talent on his team ended up helping them win in another way. Of course, Di Martino preferred the watermelon-smashing version of Joaquin to the middling backup outfielder, but he says that Guac’s biggest contribution was an intangible: the maturity to understand that baseball is just a game, combined with a sense of humor that allowed him to relay that message to just about anyone.
Even at 10 or 11, an age at which young boys are starting to shape and understand their own identities, Joaquin seemed to be comfortable with himself. He’d show up to practice with a pink grip on his bat, a pink batting helmet, sometimes with red cleats, all mismatched. Kids would ask him why, and instead of scrambling for an excuse, he would reply: “Because I like pink. Do you like it?”
He had no problem showing affection to teammates who were struggling. Di Martino can still recall multiple times when a player made the final out, or went 0-for-4 with four strikeouts, and cried in the dugout, and Joaquin was there, with his arm around him, saying, “This is just a game.”
“You could tell when a kid would cry, it would make him uncomfortable,” Di Martino said. “And he just had that natural instinct to go make him feel better. Even at a young age. To me, that’s a very mature thing.”
Di Martino has run through Feb. 14, 2018, countless times in his mind; he’s thought about the odds, and they still don’t add up. It’s hard not to compare the two outcomes, simply because the situations were so similar — too similar. Two fathers, both with 17-year-old sons, both working for the same company, in the same office building, receive word that there’s been a shooting at Stoneman Douglas.
This is where things begin to differ. One hears from his son right away. “Shooting,” reads the first text. “Here,” reads the second. This son starts running to a local Walmart, and then is transported to a friend’s house. This father has an update on his son’s whereabouts nearly every minute. Di Martino knows his son is alive. He’s left with what he terms “survivor’s guilt.”
The other father does not have the luxury of hearing from his kid. Hours pass. At first, he thinks his son’s phone might have failed, or might’ve fallen to the floor in the chaos. Rumors begin to spread; one is that his son was spotted in an ambulance, another is that he was spotted lying on the third floor.
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Nearly a full 24 hours later, Manuel and Patricia are taken into a room and told by law enforcement that their son is one of 17 victims.
“That can’t be right,” Di Martino said. “Two people from the same office go running after their kid. And one comes back and one doesn’t? That just doesn’t seem right.
“When your kids are that age, you wonder what kind of adult they’re going to be, because they’re getting close. You’re not thinking, ‘What if they die?’ Those thoughts don’t go through your head. They just don’t.”
Manuel quits his job the next day. They organize a funeral, and thousands show up — so many people, that the funeral director worries about crowd overflow. Parking spills over onto the grass. Per Manuel and Patricia’s request, everyone is dressed in sports gear. Joaquin’s favorite player, Miguel Cabrera, hears about the teenager’s death from a mutual friend and sends his family a signed jersey. “Para Joaquin ‘Guac,’ con mucho cariño; eres un ángel, mi pana. Vuela muy alto.” For Joaquin “Guac,” with much love; you’re an angel, my buddy. Fly high.
Manuel and Patricia decide to dedicate their lives to honoring their son and making sure other families won’t have to endure the same pain. They had a hard time — and still have a hard time — understanding how this could happen in a nation like the United States. This was the type of violent situation they moved away from Venezuela to escape.
“Venezuela is a very dangerous country,” Manuel said. “But there’s a reason for that. If someone in Venezuela points a gun at me and robs me of money, I will understand it. There’s a lot of poverty in Venezuela. But how do I explain to myself that a kid holding an AR-15 went inside a school and started shooting randomly? There’s no way to explain that. There’s no argument that will make you understand how that could happen.”
(Manuel Oliver: Susan Stocker / Sun Sentinel / Tribune News Service via Getty Images)
Manuel and Patricia founded Change the Ref in 2018. They describe the non-profit’s work as “disruptive,” with the intention of using creative solutions to reach populations that might not otherwise be reached. Over the last three years, they’ve staged dozens of campaigns to bring awareness to — and spur action to prevent — gun violence, ranging from music festivals to public murals and billboards featuring the face of Joaquin. For Manuel, this work has a dual purpose.
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“I don’t have my son with me, but I’m still his dad,” he said. “I’m not going to accept that I’m not a father anymore. No. Why would I? I love my son. I still love him. I don’t have him with me, and I hate that. But I think I need to keep on being his father.
“This is the only way that I can move on. By knowing that I have a purpose in life.”
Manuel still doesn’t like baseball. He doesn’t follow baseball. But when Manuel — someone who couldn’t care less if Freddie Freeman or Mookie Betts wins NL MVP — got word of the cardboard cutouts filling big league ballparks across the country, his interest was piqued.
Change the Ref often has multiple campaigns running at once, some more effective than others. He says this one is “perfect.” In his mind, it weaves separate threads — Joaquin’s love for baseball, their unfinished ballpark tour, an audience Change the Ref previously hadn’t tapped into — together into one.
“Baseball is totally an American tradition that everybody loves,” he said. “But gun violence is as American as baseball, because only in America do 100 people die per day because of it. You put them together, through a victim. It makes sense.”
Joaquin is now sitting in 15 ballparks across the country, from Los Angeles to New York, one of thousands of cutouts meant to fill spaces that, in a pandemic, can’t be filled with fans. His family hopes that in these last few weeks of the regular season, he can make it to all 30. Teams are starting to notice. Change the Ref had been purchasing cutouts with its own funds, but recently the Toronto Blue Jays contacted Manuel about putting a cutout of Joaquin in Sahlen Field in Buffalo, New York, where the Jays are temporarily based for 2020, free of charge.
It filled him with optimism. “A gesture like that means people are on board with our movement,” he said. Luzardo’s gesture also gave him hope. It might’ve been a simple one — a selfie — but Manuel sees it as an act of bravery in a politically charged world.
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Luzardo hasn’t shied away from using his platform to advocate for causes in the past — racial injustice in the United States, among them — but this one feels different.
“Guac was a guy that I knew,” he lamented. “Obviously it hits home.”
The A’s lefty plans to reach out to Manuel once the season ends and he returns to South Florida. Right now, he has a playoff run — and potentially a World Series — to focus on. At first, Manuel didn’t seem too invested in all that, until a thought occurred to him.
“Do you remember that guy from the Marlins who is always there, behind home plate every single game?” he asked. “I want Joaquin to be sitting next to him. I don’t know how to do that.”
He paused and thought about it some more.
“His name is Marlins Man. If you know him, tell him that we need Joaquin watching the World Series behind home plate. And he wouldn’t just be watching, he’d be making a statement. All the better.”
(Top photo: Courtesy Oakland A’s)
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