Octavio Arroyo (PHOTO: Youtube.com screengrab)
In a post for ESPN.com earlier this week, Eli Saslow told the heartbreaking story of Octavio Arroyo, a star high-school pitcher in the San Diego area who was deported to Mexico after border patrol officers discovered he had been attending school in the United States without the appropriate paperwork.
The whole devastating post is worth reading, and far too complex and long to adequately excerpt. But here’s a snippet:
The agent looked at his computer, where he could see that Arroyo had been crossing with his visitors visa nearly every week for three years, more than 100 crossings in total, usually on Fridays and Sundays. The agent asked whether Arroyo was going to school in the United States, and Arroyo said he wasn’t. The agent asked to see his cellphone, and Arroyo handed it to him. There were photos of Arroyo wearing San Ysidro High sweatshirts, and the agent began typing a report into his computer. “Possibility of Arroyo Sanchez Octavio living in the United States illegally,” he wrote, then he sent Arroyo to a nearby room for secondary screening.
Two border agents sat across a table from him, and now he felt intimidated. One agent asked, “Why are you entering into the United States?” This time Arroyo gave a dozen reasons, a story closer to the truth. He was going to see his family, he said. He was going because he had gone since he was a child, and because San Diego and Tijuana were in effect one city separated by a fence that so often defined the line between failure and success. People in San Diego earned four times more money and suffered one-tenth the violent crime. The baseball fields were flat, manicured and deep green, even during a drought. His cousins in the United States lived at the end of a cul-de-sac with an American flag. One of them played baseball for Texas A&M-Kingsville, and another had just come back from Disney World.
“It’s nice over here,” Arroyo said, simply.
Again, read the whole thing. Before his deportation, Arroyo had a .542 batting average and an ERA under 1.00 with 25 strikeouts in 15 innings. But while his teammates went on to win the city championships, Arroyo was forced to set up rec league games with friends and family in Tijuana to give big-league scouts a chance to watch him pitch.
Now Arroyo has a chance for a happy ending, if not the high-school degree he fell three credits short of earning: The Marlins drafted Arroyo in the 24th round of the 2015 Draft on Wednesday, providing him with perhaps his best chance of continuing his baseball career after his scholarship offers became complicated by his residency status.
The club will have to acquire a work visa for the young right-hander, who throws a fastball in the low-90s. He could also begin his professional career pitching in the Mexican League or another foreign league, according to ESPN.com.
