PHENOM'SPRESENT IS NATS' FUTURE Much rides on progress of Esmailyn Gonzalez

To the Nationals, Gonzalez represents a rebirth of the franchise's international scouting presence.

Date published: 12/20/2006

By TODD JACOBSON

IZARRETE, Dominican Republic--Esmailyn Gonzalez drives his gleaming white Cadillac Escalade through the narrow and pock-marked streets of Pizarrete, stopping often. He is 16 years old, he is almost a millionaire, and he's a celebrity.

Townspeople wave from storefront bars and fruit stands, approaching the driver's side window to offer handshakes and greetings. He picks up one woman and gives her a ride to the bus stop.

And when he pulls into the small plot of land on the edge of sugar cane fields that has served as home for the last 16 years, his sport utility vehicle sticks out like a bulldozer in a cornfield.

Gonzalez's family emerges from a humble house to greet him and his visitors. His house is a three-room concrete structure patched together with corrugated metal and wood planks.

Laundry sits in buckets near an outdoor wash basin and a relative tends to a pot cooking on an open fire. Chickens and ducks scurry across the dusty ground. In Gonzalez's room inside the house there is a stereo, a bed and a chair--and not much else.

This is home for the Nationals' top Dominican prospect, a switch-hitting shortstop wooed during the summer with a $1.4 million signing bonus.

For now.

Several miles down the road, workers have started to put tile in the rooms of Gonzalez's new home, the one he began building for his parents, four sisters and brother almost immediately after he cashed his signing bonus check.

He also bought the white Escalade--but the house came first.

The concrete structure will have two floors, four bedrooms, two bathrooms and a garage. It cost about 2 million Dominican pesos, or roughly $70,000.

"This is better for my family," Gonzalez says through a translator while chewing on a piece of sugar cane plucked from the fields a drag bunt from his home. "When I get to the major leagues, I'll buy a house of my own."

Like Gonzaelez, thousands of young boys play baseball in the Dominican Republic, plying their trades in front of a complicated web of coaches, unregulated agents and major league teams.

Each player dreams of a life-changing signing bonus and a career in the big leagues.

Gonzalez is the end product for all three competitors in this competitive player chase, a prospect who thus far has made it.

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Date published: 12/20/2006