Andruw Jones

Biography

Andruw Rudolf Jones was born on April 23, 1977 in the capital city of Willemstad on the Caribbean island nation of Curacao, off the coast of Venezuela. His father, Henry, was one of the country’s best baseball players in the 1960s and ’70s. Had major league teams bothered to scout the island, Henry might have been the first in his family to play in America. As it was, he worked in a tissue-paper factory and played ball in the evenings and on weekends. He could not wait until Andruw was old enough to play ball himself. Andruw’s mother, Carmen, warned Henry not to start the boy too early. Henry ignored her advice and attempted to teach Andruw how to catch a hardball while he was still a toddler. The experiment ended in tears. Andruw preferred to stalk iguanas in his back yard. This held his attention until the age of three, when a large iguana started to stalk him and sank its teeth into his chest. He rediscovered baseball soon after. By the time Andruw was six, he was already dreaming of playing in the majors. He would bounce around singing to himself, “I’m going to play ball in the United States, I’m going to play ball in the United States.” Most of his ball-playing back then was done on the dusty field near the Joneses’ house. Those who watched Andruw in the early days remember how calm and confident he was. By the age of 11, Andruw was on a youth select team that would travel all the way to Japan to play in a tournament. He could handle any position on the field, but because of his powerful arm he often found himself at catcher or third base. He switched to the outfield a couple of years later. Stories of Andruw’s early accomplishments are the stuff of legend. As a 13-year-old, playing for his father’s Royal Scorpions team, he sent a ball screaming over 400 feet to the tennis court of a nearby hotel. In the same game, he came up again and hit the hotel. By his early teens, Andruw‘s was playing with adults. He even played on Curacao’s national team in the Latin American Games. By the time Andruw was 15, he was the best player on the island. He had yet to be discovered, however, for Curacao was still well off the beaten path for major league scouts—even though countryman Hensley Meulens had done well in the Yankee farm system. Though Andruw required little in the way of coaching, his father and he talked a lot of baseball. Henry quizzed him on strategy and game situations and helped him train. He also raced him in sprints. Henry was still very fast, and Andruw was well into his teenage years before he could pass his father. Andruw’s first big break came when he was spotted by Giovanni Viceisza, a businessman who watched a lot of baseball in his travels around the Caribbean basin. Viceisza doubled as a part-time scout for the Atlanta Braves. He first saw Andruw during a tournament in Puerto Rico and was amazed. Unlike most boys his age, Andruw was not a wiry kid. He was already well-muscled and moved around the field like a grown man.