When he was eight years old (2013), barely one since he started playing baseball and was playing the drums in church, Felnin Elías Celesten Antonio assured his single mother that his days paying rent for the house were numbered, as well as those of working as a teacher in a school in Guaymate, north of La Romana.
In a few days the first will be fulfilled when her first bank account is flooded with green slips and now he is trying to convince her of the second, although that seems more difficult to achieve, since she says she enjoys being able to teach reading and guide children too much after almost a year. quarter of a century doing it.
Celesten, who turned 17 in September, signed on January 15 the highest bonus for prospect Dominican when the international transfer market for the Big leagues. The Mariners signed him for a $4.7 million bonus, the third-highest ever awarded to a Dominican.
“At the age of 11, a driver there told me, ‘Have you not gone to see your son playing? His son is going to be a baseball player, because his son is good.’ Another coach who didn’t work with him once leaving school told me, ‘that’s the one who’s going to make you drop those books’. He was little, when he told me that I looked at him and laughed, ”says Ruth Daniel Antonio Gue, the mother of the new Seattle jewel.
He’s a 6-foot-1, 175-pound shortstop who hits both hands with power and scores 55 on the overall 80-20 rating scale.
Break up at age 12
By 2016, the noise coming from his bat was already heard beyond the agricultural enclave where the original Haitian population dominates (arriving from the first half of the last century) and reached the ears of José Daniel Ozuna, in Boca Chica, who convinced the family that to polish that jewel required a transfer from the provinces.
The mother says that the most difficult part of the process was having to part with her only son at the age of 12 when she had to leave her hometown and settle in Guerra, in the JD Ozuna Baseball Academy, one of those laboratories where it takes an average of four years of intense and methodological work to shape these diamonds in the rough for which fortune is paid.
“After talking with their father (Fines Celesten, with a brief stint with the Orioles in 1997) we decided to send them. We did not want him not to achieve his objectives tomorrow because we did not have the courage to send him, ”he says. “The relationship between him (the father of the child, with whom she parted early) and mine always remained, in every sense of the word. Felnin grew up in a healthy environment.”
The text messages, with Bible verses in the morning as stimuli, and the videoconferences at night, meant that the 112 kilometers that separate the “pension” in Guerra de Guaymate were no obstacle to maintaining daily contact and seeing each other on weekends. , either he went to La Romana or she visited him at the concentration.
Life change
“He told me at 8 years old, I’m going to buy your house. ‘Mommy, I’m going to buy you a house like that one over there’, one that was opposite ours, with two floors; “I’m going to buy a jepeta for dad,” he always told me, “Mommy, I don’t want you to work, when they sign me,” insists Antonio, the daughter and sister of teachers and who supplemented her salary as a teacher by selling sweets orange and play “san” to pay for his teaching studies at the National Evangelical University (Unev).
“For me it is something big, I was able to see my son’s dream come true, by taking this first step (signing). Economically things are going to change, comfort at home, I am a person who likes to do many jobs, do a lot of washing, in that part, a bit of comfort, I think there. But the rest, in terms of work, his dream is that I don’t work, it’s a bit hard because (I’ve) been teaching classes for 24 years… God has prepared everything for this time, we’ll see,” says Antonio, who asked for a permission at school to attend DL.
Fulfilling her girlish dream of going to France, contemplating the beautiful Parisian nights is on her agenda, as well as improving the structure of the church where she congregates. She says it herself in a wealthy residence to which they recently moved in an urbanization with restricted access in the coastal area of La Romana.
“My thing was to keep her comfortable,” says Celesten, hours before holding a thanksgiving service at the Getsemaní de Guaymante Baptist Church that her grandmother pastors and joining the Mariners’ academy in Boca Chica, the beginning of a long process. in which it is glimpsed in five years in the Big leagues.
very special talent
Celesten is one of 21 Creole prospects who have already signed million-dollar signatures. Only the Venezuelan Ethan Salas ($5.6 million with the Padres) has achieved a higher signing than his in the transfer market.
His talent is such that a South Korean team was willing to give more money for him, but the player turned it down since his goal is to establish himself in the Big leagues.
Only Robert Puasón ($5.3 million with the Athletics in 2019), Jasson Domínguez ($5.1 million with the Yankees in 2019) and Nomar Mazara ($5 million with the Rangers in 2011) have agreed to bonuses larger than Celesten’s since he Players began to be signed in the country in the mid-1950s.
