Another challenge for the Pena family
A's first baseman on the bubble to make team
Susan Slusser, Chronicle Staff Writer

Thursday, March 28, 2002

Should Carlos Pena fail to make the A's club this weekend, it will
not faze him, even though the rookie first baseman entered camp with
a heap of expectations piled on him and he has not hit a lick this
spring.

The way Pena sees it, a trip to Triple-A Sacramento would just be
another challenge, and challenges are what the Pena family is all
about.

Take Pena's parents, Felipe and Mery. They left professional
positions in the Dominican Republic -- Felipe was a mechanical
engineer and contractor, Mery an accountant and teacher -- and moved
to the Boston area in 1992 to ensure good educations for their four
children.

They went from a comfortable lifestyle in Santo Domingo to a tiny
apartment in a dangerous area of Haverhill, Mass., and both parents
had to take jobs far beneath their qualifications, Felipe at a waste-
treatment center and Mery at a nursing home.

"It was difficult, but we did what we needed to do to pay the bills,"
Felipe Pena said.

"Carlos' parents sacrificed a lot," said Tom Sweeney, who was Pena's
baseball coach at Haverhill High School. "They gave up everything for
the sake of their kids. It is an amazing story."

It is the classic American Dream tale, retold for the 21st century.
Last year, Felipe Pena earned his MBA (his thesis was on Major League
Baseball's business practices because he wanted to better understand
what his son is going through) and now he is starting his own
company. Mery Pena is teaching full time.

Their oldest child, Carlos, was working on his degree in computer
engineering at Northeastern when he was drafted in 1998, and at 23,
he is on the verge of becoming a big-league baseball player.

The next oldest, Pedro, 21, is a shortstop at Northeastern, where he
is earning a degree in biochemistry. He is expected to be drafted
this June.

Twins Omar and Femaris, 20, are at Old Dominion and Boston College,
respectively. Omar is majoring in psychology but plans to be an
architect; an outfielder, he is also eligible to be drafted this
year. Femaris is studying communications, and she is a ballerina who
has performed with the Ballet Theater of Boston and is interning with
the Boston Ballet.

"The only way to get where you want to be is with good, honest, hard
work," Felipe Pena said. "We emphasized that every day."

The elder Pena recognized his sons' talents in baseball at an early
age, taking particular note that Carlos was left-handed. So he began
putting him through drills, albeit unusual ones.

"I just threw everything I could at him, anything that came into my
hands," Felipe Pena said. "Newspaper balls, sock balls, mangoes. I
was always throwing things at him. It was kind of a different
approach."

Carlos Pena laughed when reminded of this and said: "We'd be watching
TV and he'd have a napkin and say, 'Carlos!' and throw it at me. From
when I was really young, that was the thing."

That impromptu exercise evolved into a mainstay for Carlos, who had
friends lob palm-tree nuts at him in the Dominican and now has
clubhouse attendants throw popcorn kernels for him to hack at. The
idea, he said, is that after hitting such a small object, the
baseball looks huge.

When the Penas moved to Haverhill, the boys were no longer able to
play baseball in the streets as they had in Santo Domingo. The
weather didn't allow it and the neighborhood was unsafe. The children
were seldom allowed to go out, except to the YMCA, where they rigged
a batting cage of sorts in the basement using an old mattress and
some hockey nets.

Later, they discovered that they could use a racquetball court for
fielding and hitting practice, throwing the racquetball against the
wall to the left or right for defensive work, then setting up nets
for hitting.

"We invented something that worked pretty well," Felipe Pena
said. "It was tough to throw a breaking ball, but I could throw
fastballs, and I'd go inside and outside. Every day we were working."

When Carlos started Haverhill High School, Sweeney was impressed
immediately. The kid was from a different country and still learning
the language and culture, but the transition was smooth.

"You could tell he was something special by the way Carlos carried
himself, " Sweeney said. "He swung the bat a lot better than other
kids his age, but it was more than that. He was so personable, he
treated everyone with respect. Sometimes minorities are treated
differently, but Carlos took that in stride. When you talk to him for
five minutes, you feel like you've known him his whole life.

"I loved the whole family right from the beginning. No matter how
much adversity they had -- and I saw the two-room apartment they
lived in -- they were so close and they were always smiling."

After graduating from high school, Pena won a scholarship to Wright
State, but he missed his family and didn't feel comfortable at the
school. He came home and worked in the mailroom of a bank for nine
months before landing a scholarship to Northeastern.

There he developed his baseball skills to the point of being taken
with the 10th pick overall in the 1998 draft. He also cultivated a
love for books, partly inspired by brainy brother Pedro.

"I got this hunger for knowledge and started reading books like
crazy," said Pena, who enjoys reading philosophy and fiction (Paulo
Coelho's "The Alchemist" is a recent favorite).

"I feel like if I'm not reading, I'm wasting my time. Now bookstores
are my favorite places. You have no idea how much I enjoy sitting
down with a book and a mocha in one of those comfortable chairs, it's
so nice and peaceful.

"When I'm in a bookstore, I think every book is talking to you. All
of these great minds, all of those points of view."

With his immense intelligence and charm, Pena has been a hit in the
Oakland clubhouse and with the media. He is writing a daily diary for
Major League Baseball's Web site, and he devotes large chunks of time
to interviews.

But on the field, things have not gone quite so well. Pena has two
hits in his past 28 at-bats and is batting only .146.

Even though he will make his Bay Area debut as a member of the A's
tonight at Pac Bell Park, he might not make the Opening Night roster.
That's a fairly significant turn of events, considering that Oakland
traded four good prospects to get him (and reliever Mike Venafro) in
January, and considering that he has been touted as the heir apparent
to Jason Giambi at first.

There's little doubt that he is feeling the pressure of living up to
that, and hitting coach Thad Bosley pointed out that Pena also has to
deal with the difficulties of coming to a new club.

"It's difficult. He has expectations that he could be Rookie of the
Year and you couple that with a new organization, new players, a new
coaching staff, well that's a tremendous transition for a 23-year-old
in a six-week time frame," Bosley said.

Bosley likes Pena's approach at the plate and keeps reminding him to
just be himself, instead of trying to do too much. But Pena said
that's easier said than done.

"Sometimes I'm hitting, and I wonder, 'What is Art Howe thinking
about me?' " Pena admitted. "But I know he and the coaches want me to
succeed. Once that sinks in, I'll be all right."

And even if he winds up in Sacramento for the first part of the
season, Pena knows where he'll be soon.

"I want to be in Oakland so bad, I really do," he said. "My desire is
to be the first baseman there and play first base every day for the
next 15 years. I'm looking forward to it."

Bay Bridge Series -- WHO: A's vs. Giants -- WHEN AND WHERE: 7:15
tonight and tomorrow at Pacific Bell Park. 1:05 p.m. Saturday at
Network Associates Coliseum -- PROBABLE STARTERS: Tonight - A's Tim
Hudson vs. Giants' Kirk Rueter. Tomorrow - A's Barry Zito vs. Giants'
Livan Hernandez. Saturday - Giants' Russ Ortiz vs. A's Cory Lidle. --
TV: Tonight, Channel 36. Tomorrow, FSN. Saturday, Channel 2.