The stadium is only half full as Pablo Sandoval steps up to the plate. The seats near the field at the Estadio de Béisbol Monclova, home to Sandoval’s Acereros de Monclova, have no shade cover, so they often stay empty until the sun sets. As the Acereros social media manager explains it: “Have you ever played Super Mario Bros.? Remember that level where the sun’s trying to kill you? It’s like that.”
Sandoval reaches for a fastball and rips a double down the rightfield line, tying the game at 3. The music and cheering never stop during a Liga Mexicana de Béisbol (LMB) game—every team has multiple mascots, $2 beers, cheerleaders, and game-ops people committed to shaming fans into chugging their drinks. But the crowd erupts as the two runs score, twirling noisemakers and banging drums. By the time the Acereros’s closer records the final out at 11:11 p.m.—LMB games are long because the pitching is lightyears behind the hitting—there’s a fan in every seat. “Cheerleaders, music, and every fan’s in the game, too. It don’t matter where you play in this league,” Bruce Maxwell, the former Oakland A’s catcher who came to Mexico after making headlines for taking a knee during the national anthem in 2017. “Honestly, as a country, I think these people love baseball more than we do in the States.”
For Maxwell, part of the draw of playing in Monclova is a taste of stardom. “I was a ghost in Oakland, man,” he says. “But down here, I can't go anywhere. Every city you go, everybody knows who you are.” But that’s nothing new for Sandoval. The 35-year-old slugger played 13 years in the Major Leagues. He won four World Series and collected $116 million in career earnings. But after a meteoric rise, he spent a decade hounded by media and front offices who thought the electric talent with the unconventional build had more to give. Early in our first conversation, Sandoval tells me he feels he’s found a home in Monclova because they know he does his work and always comes prepared to play. They trust him, he says.
Sandoval played in the big leagues last year, splitting time between Atlanta and Cleveland—he was home when the Braves won the World Series, but still received his fourth World Series ring. His Acereros teammate Josh Reddick says he picked Monclova because it was the one team that called. Sandoval, meanwhile, “could have run off into the sunset with his four World Series rings and never looked back,” Reddick says. “But the guy just wants to keep playing baseball.”
I’d driven seven hours from Austin, Texas, to this small city in northern Mexico, 1,800 miles and a world from San Francisco, to understand what still drew Sandoval to the game. Mexico’s summer league has teams in Tijuana, in Mexico City, in Oaxaca City, in Monterrey. Why did the Kung Fu Panda choose to sign on in a landlocked steel town whose 8,000-seat stadium is the lone tourism draw? Had he found, in Monclova, a road back to the states? Or had he found something else?
At 4 p.m., three hours before first pitch, Pablo Sandoval packs a lip. He wears diamond earrings, a burst fade buzzed close on the sides, knee-high blue socks, and flip flops. We sit on a bench in the dugout, bisected by a bit of shade, and he’s sweating. It’s 96 degrees, down from the high of 108 the weekend before, and it’s humid. But Sandoval says he doesn’t mind the heat; it reminds him of home in Venezuela.
When I ask Sandoval what he’s still reaching for after all these years in the game, he leans back and grins. “As long as I can hit the baseball, I'm gonna keep playing,” he says. “Until my wife tell me or my kids tell me, ‘Dad, stop!’”
Close your eyes and picture Pablo Sandoval. What do you see? The portly slugger’s leg lifted high and then all that weight lunging towards a fastball above his eyes or a curveball inches from the ground? The lasting image is one of joyous abandon and incongruous athleticism. Even through a screen, you could feel the insatiable hunger to swing.
Sandoval was called up to the majors in 2008 and his ascent was exponential. The 21-year-old seemed born to hit, and immediately started mashing. But it was about more than the production. There was a magnetism to the 5’10" third baseman who was then listed at 246 pounds. After Sandoval hurdled a Dodgers catcher to score a run, his teammate Barry Zito dubbed him the Kung Fu Panda. The nickname stuck. Soon, masses of Giants fans came to games wearing panda hats.
This was a middling prospect, built like Babe Ruth, who’d arrived from nowhere and seemed to flash the inexplicable every night. He’d lunge for line drives and blow a bubble while airborne. He’d also occasionally trip and fall while running the bases. David Halberstam wrote of Joe DiMaggio: “He was always gliding, always smooth, always, it seemed, where he wanted to be just when he wanted to be.” Sandoval’s appeal was just the opposite. His allure came from his lack of varnish. He was unpredictable. He made it impossible to look away.
But the closer the Giants looked at their burgeoning star, the more they saw things they wanted to change. In late fall, before the 2010 season, the team put Sandoval through Operation Panda, a three-week diet and workout program at their spring training facility in Scottsdale, Arizona. Then he went to play winter ball back home in Venezuela, and arrived the next spring as heavy as before. He had a down season, and the questions about his conditioning began to burble up. The Giants manager Bruce Bochy benched him for parts of the Giants World Series run. He went hitless as the Giants won their first championship since 1954.
Still, Sandoval’s Giants run was unimpeachable. In 2012, he joined Babe Ruth, Reggie Jackson, and Albert Pujols as the only players to hit three home runs in a World Series game. He won World Series MVP and his second ring in three years. “God give you a talent and give you opportunity to shine,” he tells me. “When you shine, you have to keep your foot on the ground.”
Sandoval was adored by Giants fans—a modern-day folk hero. He was in his early 20s and San Francisco was his oyster. “He did feel like a mythical baseball figure,” his former teammate Hunter Pence tells me. Sandoval says he’d often go out to dinner and the restaurant owners would refuse to let him pay. “They tell me things like, ‘You do a lot of things for this city and, you know, you earned this,’” he says.
A couple of veterans—Zito and Rich Aurilia—pulled Sandoval aside in those early years and warned him: “Fame can come quickly and go quickly too if you don't know how to handle it.” He’d arrived in San Francisco unblemished, but then his production continued to slip. Sandoval would never again hit as many home runs or hit for as high of an average as he did in his 22-year-old season. Still, in 2014, he caught the final out, sealing the Giants’ third World Series in five years.
And then he left. At 28, Sandoval signed a 5-year, $90 million contract with the Boston Red Sox and the panda-hat-wearing masses were gutted. What the hell had happened? Who was to blame? Sandoval said publicly that he’d only miss Bochy and Pence. “New house, new friends,” he told USA Today during the 2015 spring training. He’d been annoyed by the organization’s constant focus on his weight. He felt he’d earned the right to be trusted to take care of himself.
Boston was another kind of animal. “The media and the cities are just different, and I tried to tell him that you have a really good home here,” Pence says. “Honestly, he'll even probably admit that he had some maturing to do, and he grew up a lot through that experience.”
Sandoval hit terribly in his first year of the new deal and showed up late at spring training the next season, leading the Boston media to start a “Panda Watch.” In his first press availability, they asked about his weight and about what he needed to prove after the down year. “No, I don’t got nothing to prove,” Sandoval responded. Those seven words unleashed the hounds.
The Boston Globe’s Dan Shaughnessy wrote a column that included the line “Get a load of that gut” and a paragraph about searching for him at “the deli counter at Publix and the popular Two Meatballs in the Kitchen restaurant off Daniels Parkway.” The day after that, Eric Wilbur of Boston.com wrote a scathing take on Sandoval, mentioning an unflattering photograph that ran in The Globe: “Jim Davis had the money shot of Sandoval working out at third, his girth protruding over his shorts, seemingly boasting of an offseason flirting with Sara Lee and Colonel Sanders.”
He hadn’t earned a runway in Boston; there was no loyalty from the organization or the Red Sox faithful. “We make mistakes. We can make errors. And you know, it's part of the game,” he says now. “But fans don't realize that we are human beings. We got lifestyle. We have problems, too. We have off-the-field things. And they don’t understand that.”
Sandoval tells me he thought about quitting baseball when he tore his labrum in 2016. His wife was the one who convinced him to keep playing. I ask if he regrets signing in Boston, if he wishes he would’ve taken the Giants' offer and stayed in San Francisco. “I should have stayed. I know. I learned my lesson,” he says. “But I'm happy I went through it, man, because I kept my eyes open and learned a lot of things.”
“He was so young. People don't realize that because he was so talented, he's having to make these wild decisions at such a young age,” Pence says. “It's tough in this world to know who to trust and who's telling you what. There are a lot of people pulling you a lot of directions, especially being a part of three World Series and winning a World Series MVP. Being that young, it's tough to manage.”
I ask Sandoval if he ever lost his love for the game during his big-league career. When the Giants harped on his weight? When Boston columnists questioned his dedication? When Barstool published an article headlined “Look At This Fat Fuckin' Piece Of Shit Pablo Sandoval”? He’s quiet for a moment, touching a scar that sits below his left eye. But then his wide cheeks split open to flash that too-bright, too-straight toothy smile. “It never changed. Baseball means a lot for me. It's my life, my career,” he says. “It's one of the things that I still do with love and passion because that's the way they teach me when I was young. People don't realize that when you lost that, it's the time to walk away. But I’m never gonna lose that, because I love this.”
The first thing you see when you get to Estadio de Béisbol Monclova is a large iron statue of a ladle — the bucket that pours the molten iron during the steel-making process. It stands beside a decommissioned train and a massive replica of the team’s 2019 championship ring. Acereros translates to “Steelers”; the statue is a not-so-subtle reminder that steel is inextricable from this city and this team.
Jesús Guajardo, a 64-year-old artist and historian, tells me the “gringo” Harold R. Pape’s role in his hometown’s history. The elder Pape came south from Ohio to jumpstart Mexico’s domestic steel production during World War II, and eventually, his company Alto Hornos de México (AHMSA) became the largest steel producer in Latin America. The Papes stayed, building parks and a museum, and investing in the schools. In 2017, Pape’s grandson bought the local team. The shared team name—the Steelers—makes it easy to understand Monclova, a city of 230,000 in the northern state of Coahuila, as the Pittsburgh of Mexico; in that case, the Pape family can be understood as the northern state of Coahuila’s Carnegies. It’s not hard to imagine a rich gringo in the extraction industry being reviled in Coahuila, but Monclova’s first family seems to intimately understand their adopted hometown. In 2019, two years after Pape’s grandson bought the Acereros, he signed some well-compensated former Major Leaguers and they won Monclova its first LMB championship.
Bruce Maxwell was one of a handful of former big leaguers on the 2019 Acereros roster. Chris Carter, Josh Reddick, Addison Russell, and Sandoval all signed on to play on the 2022 team after years in the show. But for Russell, Maxwell, and recently fired Acereros manager Mickey Callaway, the road to Mexico was considerably pocked. Callaway was suspended by MLB after an investigation by The Athletic detailed allegations of “lewd behavior” by five women. Russell was cut by the Cubs in 2019 after serving a 40-game suspension for domestic abuse against his ex-wife. Maxwell still says he believes kneeling led him to be blackballed by the league, but he was also arrested for aggravated assault for allegedly pointing a gun at a delivery woman in 2017. “The States wants everybody to be clean and a perfect person. And it's not reality. So, I feel like a lot of people get ostracized for expressing personal beliefs or having personal problems or not being the perfect person,” Maxwell says. “And down here, nobody gives a shit.”
Sandoval and Reddick, meanwhile weren’t exiled from the big leagues for anything but age. When I’m down with the team, Reddick seems a bit drained by what he calls the “Double-A travel schedule”—the Acereros had arrived from a nine-hour bus ride right before dawn on the day of the game. Still, he says he’s having fun. “You're a former player a lot longer than you ever were a current player. So, you just try to play as long as you can and enjoy every moment,” he says. “You don't want to look back and go: ‘Man, I really wish I would have played two more years.’” But a week after I leave Monclova, Reddick surprises the organization by announcing that he’s retiring.
Sandoval is much more energized as we talk on that dugout bench. He says he loves the small-town life in Monclova. He loves the food and the fact that fans invite him to cookouts and carnivals. And he loves to be a mentor to the young guys, especially Aldo Nunez, the 21-year-old infielder who starts laughing while correcting me when I ask if he sees Sandoval like an older brother: “No mi hermano mayor. Mi papa.” Not my older brother. My dad. Sandoval, sitting on a bucket of baseballs behind Nunez, stomps his foot and shakes his head: “Damn! Making me feel old, man!”
Hunter Pence remembers the young Sandoval as a wild, energetic extrovert. He says the Giants had to put stoppers on the dugout railings to keep their third baseman from sliding down too fast and hurting himself. Sandoval’s held onto that childlike energy, but he has found a second life in the game as an elder statesman. He tells the young guys on the Acereros the same thing he told the young Braves stars early last season. “When you play the game the right way, the game gonna pay you back,” Sandoval says. “It's the only thing that I always say to the guys: if you play hard, respect your team, and respect the game, the baseball gods are gonna give you something.”
But no one knows better than Sandoval that the baseball gods take, too. The best hitters on the planet fail seven times out of ten. Start failing eight of ten, and then the trouble comes.
Each team in La Liga is allowed to sign seven foreign players, who are often the most expensive guys on the roster. Salaries aren’t made public in Mexico, but people I spoke to estimated that Sandoval was getting at least $20,000 per month, plus room and board. One pitcher told me he was actually paid less by an MLB team when he was called up last September than he gets per month in Mexico, because the LMB teams cover expenses and pay taxes for the foreign players. As Sandoval has learned again and again, the game he loves is a business, too.
When he signed with the Acereros (whose nickname is Furia Azul) in February, the team released a 500-word press release in Spanish outlining Sandoval’s storied career. It ended with the sentence: “With his arrival, the Furia Azul adds an element that, in addition to helping on the field of play, will give shine and projection to the Mexican Baseball League, becoming one of the most anticipated attractions to be seen not only in Monclova, but in the cities that the team will visit.”
Sandoval had signed with the Acereros because he knew there’d be no Operation Panda and no Panda Watch in Monclova. But ten days after I drove back to Austin, as the Acereros prepared to head to Mexico City for a three-game series, the franchise unceremoniously released Sandoval. A team employee explained to me that it was a baseball decision: “He was hitting .240 in a hitters’ friendly league. I guess they expected more.” The small-town team with a lineup packed with big-league talent was barely .500. The front office was in a panic.
The next morning, I reach out to Sandoval’s representative Victor Acosta, who texts me in Spanish: “This news doesn’t sit well because of the way the team went about things with Pablo Sandoval, a guy who was in the big leagues for 15 years.” When I get through to Sandoval and ask what happened, he tells me: “Nah, nah. I don’t want to talk about Monclova.” The call lasts 45 seconds.
A week later, I get back in touch. Sandoval’s in Durango, in northwestern Mexico, on a roadtrip with his new team, the Olmecas de Tabasco, who picked him up a few days after he was cut by the Acereros. He says he was surprised he’d been released, but seems sanguine enough. “It’s a job, you know? There's nothing you can do,” he says. Sandoval wants me to know that he appreciates the Acereros for bringing him to the LMB, that he’s thankful to the ownership and his ex-teammates. Still, his tone is decidedly different than it was during our conversation in the dugout. That one kept coming circling back to his love of the game. Now, he reminds me: “Like I said before, it’s work.”
Near the end of our chat in the dugout, I ask Sandoval if he’ll have regrets when he finally takes his last swing. “No, I never imagined this. It's the things that I was dreaming when I was a little kid in my backyard playing baseball,” he says. “When I retire, I'm gonna retire with my head up.”
He’s been thinking more about his earliest memories, he says, remembering the days taking batting practice from his older brother Michael in Puerto Cabello. The Major League scouts first came calling when he was 14. Before then, Sandoval thought he’d be a lawyer and spend his life in Venezuela. But then the men arrived and said he could be special, so he told his mom he wanted to pursue a career in baseball. She needed to talk to these scouts first. “She said a lot of things to them,” Sandoval tells me. “That she want me to finish high school. She want me to do things. She want me to be a better person.”
So, he graduated and then he left everyone he’d ever known and arrived for rookie ball in Arizona. He was 17 and barely spoke a lick of English. Everything was brand new; nothing was easy. He missed his country and he was homesick. But by his second year, he started to find his footing in the game again. He started to realize he belonged. “I learned how to survive,” he says.
There were still three more years in the lowest levels of minor league baseball. But then, in 2008, he began the season at the Single-A level in San Jose. All year long, he hit everything he saw. By September, he was the Kung Fu Panda, prince of San Francisco. His life had changed for good.
Sandoval tells me his son is now six, and has found his way to the game. “It reminds me of myself when I was a little kid. Tee-ball, everything, got me excited. He started by himself. He wanted to swing the bat. I don't put pressure on him,” Sandoval says. I ask what kind of player his son is. Sandoval starts to laugh. “He swings at everything. He love to hit. That’s his thing. He love to hit.”
An Acereros coach comes over and tells Sandoval his group is up next for batting practice. I tell Sandoval that I remember being instantly drawn to the way he seemed to relish each at-bat. He was always waiting, eager and impatient, like he was telling the guy on the mound to get on with it already. And then the pitch would come, and then he’d swing, and often he’d look foolish doing it. But the pitcher would get set again and he’d be just as eager and impatient for the next one. I ask him if he sees a parallel between his life in the batter’s box and his life in the game. He stands up, slipping on his batting gloves. Then he turns back to me and nods: “Keep swinging. I’m always saying that.”
Joseph Bien-Kahn is a freelance writer in Los Angeles. He’s written about sports, film, and adventurers for the New York Times Magazine, Sports Illustrated, and New York Mag