As a young man he sold avocados in trays and buckets through the streets of Padre las Casas, Puerto Plata, he attended a hog dog cart, and worst of all, he defied death three times in his attempt to travel as a cop inside a ship, very close to the propellers, all in search of a better future for him and his family.
But, Amauris Batista never rested in his effort to change his life status and make him forget the hardships of his past, marked by hunger and lacking a light at the end of the tunnel that would allow him to leave poverty.
Today, and after spending decades of hardship, Batista, who is affectionately nicknamed “Chapita” is a prosperous baseball coach and recruiter, with more than 30 players from his Chapita Baseball Academy program who have signed for different organizations.
Although he currently enjoys a bit of the “honey” that comfort and owner of a rising career provides in his role as an instructor, Chapita never forgets his past and even gets goosebumps when he has to talk about it with even tears in her eyes.
“I had a very strong childhood and adolescence, look, we were 10 siblings in the house and there was not much to eat,” says the coach, whose father José Francisco was a farmer and his mother, Altagracia Batista, worked in the cocoa cut and harvest of coffee.
Narrating part of his vicissitudes, Batista has the last of his failed attempts latent in his eyes, when his sisters Miguelina and Carmen Batista ran like “crazy” to the West Beach pier in Puerto Plata to look for him and defy the old adage that says that the third time is the charm.
A few minutes before the ship left for New Orleans on that third occasion, which occurred in 1997, a friend named Cecilio accompanied Batista on his journey, but he abandoned his intentions, invited him to follow in his footsteps and seeing that he had no success, he He went to the house of his sisters, who arrived quickly and shouting they were able to convince him to leave it.
With knowledge of swimming, some experience in these trades, Batista chose to look for the middle part of the boat to jump into the water, because if he did it close to the propellers, these with their strength and pressure could drag him and break him to pieces. This he did and thus he was able to save himself.
“I am alive to tell this type of story, if it had not been for Cecilio, he would have been dead, since he had spent a couple of days in the lower part of the area occupied by the ship’s rudder, a place where an immense amount of fat sprouts, already I ran out of water, chocolates, pastries and spirit mint with which I had boarded the boat” he relates.
How does he get to instruct in baseball?
Barely 5’3 tall and weighing 105 pounds, he was far from being a baseball player, he never did it in an organized way, but in 2008, a coach named Santos Brito recruited him to take charge of one of the categories of children in the league that runs. He stayed there for a long time, but it was a few years later with Diógenes-Tite-Núñez, president of the Santiago Baseball Association, with whom he began his real journey as an instructor. He had started as a messenger in the entity in 2013, they gave him a small engine and along with this work he also looked for boys with qualities for baseball for Núñez and in this way he was introduced to the business.
He worked with Núñez for about three years, in the end he had learned the trade to train mainly pitchers and had as his first mentor in the role of instructor José Guerrero, a renowned pitching coach and who dedicated himself to teaching him.
LEARN MORE Great evolution in baseball Your prospects.
His first prospect was called Joan Domínguez, who in a short time agreed for 93 thousand dollars with the Phillies, the following year he had two more pitchers Luis Cepeda (Kansas) and Israel Puello (Phillies), between the two they agreed for 800 thousand and the rest already is history, because their signatures have arrived one after another and in a short space they exceed 30. Many of their prospects like Adisson Plascencia 1.1 million advance in Class A Medium with Anaheim, Lizandro Rodríguez