Starscreams | A Sit-Down with Ramón Pagán (50.4)

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Starscreams | A Sit-Down with Ramón Pagán (50.4)

Post by mragland » Sun May 08, 2022 8:45 pm

Starscreams: A Valencia Stars Baseball Blog

A Sit-Down with Ramón Pagán

8/27/2050
Brianna Robles, Starscreams contributor

Most Brewster fans know Ramón Pagán as the ball player who had a 50/50 season, twice. They know about the all-star appearances, the Golden Bat award.

But how does a ballplayer from Colombia end up with the nickname Waco? I had a chance to sit down the once and current Stars outfielder and asked him just that.

"It's a funny story," says Pagán. "The confluence of two things that appear unrelated. My game has always been about speed. Fast hands, fast feet. Quick decisions. My father was a big fan of the films of Mel Brooks, dubbed into Spanish. In youth baseball, and even today, though to a lesser degree, I had this odd hitch in my swing. I would start out slow and watch the ball for just another split second before committing to my swing. I've always had quick hands in the zone, strong wrists, and I needed to have them since I basically was starting my swing just a little bit late and catching up to the ball. I always felt that this small amount of extra time watching the ball helped me make contact, judge the path of the ball better, though it's certainly not a swing that you would teach a youngster. Anyway, once I did get going, my swing was so fast my father started calling me The Waco Kid, after the character in Blazing Saddles.

"In my youth games my dad, he had an unusual sense of humor, he would sit in the stands and when I came to the plate he would call out 'Wa-co, Wa-co', like he was taunting me. It didn't make sense to anybody but him. I asked him, 'why do you do this?' He said, 'son, you are very good, but you need to be humble, not everyone is going to be cheering you on like they are now, you need a thick skin if you're going to play at a higher level, so I am here trying to distract, or rather to teach you not to be distracted by anything that goes on in the stands'.

"He kept trying to get the Waco Kid nickname to stick, but really nobody else called me that. And then finally, one day he was being interviewed by an American reporter just before the Brewster draft, and he told the reporter about the nickname and how popular it was here in Colombia, which of course was a lie, but the reporter put it in the, like, two paragraphs he wrote about me in a larger article about draft prospects, but there must have been a bad connection or something went wrong in translation, my dad doesn't speak English very well, though it's been getting better since he's been traveling to the states to watch me play, and the sports writer took the nickname down as simply 'Waco'.

"In other baseball news stories that were later written about me, the writers kept quoting or referring to that first blurb about me being called 'Waco', and later stories would refer to those, and so on, and this one fib my father told a reporter one time kept getting repeated over and over in the press here in the States. In the end, the joke was ultimately on my father, because still nobody really calls me Waco or The Waco Kid. The fans and my teammates just call me Pags, which is fine by me. So if you're ever at a game and some guy starts chanting 'Wa-co, Wa-co', there's a pretty good chance that it's my dad."
Morris Ragland
President, Baseball Ops, Beirut Cedars (8/25/46 - 10/23/47)
President, Baseball Ops, Valencia Stars (10/24/47 - present)
925-891 Lifetime Record
2048 Caleca Winner

"Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm." - W. Churchill

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Re: Starscreams | A Sit-Down with Ramón Pagán (50.4)

Post by recte44 » Mon May 09, 2022 7:56 pm

Brilliant

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Re: Starscreams | A Sit-Down with Ramón Pagán (50.4)

Post by Joshua Biddle » Mon May 09, 2022 11:51 pm

:D
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Re: Starscreams | A Sit-Down with Ramón Pagán (50.4)

Post by chicoruiz » Tue May 10, 2022 10:32 am

That’s some good content right there… if we do Caleca team post awards this season, I bet it’s in the running.
( “In baseball you don’t know nothin’...” Yogi Berra)

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