From Pearl Lagoon to Fenway .

[NateGrey]

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http://espn.go.com/photo/2007/0210/nic20.jpg

 

 

 

The Nicaraguan pitcher with a Jamaican inflection and British surname sat in his airy Toronto five-star hotel room this past September, took a deep breath and looked down at his dark, flexed forearms.

 

"A Pearl Lagoon boy is here," Red Sox pitcher Devern Hansack said. "I can't believe I'm here."

 

You can't fault his amazement, since the past year lifted Hansack from obscure pitcher playing pro ball in Nicaragua to major leaguer on the last day of the season at Fenway Park, no-hitting the Orioles for five rain-shortened innings.

 

It was Craig Shipley, Boston's vice president of international and pro scouting, who spotted the 27-year-old Hansack in the fall of 2005 in Holland pitching for the Nicaraguan national team. Hansack had been released by the Astros in 2003, and went unsigned until Shipley gave him a $3,000 bonus. Hansack went on to become the Red Sox's Double-A pitcher of the year while living in a Dominican fan's basement apartment in Portland, Maine.

 

Now Hansack, at 29 and with a wicked slider and a mid-90s fastball, has got an outside chance of winning the closer's job for the Red Sox. It might be a long shot, but so is Hansack.

 

"Boston signed me and gave me a second chance," Hansack says. "I can tell any young guy who wants to do something, there's a second chance. Just put your mind to it."

 

In late January Hansack invited The Magazine on a wild trip back to his hometown, where most people speak English with a Jamaican lilt. "I think he lives in the middle of nowhere," Red Sox PR director John Blake told me when I asked in early January about finding Hansack. "It may be difficult."

 

It was. From Cessna airplane to motorized canoe to Pearl Lagoon, the journey isn't for the weak.

 

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Not many make it out of Pearl Lagoon, a town of over 7,000 whose ancestry is a mix of Jamaican and African slaves, British occupiers and indigenous tribes that inhabit the surrounding cays on Nicaragua's Atlantic Coast. For people in the second-poorest Latin American nation (Haiti is first), money and commerce are sparse.

 

The people of Pearl Lagoon are extremely poor, but they, unlike their inland countrymen, are people of the sea. The water is the lifeline in this fishing community, where most men begin fetching lobster, shrimp, snapper, catfish and shark, among others, when they are young boys.

 

They are proud too, of their heritage. Inherent racism thrives in all Latin countries, but the language difference and remote locale of Nicaragua's Costa Atlantica adds to the segregation. The Coast traditionally has been exclusively black; only recently, pockets of Mestizo and Spanish-speaking people have migrated from interior parts of the country.

 

Hansack's agent, Evelio Areas -- who is from Managua, the country's capital -- quips that Hansack speaks Spanish "with a gringo accent." But Areas is serious when he says that Pearl Lagoon, "is a whole different country. I'm Nicaraguan and it was a foreign land when I went."

 

Hansack isn't sure from whom he descends, but his roots are firmly ensconced in baseball. Situated right behind the scoreboard in center field is Hansack's house. He was born next to the baseball field, and lived it his entire life. He still hasn't left....

 

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