TORONTO — Carlos Febles was intrigued when he spotted Addison Barger chatting with Cincinnati Reds infielder Jeimer Candelario near the visitors’ dugout at Rogers Centre last August.
The Toronto Blue Jays infield instructor, a native of the Dominican Republic, was wondering how exactly Barger knew Candelario, who also grew up on the island. He later posed the question to Barger and was surprised by the answer.
Turns out Barger had spent some time playing there when he was a teenager.
“I found out that he knows his Spanish,” Febles recalls with a smile. “And I was just talking (smack) about him in Spanish.”
Barger doesn’t advertise his D.R. experience to teammates or coaches, even though it was actually a formative time in his baseball life. The 25-year-old is becoming known for his impressive tools — he’s got a cannon for an arm and possesses one of the fastest swings in the sport — and his desire to maximize them can be traced back to the island.
It’s all part of a backstory that is unique, to say the least.
“Everything about this kid’s story is rare,” says Matt Bishoff, the former Blue Jays scout who drafted and signed Barger.
The tale begins with his parents, Adam and Leah, who started a successful software business and had their four sons in the Seattle area before moving to Florida to pursue Bible studies.
The family bought a large piece of land northeast of Tampa, and before a house was even constructed, Adam, an avid baseball fan, built a full-sized diamond on it. His sons, Ken, Connor and Luke, all played but weren’t drawn to the sport in the way that the youngest, Addison, was.
Barger was homeschooled and, from a very young age, his routine revolved around baseball. Adam hired Luis Arzeno, a Dominican former catcher and first baseman in the Philadelphia Phillies’ minor-league system, to work every day with his son, developing his body and advancing his skills.
“Addison was a late bloomer,” Arzeno says. “To be drafted in the United States, you need to run, you need to throw, you need to hit, and you need to have size. He didn’t have that size.”
Barger also didn’t benefit from the on-field development associated with playing for a high-school team like other freshmen his age, and Adam felt this would eventually hurt his draft chances. He sought to expedite his son’s progress and, along with Arzeno, devised a plan for Barger to compete in the Dominican Prospect League showcase.
“I felt that he needed to be exposed to wherever the most committed development of baseball players was,” Adam says. “Luis provided a bridge to that in the Dominican Republic.”
Barger embraced the experience and wasn’t fazed by being in a different country — he’d previously travelled to Brazil, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras with his parents during their missionary work.
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On the field, though, he felt out of place.
“I was just a young kid,” Barger remembers. “I was 14 years old and easily the smallest. All these kids are huge, and I was probably five-foot-two, 100 pounds. I was a tiny kid (who) was just thrown into the fire. It was good for me, but it was scary, it was hard.”
While Barger stuck out for more than just his size — “Everybody was asking, ‘Who’s that white kid in the middle of all the Latin players?’” says Arzeno — he did manage to hold his own while playing shortstop. However, more important than the physical development was the change that came about in his mindset.
“There’s a difference between a 14-year-old Dominican and your average 14-year-old American,” says Barger. “In the U.S., we’re focused on being good at baseball and learning the game; their focus is more, ‘How hard can I throw?’ and, ‘How hard can I hit the ball?’ as young as possible in order to sign.”
“They’re all tooled out,” he continues. “So, the difference is you have to focus on getting those tools up because at that point, I was a good player. I could field groundballs, I had a decent arm and I could hit a little bit. But I didn’t have power. My tools were never amazing and I think the experience helped me exaggerate focusing on the tools.”
Adam says Barger’s two weeks in the D.R. also helped instill in him a stronger work ethic.
“As hard as you ever think that you’re working, there’s probably somebody working harder out there,” says the father. “As much as you think you’re suffering to develop a skill, there’s probably somebody suffering more to develop that same skill or that specialized knowledge.”
The next summer, Adam and Arzeno worked to find another way for Barger to level up. This time, they created a travel ball team and invited 15 Dominican teenagers from the prospect showcase to live and train at the Barger household while competing with him in tournaments against top teenage talent in Florida.
Adam outfitted his garage into a gym, and above it was a 900-square-foot room where the teens slept. It was configured with a kitchen, essentially functioning as an apartment for the team. Adam estimates he spent roughly $30,000 over eight weeks on food, travel and administrative costs and was content that the venture not only gave his son another avenue to compete and grow, but it also offered additional exposure to the D.R. players. Alberto Rodriguez (Blue Jays) and Starlyn Castillo (Phillies) were among the travel team’s alumni who signed with major-league organizations.
Adam fully acknowledges that Barger has had advantages and resources that have set him up to succeed, but he points out that his son has doggedly put in the work to get stronger and become a better athlete and baseball player. His development continued when he played for the C. Leon King High School team in Tampa during his junior and senior years. By then, Barger had begun to attract MLB teams.
Bishoff, an area scout for the Blue Jays at the time, says that while Barger’s frame hadn’t yet filled out, he had a good feel for the game along with a “really fast bat” and a “bazooka” of an arm. Additionally, evaluators loved his makeup.
The Blue Jays run a scout team that competes annually in a major high-school tournament in Jupiter, Fla., and selected Barger, who was in his senior year. He suffered a lower-body injury but was adamant about continuing to play, an occurrence that endeared him to Bishoff and others.
“I’ll tell you, 95 per cent or higher of kids in a showcase tournament like this, they get a little tweak or something like that, they’re shutting it down,” says Bishoff, who now works as an international and amateur crosschecker for the Los Angeles Angels. “Like, ‘I’m done. I’m not gonna play hurt in front of scouts.’ He did the opposite. He didn’t want to come out of the lineup, he wanted to win the games.
“We’re like, ‘Oh man, this kid’s got something to him.'”
Around eight months later, the Blue Jays selected Barger in the sixth round of the 2018 draft. He slowly climbed through the organization’s system before making his major-league debut last year. He began this season in triple-A but was called up to Toronto in mid-April and has since provided impact on both sides of the ball, generating 0.6 wins above replacement in just 25 games.
Arzeno, his old trainer and personal coach, has been tuning into recent Blue Jays games and can’t help but draw a direct line between Barger’s style of play and his time in the D.R.
“Addison came back from the Dominican with a different mentality because he knows he has to push himself,” says Arzeno. “Going to the Dominican created hunger in him. Hunger to get better and play with a chip on his shoulder all the time in the field. That’s the reason Addison plays with 120-per-cent intensity every game.”
