T
he youngest child born to parents Roger and Yoleida, baseball was far from the obvious path for the young Santander, even if he started playing the game at the age of four. Roger played basketball competitively, but not professionally, helping his team reach a top-level national tournament that included future Houston Rockets power forward Carl Herrera, the first Venezuelan to reach the NBA. Roger started his son in hoops when he was nine and Santander took to it immediately, enthralled by the pace and constant movement. “As an athlete, you like action,” he says, “so basketball, for me, was big-time.” Still, he also played baseball, and it soon become apparent which road he was meant to follow. “I didn’t know if I was good enough to be a pro, because it’s tough to know, but I knew I was good,” he says. “I just worked, worked, worked and let the results speak for me.”
Santander was first invited to join the OL academy in 2008, when he was 13, but his mother nixed the idea because she wanted him to finish another year of school and graduate. Santander did that and the next year he headed off, showing enough to attract the interest of multiple clubs ahead of the 2011 international signing period. Cleveland made the best offer and he signed with the club that July, joining an organization where Atkins was vice-president of player development and Mark Shapiro, now the Blue Jays president and CEO, was president. “Very early on,” Atkins remembers, “he stood out because of his strength and athleticism and just how mature his approach to the game was.”