TORONTO — There isn’t much to the unusual tattoo on the left side of Yohendrick Pinango’s neck – a very noticeable set of red lips – that was essentially a fit of fancy when he was 18. “When you’re young, you do things,” the Toronto Blue Jays outfielder explained. “I liked it, so I did it.”
The body art with real meaning, that offers a window into his backstory, is the sleeve that covers his right arm, a carefully crafted dedication to his late father, Alexander. An image of the man better known by the nickname, Reyito, stares out from his son’s shoulder and the words beneath it, “fu en cielo, yo en la tierra, un solo comazon,” are those of love and loss.
You are in heaven, I’m on Earth, one heart.
“My dad was a great human being. He was the guy always helping in the community. Unfortunately, he got killed,” Pinango recalled through interpreter Hector Lebron. “It’s difficult to live with that. But you’ve got to learn, to find a way to live without him and to accomplish one of the goals that he had for me. One of his dreams for me was to become a ballplayer, a big-leaguer. That’s one of the things I took from him and I’m very happy that I made it, not only for myself but for him, because I know that’s what he wanted me to do.”
Pinango had just turned six when Reyito died May 11, 2008, the specific details of how he didn’t want to share. Before his death, the father had asked his older sister, Noris, to take custody and raise his son if something ever happened to him, which she did after consulting with Pinango’s mom Yarbelys, who was raising two step-siblings from a different father.
Reyito, who was 30, played professional basketball in Venezuela, as well as volleyball and baseball recreationally. All three sports are depicted on Pinango’s arm, with the date of his death, 11-05-08, and the No. 14, his jersey number, along with his nickname behind a lightning bolt. Yarbelys is scrawled in bold lettering across his forearm, too.
During their brief time together, Reyito and Pinango played lots of sports, especially baseball. Like his son, the father played the outfield, but he batted right-handed and tried to coax the young lefty-swinger to turn around, to no avail.
Pinango took to the game immediately.
“Even before I played in a league, off the field, I always worked out with him and he knew it,” said Pinango, 24. “He always told me that, to keep working, you’re going to be good.”
Fulfilling her brother’s wishes, Noris both educated her nephew and “pushed me in baseball, taking me to the fields and helping me out with everything in my life.”
Pinango was seven when he first joined the local league in his hometown of Carora, leading his team to a championship while winning all the individual hitting awards. He continued to progress from there, becoming a player of some repute, and at 13, happened to hit for the cycle one game when Alvaro (El Chivo) Bernalete was watching. Bernalete worked with an academy called Future Stars and invited Pinango to join.
While Noris wanted him to study more, she also understood that baseball was his passion so she agreed. Barely a teenager, Pinango moved to a facility in Barquisimeto 90 minutes west, sharing one of the bunkbeds in a massive dorm room housing roughly 20 kids. Three years later, the move paid off when Jose Luis Montero, the academy’s owner, helped negotiate a deal with the Chicago Cubs once the 2018 international signing period opened.
Pinango spent 5½ years in the Cubs system before the Blue Jays acquired him and shortstop prospect Josh Rivera in a deadline deal for Nate Pearson on July 27, 2024. He’d just gotten to double-A and the trade “surprised me a little bit, but I saw it as a new opportunity,” he said.
“It felt like when I first signed with the Cubs and when I found out it was the Blue Jays, I was very excited,” he continued. “They told me to keep doing what you’re doing, we like that you’re always aggressive, very aggressive hitter, you like to do damage at any count and that’s what I’m doing since.”
Blue Jays player-development staff were excited by his bat speed and exit velocities but felt a steep attack angle in his swing led to too many groundballs and didn’t maximize the quality of his contact.
After the 2024 season, he played winterball with the Cardenales de Lara, where he began working on getting his barrel on plane earlier, mashed at double-A New Hampshire for two months to open 2025 and then got a bump to triple-A Buffalo, posting a .714 OPS in 84 games with the Bisons.
Another stint with Lara, this time with a .363 average and eight homers in 24 games, springboarded him into a solid big-league spring training with the Blue Jays, impressing with the quality of his at-bats. When Nathan Lukes hit the injured list April 25, the Blue Jays brought him up from Buffalo in a late-night call, a moment that he shared with his wife, Luisana Mendoza, before calling his aunt and his mom.
“I had in my mind that this year I was going to be in the big-leagues – I wasn’t expecting to be here this soon,” said Pinango. “But my goal was to be here at some point this year.”
Now that he’s up, he’s seizing the moment, the way Reyito would have wanted him to.
Hitting coach David Popkins described Pinango’s at-bats as “fearless.” Manager John Schneider admires the way he “has bad intentions at the plate, he’s not just trying to touch it.”
Pinango believes his father would like “my aggressiveness” and “would have called me like an animal in danger, because that was his style of playing.” When he runs into his father’s former basketball teammates who have seen him in the batter’s box, “they tell me that was your dad, too, he was very aggressive.”
Competing with that energy is another way to honour his father, who is always top of mind. As part of the sleeve, on the side of his forerarm are the words, “No todo lo que, tiene Vida Vivo, No todo lo que, Muere a Muerto,” Spanish for “not everything that lives is alive, not everything that dies is dead.”
“It’s still a challenge, it’s an everyday challenge to live without your dad,” said Pinango. “It’s very hard, especially the way everything happened. My dad was a great person and hopefully one day justice comes for him. Every day I think about him and I use it to push me to keep accomplishing everything that I can.”