Here’s a strange one: A Cuban baseball player named Loah Linares has been sleeping outside Dodger Stadium for weeks in the hopes of landing a tryout with the Los Angeles club.
ABC 7 in L.A. has the details:
“If I didn’t know how great a baseball player I know I am, I wouldn’t be here trying to show off my skills to somebody,” Linares said.
He’s determined to stay outside Dodger Stadium for as long as it takes, and has been working out as much as he can on the streets, hoping the owners will give him a shot on the field….
The Los Angeles Dodgers had no response when contacted by Eyewitness News, but security says Linares has unsuccessfully tried to get into the stadium.
It’s a curious story, and there’s no evidence I can find online of Loah Linares’ history as a baseball player beyond the publicity surrounding his efforts at Chavez Ravine. So it could easily be some sort of stunt.
Either way, the attention Linares is now getting and the apparent presence of a film crew there to interview him suggest we probably haven’t heard the last of him. And it’s easy to say, heck, if the dude’s this dedicated to playing for the Dodgers, they should at least give him 10 minutes to show what he’s got. But presumably the Dodgers don’t want to be in the business of encouraging guys to start camping outside their stadium for tryouts, even if they’ve got the financial flexibility to sign every one of them to an eight-figure deal on spec.
Linares’ best-case scenario is probably to drag this on long enough to become famous, at which point some independent-league team will almost certainly give him a roster spot for publicity purposes. And once he’s playing somewhere, Major League teams will know right quick if he’s actually got big-league talent.
Here’s hoping he does, as that would be cool.
(Thanks to Hardball Talk for calling our attention to this story.)
