Yankees Mag: Life Sciences
Melissa Hernandez seems to be fighting back tears as she tells the story, attempting to explain some of the unexpected emotional heft that comes with her job as the lead teacher/player development assistant at the Latin Béisbol Academy.
Hernandez has been working for the Yankees since 2016, teaching in the Dominican Republic for several years before spending time running the education side of the player development complex in Tampa, Fla. She’s back in the Dominican now, where her office in the Boca Chica complex is plastered with photos of smiling young ballplayers. The vast majority of them are all but anonymous; few would be recognizable to even the most prospect-savvy Yankees fan. But the photos radiate warmth and joy and achievement. It’s the type of brag wall that only a teacher could truly appreciate.
The Latin Béisbol Academy is where some of the youngest members of the Yankees organization get their start. While players from the United States and Puerto Rico are subject to the MLB Draft, which they can take part in either immediately following high school or after one year of junior college or three years at a four-year college, international players can sign contracts when they’re as young as 16 years old. It’s essentially a free-for-all, with scouts scouring the globe and locking up players as early as possible. And while amateur baseball in the U.S. is becoming an ever-more-expensive and specialized sport, many of the teenage prospects signed from far-flung corners of the world show up with well-trained skills, loads of potential … and little else.
Hernandez recalls a young, thin pitcher that was signed and brought over to the Academy. “He was so skinny that I was worried when I saw him,” she says. “Like, How is he going to make it? He had these sandal shoes on all the time. And when they took him down to get his feet sized for baseball shoes, he started crying. And the guy down there called me, ‘Melissa, will you please come down here, because this kid is crying and I don’t know what’s going on.’ So, I went down there and I asked him, and he told me that was the first time that he had worn shoes.
“Those are the kinds of things you hear.”
Hernandez and everyone else involved with the Latin Béisbol Academy have plenty of stories like that. To be sure, if you asked administrators from any of the other 29 teams’ academies that dot the Dominican landscape, they certainly do, as well. The system that feeds players to many of these academies, particularly from third-world countries, is different in every way from what American amateurs experience.
Oswaldo Cabrera was 16 years old when he signed with the Yankees out of Venezuela on July 2, 2015. By the end of 2016, he had split time in three different leagues, starting in the Dominican Summer League, then spending time in Florida’s Gulf Coast League and with the team’s then-Carolina League affiliate in Pulaski, Va. But, he says, “I left home at 13 or 14 years old.” Like so many other young strivers, Cabrera had turned his life over to baseball at a time when young American boys and girls are managing the awkward effects of puberty.
“You’re still a kid; that’s not a secret,” he says of showing up at the Academy as a 16-year-old. “You have to get your mind in the right way to not think that you’re a kid. You’re a man now.”
Kids need love, they need support, and they need schooling. And at the Yankees’ Latin Béisbol Academy, Hernandez and her staff are working to make sure that the players in their charge get all three.
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Brian Cashman gets it. The big leagues’ longest-tenured general manager knows that he and his staff are judged by results more than processes. All the goodwill that he has accumulated could be wiped away by a few dark Octobers at Yankee Stadium.
It’s a ruthless game, for executives, for coaches and certainly for players. Succeed, and you’ll be treated like a hero. Fail, and you’ll be cast aside. It’s always brutal when a player fails to meet expectations and the harsh realities of business take over, but it’s also the nature of the beast.
When it comes to teenagers at the Latin Béisbol Academy, it’s not so simple. If they don’t make it -- and most won’t -- you can’t just send them back home with nothing to show for their years of struggle. “The odds are against everybody that walks through that door,” Cashman says. “Despite their gifts, as those amazing baseball athletes with potential, we want them to leave armed with an education and non-baseball abilities that will serve them well for the rest of their lives.”
That mantra is evident in everything that the Latin Béisbol Academy does, and it starts almost from first contact.
“The first talk that I have with these guys when they first come here in groups is, ‘You’re not going to make it,’” Hernandez says. “It’s the reality: If there are 100 guys, only one of you is going to make it. So, what’s your plan? Because you need to have a plan.
“The Yankees and the Steinbrenner family are very clear on that point. They will help these players get as much education as they can. Because they know for a fact that not many of them are going to make it. So, what is the greatest gift that we can give them? Education. And a support system. We make sure that they have the chance of making it. But it’s on you. Because if you don’t make the effort? If you don’t ask for help? If you don’t do the work? You’re never going to make it.”
Once a player is signed and sent to the Academy, the Yankees have already invested in his athletic future. The support continues with industry-leading coaching and training. But the investment in the person is no less important, and it can have a longer (and more meaningful) impact.
It’s also something that the players who do make it always remember -- that when their big league career was still a far-off fantasy, someone was ready to invest in them. Fernando Cruz has thrived in his first year as a Yankee after a Homeric odyssey that finally landed him in the majors at age 32 in 2022. Drafted by Kansas City out of Puerto Rico, Cruz took advantage of all the opportunities that the Royals’ organization gave him to learn English and thrive in a professional setting, knowing that it would set him up for bigger things.
“I think it’s the most important thing for me as a player,” says Cruz. “I’m always going to choose the people that care about my life instead of who I am as a player.”
And everyone at the Yankees’ Academy truly does care. Hernandez knows what it’s like to be a parent relying on others for help. The mother of three sons, she leads a life in the baseball world rife with constant travel, moving from the Dominican Republic to Tampa and back, working insane hours caring for other parents’ children. “So, I treat them the way that I expect people to treat my boys,” Hernandez says. “I make it a point to get to know these guys. I sit down with them. I talk to them individually. I get to know their families. I get to know their people. I see them in classes. I see them in practice. I see them outside. If they have a wife, I make it a point to know their wife, to know what’s going on, because who’s going to do it? If I don’t care, who’s going to care for these guys?”
Hernandez is proud of the fact that the players never need to leave the Academy if they don’t want to; everything is there for them, from academic facilities to computer labs to a dining hall to rooms with video game systems. They never need money, and they never need to worry about their necessities being met. Touring the living quarters, it seems like your standard college dorm, only with thick, luxurious-looking mattresses, a reminder that this is still a place where cultivating athletic greatness is top of mind.
Again, when it comes to the Yankees’ philosophy, none of this is limited to the Dominican operation. The Steinbrenner family, as Cashman points out, is determined to do absolutely everything to the highest level possible. Aaron Judge recalls his own experiences as a young Minor Leaguer, with large professional athletes crammed onto a single bus for long trips up the East Coast. The 16-hour drive from Charleston, S.C., to Lakewood, N.J., could be brutal on anyone, but especially on ballplayers expected to perform upon arrival.
Judge and his teammates brought it up, and very quickly, there were two buses for road trips. The players could spread out. They could be more comfortable. Were there performance-based reasons? Sure. But for a 6-foot-7 ballplayer given the option to sleep comfortably on an interminable bus ride, the message was that the organization would listen even to low-level Minor Leaguers.
Cashman has seen it play out in a number of ways. Sure, you can point to a guy such as Judge, who developed into a superstar and matured into a captain determined to lift up his own young teammates. But he also points to a different, perhaps more meaningful anecdote. In September 2020, Mark Newman passed away. A longtime Yankees executive who spent 15 years as the team’s head of baseball operations, Newman was a constant presence and a hugely supportive figure in the lives of young Yankees striving for huge things.
When Cashman showed up to Newman’s funeral, he was astonished to see Gary Sánchez, then the team’s star catcher, in attendance.
“People understand the hands that have helped guide them and that spent so much time to help them,” Cashman says.
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As Luis Gil worked out on a field in a small Dominican town this past January, it was hard not to notice the young kids playing alongside him. It was a Friday morning, and “school” was very much in session. For some kids in the island nation, that word means classrooms and desks, no different from what you’d find all over America. For others, especially for those with hopes of using baseball as a means of lifting a family out of poverty, these on-field sessions are often what matter most.
All of which is how you get to a situation where the academic facilities at the Yankees’ Latin Béisbol Academy occasionally look like a middle school rather than an environment where you would expect to find 17-year-olds.
“Unfortunately, it’s a limited educational background,” Omar Minaya says, acknowledging the reality with a lot of players signed to the Academy. A native of the Dominican Republic, Minaya was the first Hispanic general manager in baseball when he held that job for the Montreal Expos in 2002. Now an advisor to Cashman, he knows that teams owe more to their players than the best baseball instruction possible. “You’re not only signing the player, you’re filling the void of a limited education history. It just makes sense for the player; it makes sense for the team. It makes sense to do the right thing when you take on a 16-, 17-year-old kid. You want to make him the best player he can be, but also the best person he can be.
“It’s a social responsibility. Most of these guys are not going to get to the Major Leagues. But we have a commitment from up top, from the Steinbrenner family and from [team president] Randy Levine and Brian Cashman. We’re committed to not only making these guys the best players they possibly can be, but we’re committed to … giving them the best chance to succeed in their post-baseball life and career, as well.”
The staff that Hernandez leads works tirelessly to do just that. Running a school for professional athletes comes with its share of challenges (and it’s not as if running any educational operation is easy). The students are baseball players first; they’re there to pursue a dream of big league stardom. So, the teachers work around schedules that are already plenty full. Sometimes that means classes early in the morning, before workouts begin. Other times, it means being ready to work with students late into the evening. There’s no bell schedule at the Latin Béisbol Academy; everything is a moving target.
It’s not even limited to the walls of the Boca Chica facility. Teachers at the Academy continue offering Zoom classes to prospects playing throughout the Yankees’ Minor League system. And the teachers are much more than academic mentors. For the past few years, English teacher Joel Alvarez has accompanied Dominican players to Tampa for medical procedures such as Tommy John surgery. The team doesn’t want to send young, nervous players to an unfamiliar place alone, so they make sure that there’s a friendly face along for the trip. “For those three or four days, I get to learn so much,” Alvarez says. “Once you get to know them in a different way -- not just inside the Academy -- you learn and you treat that particular player differently. Because they talk to you about the struggles, what they’ve been going through, in order to get here.”
The baseline expectation is that players at the Academy will, by the time they’re in Double-A, be able to conduct an interview in English. But for those who want it, there’s a full high school curriculum with the ability to earn a high school diploma, the academics accredited like any school in the Dominican Republic. The team also offers vocational studies, everything from barber training to cell phone and computer repair.
“It’s not mandatory at this point, but we want them all to finish at least high school, so they can be prepared for the future,” says Carolina Crespo, lead educator at the Academy. Crespo has been teaching in the Dominican Republic for nearly a quarter century and has been working at the Academy since 2017. “At the beginning, I had another idea of the work that we were supposed to do here, because I have in my mind all the things that I knew before. But once I came here, I realized, ‘What are the needs of our players?’ And that’s why the curriculum changed through the years, and we made the adaptations and things that are important for our students, based on their needs.”
Minaya is adamant that, throughout the industry as a whole, those needs shouldn’t be limited to English comprehension.
“I think it’s more about, ‘How many of the academies are graduating kids, whether with a high school diploma, or a trade school?’” he says. “That’s more important. We’re beyond learning English; that has to be automatic. I think education, when I talk about the social responsibility, it’s, ‘What else besides English are you giving them? Are you giving them a trade?’ So that when their career is over, whether it’s in the Dominican or the United States, they have some sort of base for a potential career.”
It’s plainly visible, Hernandez says, every time a player leaves, whether after seeing his career peter out or -- more happily -- when they head to the U.S. to continue chasing their dream. “From all those years back to now, you can see the difference,” she says. “The guys that go from here to Tampa are a different group of guys. They go ready. They go prepared.”
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Jasson Domínguez produced his first three-homer game during the Yankees’ trip to Sacramento in May. He was the youngest player to perform the feat in Yankees history, and while it’s possible that players at the Latin Béisbol Academy were watching it live -- these promising athletic prospects need their sleep! -- you can be sure that they discussed it.
“You hear the stories when you go down there that during the season, the games are on, they see somebody that was in their shoes not long ago,” says Yankees manager Aaron Boone. “To see that and to be able to say, ‘Oh, this is really possible. He was one of us at some point.’ I think that those are important things in everyone’s development.”
Or, as Judge says, “If you can see it, then you can do it.”
But there’s another thing that Domínguez did that the young Academy kids can see. It wasn’t that long ago that Domínguez was one of the youngsters dreaming of making Yankees history someday. Signed to a franchise-record international contract as a 16-year-old, Domínguez worked tirelessly to get his baseball skills in gear. “When I signed, I wasn’t very interested in the academics,” Domínguez says. “And I remember Melissa and all the teachers there, they talked to me, and they motivated me. And I did it.
“I can study at a university. If baseball’s over, I can take my diploma and make another career.”
Through 2024, the Yankees had seen 112 players graduate from the Academy, including big names such as Domínguez. Yoendrys Gómez, who graduated with the 2024 class, was the first Yankee ever to finish his studies while being on the team’s 40-man roster. (Gómez pitched parts of the last three seasons for the Yankees before being designated for assignment in late April.)
You can be certain that every teacher who taught Judge in Linden, Calif., will dine out on that story for the rest of their lives (and knowing Judge and his parents, he probably got an A in their class). Teachers live for the opportunities to see their kids thrive. It’s why they put up with comparatively low wages and often-difficult environments. For that chance to watch a kid move on. To see a kid make it.
But what if all your kids were pursuing one goal; indeed, what if you were a steward of both their personal and professional lives? Or, to put a finer point on it, what if Judge’s high school biology teacher had been Boone, with AP calculus taught by Cashman? It’s a give and take that is core to everything the Yankees are trying to accomplish at the Academy.
For Hernandez, the stories keep her coming back every day to the place where she spends more time than even her own home. It’s because of the 16-year-old who showed up to sign his contract and needed help because he had never learned to write his name. That kid got his high school diploma under her watch.
But this is still a baseball team; the Yankees didn’t throw a parade for finishing second in 2024, and inspirational stories only go so far. The Steinbrenner family, though, truly does care to see its most vulnerable players set up to succeed. And Cashman has seen enough to know that in a sport that constantly struggles to balance objective skills with intangible characteristics, there is useful data to be gleaned by seeing how young prospects treat their academics.
“It shows an adaptability and a growth mindset that does translate into when coaches are connecting with them about changing their pitch grip or changing their arm angle or messing with mechanics,” Cashman says. “The ones that really master these areas are predictably the ones that end up not washing out, that end up making it to the higher level in our sport.
“But that’s not the endgame for us. The endgame really is to make sure if you are employed as a New York Yankee, that we can rest comfortably knowing that we invested in you as an individual, to put you in a position to provide for your family and arm you with the tools and the education components that, if baseball doesn’t work out, you’re in a much better place because you worked for us.”
Jon Schwartz is the deputy editor of Yankees Magazine. This story appears in the June 2025 edition. Get more articles like this delivered to your doorstep by purchasing a subscription to Yankees Magazine at www.yankees.com/publications.