This story was excerpted from Anthony DiComo’s Mets Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.
BROOKLYN, N.Y. -- Before he was a prospect on one of the most promising rosters in Minor League Baseball, Chris Suero spent his youngest years in the Sedgwick Houses, a housing project in the University Heights neighborhood of the Bronx. He draws strength from the idea of being a “project baby.”
“Born and raised,” Suero said before a recent High-A Brooklyn Cyclones game. “I take that with pride. I’m putting the city on my back for sure.”
If Suero, the Mets’ 21st-ranked prospect, makes it to the Majors, he will become one of the rare modern big leaguers from New York City. Even then, Suero’s path will have taken a windier route than most.
At 15 years old, Suero moved to the Dominican Republic, taking advantage of his bloodlines with two Dominican parents. He spent two and a half years at the Academia Carlos Paulino in Nizao, which provided multiple advantages. One was that he was able to play baseball year-round against tough competition, instead of being limited to the spring and summer seasons in New York. The other was that he became eligible to sign as an international free agent, rather than submit himself to the Draft.
“It took quite some time,” Suero said of his decision to move, “being that I was going to leave my mom, I was going to leave my whole family, and I was still 15 years old. I was still a little kid. I hadn’t really been exposed to anything like that, being away from home. So it was a tough decision for me and my family, but at the end of the day, we just wanted to do what was best for me and my career.”
Now 21, Suero has already experienced more adversity than most. In addition to adapting to life as a teenager in the Dominican, which he called “a rollercoaster,” Suero had to navigate the early part of the COVID-19 pandemic in a foreign country. He learned to deal with frustration when big league teams showed little interest in him, with the Mets eventually signing him to a $10,000 deal -- far from the multimillion-dollar bonuses the most talented Dominican teenagers receive.
Then, two years ago, Suero learned to grieve when he lost his sister to a car accident.
“I had to kind of mature at a faster rate than people my age,” he said.
All of it has become part of Suero’s story, bringing him to a place where he’s now earning recognition as a legitimate prospect. A catcher athletic enough to play first base and the outfield, drawing comparisons to Blue Jays slugger Daulton Varsho, Suero began this season with three consecutive multi-hit efforts and produced a 1.334 OPS over his first 10 games. Although he has since cooled at the plate, Suero still owns an .841 OPS for the season. He does not appear out of place in a stacked Brooklyn lineup that includes nine of the Mets’ top 19 position-player prospects.
More than that, Suero has demonstrated “the traits of a leader,” as Brooklyn manager Gilbert Gomez put it. Fully bilingual, he has helped bring together what many around the team call one of the most cohesive Minor League clubhouses they’ve ever seen.
“The fact that he can speak both English and Spanish -- born and raised in New York but a Dominican family -- he can mesh with different groups inside of a clubhouse that not a lot of people can do,” Gomez said. “And he takes pride in that. He will hold people accountable. The fact that he’s a catcher makes him a leader just by nature. So yeah, I’ve been impressed.”
Suero, who currently lives in team housing near Maimonides Park, often returns to the Bronx when he has an off day. But he doesn’t intend to stick around the boroughs for long. To make it back to New York City on a permanent basis, Suero will first need to conquer the upper Minors in Binghamton and Syracuse -- a quest that could begin as soon as this summer.
Once again, he will need to leave the security of home in order to return. With a smile, Suero noted that Coney Island is farther from the Bronx than Citi Field is.
“I’m playing professional baseball, doing what I love most, and I have my family around me too,” he said of his time in Brooklyn. “But I definitely don’t get comfortable. I don’t want to get comfortable. This is just a short trip. I want it to be a short trip, get back out of here and be in Queens."