Panama's Manuel Corpas a big hit as Colorado closer

By Melissa Segura, SI.com - He tried -- really tried -- to get it right, to be the good guy. It seemed like such a good idea when Manuel Corpas scooped up all the dirty clothes from the floor of the Panama City hotel room he was sharing with his girlfriend, stuffed one bag with his clothes, another with hers, and took a cab to a nearby laundromat. The couple had been staying at a hotel near his childhood home partly because the renovations he'd paid for left little room for them and partly because, for the first time, he could afford a nice room. His girlfriend, Amy Spanier, had gone to the hotel gym. Manuel wanted to surprise her when she came back, to show her how much he appreciated those moments back in 2006 when she would be stuck in his apartment stairwell of their building in Tulsa, Okla., wondering how she was going to move their double bed all by herself because he'd been promoted to Colorado Springs, and when she had to explain to her employer and the apartment manager only a week later that they were moving again, because Corpas had been called up to the major leagues. Taking care of her laundry seemed like the least he could do. (more)

After he'd folded the clean clothes at the laundromat he caught another taxi back to the hotel, paid the driver and strode triumphantly into the lobby ... with one bag of laundry. His own.

Once he realized that the only clothes his girlfriend would have were her sweaty gym togs, a less famous man might have run back into the street, trying to find the cab in a big city chock-full of them. But Corpas is a major league closer. He simply went to the taxi dispatcher's office and said, "I'm Manuel Corpas." Within minutes the clothes were back.

In Panama that simple sentence, "This is Manuel Corpas," is like Aladdin's lamp: It magically grants wishes and opens doors. It suddenly frees the best tables at crowded restaurants and pulls back velvet ropes. From dark country backroads to bright city malls, the closer who helped propel the Colorado Rockies to their first National League pennant and the 2007 World Series is his country's most beloved ballplayer.

As he rides through city traffic, drivers in neighboring cars roll down their windows to snap his picture. Sure, Panamanians will say, they are proud of Gatún-born Hall of Famer Rod Carew and Puerto Caimito's Mariano Rivera. But Carew went to high school in New York City, and Rivera wouldn't don the Panamanian jersey for the 2006 World Baseball Classic. But Manuel Corpas? Well, they say, Manuel is ours.

In just one year, Panamanians who did not know the difference between the Colorado Rockies and the Chilean Andes have fallen hard for the right-hander with the 98-mile-an-hour fastball and the nasty sinker. They pack sports bars and restaurants to watch Colorado games -- or at least the eight and ninth innings, when their countryman pitches. In his first full year in the majors, the 6-foot-3, 170-pound Corpas snatched the closer's role from three-time All-Star Brian Fuentes, set a franchise record for the best ERA by a reliever (2.08) and collected four saves in the postseason, the most since Rivera saved five for the New York Yankees in 2003. Corpas might have surpassed Rivera's record had the Boston Red Sox not swept the Rockies in the World Series. But while Corpas's success has earned him respect, it's his deep connection to his homeland that's made him adored.

The boy always knew what he wanted to do with his life: Play baseball. Pitch or catch, to be more specific. He had seen himself atop a mound for as long as he could remember, but he'd settle in behind the plate if he had to, covering his body with pieces of cardboard cut to look like the shin guards and chest protectors he'd seen big leaguers wear on TV. He'd go home rather than play third base, leftfield or anywhere else for that matter. The Gil women, the maternal side of Manuel's family, lived shoulder-to-shoulder on a strip of land in Chilibre, 25 miles northwest of the Panamanian capital, and they produced a handful of boys who, with some neighborhood friends, made a full lineup of boys. Rather than play one man short, Manuel's cousins would just nod and let Puny -- that's what they called him -- pitch or catch.

Every day each of the cousins would stand in his stadium -- that's what he believed his patio was -- and be his own announcer. "From the Estadio Mariano Bula in Colón, playing leftfield, Rooooooonnie!!!"

"From Estadio Matuna in La Chorrera, playing third base, José Ángel Delgadooooo."

The imaginary crowd would go wild as the boys, dressed in their school uniforms -- white T-shirts and red shorts with white stripes down the sides -- beat a brown path through the green grass on their way to their improvised field. They would play until the palm fronds they used to make bats had broken or there were no more tennis balls to hit. Or, which was more often the case, until they heard the rumble of the bus bringing home their mothers, who had gone to work after leaving lists of chores for the children to do before they returned.

The sound of the bus sent the boys scurrying off to the dishes that needed washing or patios that needed sweeping. But not Puny. He'd just stand on the field, mad that everyone else had left with a 3-2 count.

Florencia Gil de Corpas, exhausted from working as a domestic aid for an American woman in the capital, would sigh as she tired to figure out how to make Puny do what he was supposed to. She grabbed the only thing she could find that was as hard as that head of his -- a skillet -- and whapped him on the butt. When blows to the behind didn't work, she thought an examination of the head might. Florencia dragged Manuel to a psychologist when he was 9, hoping he could influence her son in ways that she and her husband, Manuel Sr., couldn't. "He doesn't want to study, doesn't do what I ask of him," Florencia told the doctor. "He just wants to play baseball."

The doctor assured her that there was nothing wrong with the boy. But Puny not only continued to avoid his chores, he also began to skip school. That sent his mother's already high blood pressure skyrocketing, and she checked herself into the hospital for treatment several times. By the time Puny turned 10, he was hopping on the bus to school but not getting off when it got there. Instead he would ride the bus until it circled back to his house about an hour later, look his mom straight and the eye and lie. "I don't know what happened," he said. "The teacher didn't show up today."

Then he'd scramble off to the baseball field with the backpack he'd stuffed with tennis balls instead of books and pitch against men in their twenties who were off work or unemployed. Occasionally one of the men would look at the 10-year old and ask, "What's he doing here?"

"Déjalo," one of the others who'd seen him play would say. "Leave him."

Then Puny would wind up and let a fastball fly. "Nobody ever took me out after that," he'd say years later.

After competing with young men, Manuel would torch his contemporaries. He led his youth-league team, Panamá Metro, to three consecutive city championships. That led him all the way to Taiwan, where he pitched for the Panamanian national 16-and-under team in the 1999 Baseball World Cup and where he found himself in a convenience store one day wondering why a bald, portly man wouldn't stop staring at him.

"I would look over, and he would look away," Corpas remembers. There the man was by the soft drinks. Then by the chewing gum. And on the street, and at the hotel, too. Always at a slight distance. "It was like you see in the movies," Corpas says. "If I stopped walking, he stopped."

When the boy went to hide in his hotel room, he saw the blinking red message light on his telephone. "There's a scout," said his coach Cristobal Girón, "and he'd like you to try out."

"Is he bald and fat?" Corpas asked.

"That's the one."

Tim Ireland, the Pacific Rim coordinator for the Rockies in 1999, saw in Manuel what Manuel had seen in himself. The moment Ireland set eyes on the bone-thin boy with arms as long as his legs, just one word came to mind: pitcher.

The next day the Panamanian boy and the American scout snuck into an old stadium and began to throw. Puny hurled an 82-mile-per-hour fastball, then a heater that clocked 83, and another, and another. But just before he reached back to throw his seventh consecutive fastball, Ireland, who had stood and watched in silence, said, "Ya." Enough. Suddenly the confidence Manuel had shown as a 10-year-old facing batters twice his age evaporated. He thought, "This won't be the first time I've disappointed a scout, but it might be the last."

Back in Panama, the Yankees, Pittsburgh Pirates, Seattle Mariners, Chicago White Sox and Texas Rangers had given him tryouts but sent him home without a contract. "Otra vez," Manuel thought. "Nobody's going to sign me. I'm tired of this."

So tired, in fact, that the phone call the next morning at 8 jolted him out of a deep sleep. "If the phone is ringing in my room at 8," he thought, "it must be important."

"Manuel," Ireland said, fumbling for words in Spanish, which he does not speak fluently, "I'd like to sign you."

After talking the Rockies into increasing his signing bonus by $2,000, to $17,500, Manuel Corpas, almost 10,000 miles from home, signed a professional baseball deal. After returning to Panama for a few months, the 16-year-old Corpas would do what millions of other Latino boys had done before him: Leave home to work. The difference for him was that the work wasn't so much a job as a dream fulfilled. But that distinction was of little solace as he headed for the airport to fly to Venezuela and its summer league. As his relatives hugged him and kissed him goodbye, they saw something that his skillet-swinging mother and Panamanian batters twice his age had rarely seen in him: fear. The idea of boarding an airplane made his insides shake.

There's only one time Corpas ever wanted to get on a plane. After landing in Caracas that day, the teenager looked around and knew no one. He ambled about the airport, asking people for the time. "I'm going back to Panama," he said to the Rockies representatives who later came to pick him up. That, of course, would take money he didn't have. So, without an option, he took the three-hour car ride to the Rockies' Venezuelan academy. They arrived in the dead of night, and Manuel tried not to disturb the roomful of strangers sleeping in his new home.

The Rockies were patient with their Panamanian prodigy, limiting his work in the Venezuelan league in 2000 and changing his pitching motion from submarine-style to overhead in the 2001 Dominican summer league, where he had a 2.24 ERA in 15 games, five as a starter. Over the next five years he bounced around the minor leagues in the U.S., both starting and relieving. He ate mostly bread and corn flakes, unable to adjust to small-town American cuisine. Playing for one Single-A team, in Modesto, Calif., he spotted a green-eyed woman with light brown hair in the stands at several home games and finally asked to be introduced to her. Amy didn't speak much Spanish, nor Manuel much English, but soon they were inseparable, and she would be with him in 2006, when he closed games for the first time and found his true position.

That season he jumped from Double-A to the major leagues. He began the 2007 campaign as a setup man for Fuentes, but after Fuentes blew four straight saves in late June, Corpas became the Colorado closer on July 7. Fuentes didn't blame him. Corpas might swallow tranquilizers to control his fear of flying, but on the mound, Fuentes says, "he's fearless." The Panamanian's emergence coincided with the Rockies' astonishing rush from 5 1/2 games behind in the National League West to win the pennant in a one-game playoff with the San Diego Padres and then the National League pennant with sweeps of the Phillies and the Diamondbacks.

There are no strangers here tonight. The public address announcer at the Fiesta Casino in Panama City has just bellowed, "Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Manuel Corpas." The 25-year-old baseball star, perched in the casino's VIP balcony, does his best Eva Perón and waves to the crowd below. It's nearing midnight in mid-December, and Corpas hasn't so much as thrown a pitch since end of the major league season. He's doing exactly what the Rockies ordered him to do: rest.

Resting, of course, is subject to interpretation, and Corpas' daily routine to recover from the 88 1/3 innings he pitched in 2007 -- way more than he'd ever thrown before -- sounds like a college kid's dream vacation. Today, for example, after sleeping late and grabbing lunch at one of the capital's best Italian restaurants, he headed to a gun range where he shot bullets through the head of a human target printed on a sheet of paper. He carries a gun with him everywhere he goes in Panama, because, he says, "You never know what can happen here."

He knows how quickly an athlete can turn into a target. That, and he wants to be as sure a shot as Rockies first baseman Todd Helton when they go hunting in Colorado once the 2008 season starts. (On Thursday, Corpas agreed to a four-year, $8 million deal with the Rockies, which includes a two-year club option that could increase the value of the deal to $21.775 million.)

Then, Corpas went to a mall before grabbing dinner on the trendy Causeway strip and finally heading to the casino to hit the roulette tables with Tom O'Connell, one of his agents, and the slot machines with Amy. He parks himself in front of a nickel slot with blinking red, white and blue lights advertising it as "America's Game." It's 2:45 a.m. when the machine spits out three 16-ounce containers full of quarters. Corpas rushes off to the cashier to convert the change into bills, knowing that for him, now, even a huge pile of quarters is mere laundry money.