Inside Gabriel Moreno's journey from Venezuelan afterthought to potential Diamondbacks star

Back before the 2021 season, Hunter Mense would stand on the side fields at the Blue Jays’ complex in Florida and field questions from reporters. Inevitably, they wanted to know about the club’s top young players, names like Bo Bichette and Alejandro Kirk.

Each time, Mense, then Toronto’s hitting coordinator, offered a warning. “Look,” he told them, “you might be missing somebody that's gonna end up being really, really good.”

The Blue Jays, in those days, felt a bit like a parent waiting for their kid to open a Christmas present. Over the span of three months at their alternate site during the COVID year, they had seen what Gabriel Moreno could do. “This guy has a chance to be a big league All-Star for a long time” became the takeaway, repeated by major leaguers who had been sent down to the alternate site and caught a glimpse.

But the rest of the baseball world remained unaware.

Before that season, MLB ranked Moreno as the club’s eighth best prospect. The type of player who would surpass expectations by becoming a big league regular. By mid-season, he was a top five prospect in the sport.

“He became who he is now,” Mense said.

Who is he now? Based on the Diamondbacks’ off-season moves, a potential franchise cornerstone. In December, they traded away Daulton Varsho — their most valuable player in 2022, per FanGraphs — in order to receive Moreno.

“He has the ability to be an impact catcher behind the plate, offensively and defensively,” Diamondbacks General Manager Mike Hazen said at the time. Evaluators around the league would agree. Many see him as a potential star, a path that could now be accelerated with Carson Kelly set to miss extended time, turning a timeshare into Moreno's job. “A year in the big leagues in a full season of play, I think I make a phone call on (Moreno) and I don’t get a response,” Hazen said.

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All this praise is rarified air for a player with 25 major-league appearances. But to understand where Moreno is now, to understand where he’s expected to go, it’s worth understanding where he came from.

Because there was a time in Moreno’s life when he didn’t think a major league team would sign him.

That’s not hyperbole borne out of a desperate search for a slight, Last Dance style. It’s real and it’s ingrained into who Moreno is.

Growing up in Barquisimeto, Venezuela, he would go to tryout after tryout, like thousands of other kids, hoping to catch the eye of a scout. Each time, he’d come away feeling he succeeded, having sprayed the ball all over the field and recorded base hit after base hit.

But Moreno’s skillset didn’t lend itself to these settings. As an infielder back then, his fielding wasn’t particularly fluid. At the plate, his undersized frame didn’t carry the natural power to put on a batting practice show. Looping liners over second base don’t drop jaws.

“He thought he was never gonna get a chance to play baseball because of his size,” said Luis Hurtado, a catching coach in the Blue Jays’ organization.

Eventually, interest did start to trickle in. Philadelphia and Detroit maintained contact. Others hovered around the edges. None took center stage quite like the Blue Jays, who maintained that their plan was to sign him during the 2016 international signing period. When that offer did come in, it was a mere $25,000. Throwaway money for an organization. The type of move a GM doesn’t even have to sign off on.

“I just wanted to be signed at the end of the day,” Moreno said through interpreter Alex Arpiza.

With that, the door was open. Quickly, it became evident that Moreno was a little different.

Hurtado realized as much before Moreno even played a game. In the fall after the Blue Jays signed him, a Facebook Messenger notification popped up on Hurtado’s phone. Moreno had requested to chat. Seven years later, he remains the only player to ever reach out to Hurtado on social media. But even as a teenager, Moreno wanted to pick the brain of the people around him.

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And Hurtado was the perfect fit, as a former catcher also out of Venezuela. Although Moreno came up as a shortstop, the Blue Jays had signed him as a backstop. Their system was already full of infielders, but they liked Moreno’s bat and felt that his arm strength and body type would play behind the plate. Initially, Moreno says, “there was a moment where I didn’t want to catch.” But rather than dwelling on the positional change, he got to work.

Over the course of that winter, Moreno would send videos to Hurtado, accompanied by questions. Am I receiving the ball well here? Is this a good position in my secondary stance? Are my hands in a good position?

“You don't see those guys often,” Hurtado said. “That's why he’s successful. He always wants to get better.”

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That first year in the Dominican Summer League, though, showed why Moreno had been a $25,000 signing. His final batting average read just .248 with a .570 OPS. Still, when Paul Elliott, then a hitting coach in the Gulf Coast League, went down for a five-day complex visit, manager John Tamargo told him to keep an eye out for Moreno. The front-line stats may not have been pretty and the signing bonus was negligible, but Moreno also struck out just five times in 135 plate appearances that summer. At 17, that stood out.

“Hitting the baseball is the hardest thing,” Elliott said. “If you've got the natural ability to do it, that's pretty good and pretty exciting. Especially when you see someone so young as that.”

The next season, Moreno was assigned to the Gulf Coast League, where Elliott worked. When he arrived, his signing day rawness was still intact. He chased everything, had a rigid stance, hit down on the ball and was overly reliant on his hands. Everything about the swing was borne out of a desire to get to every pitch and put it in play. That produced enticing strikeout rates but an inability to drive the ball. In the DSL, Moreno managed just five extra base hits and no homers in 32 games.

So in extended spring training, Moreno and Elliott got to work. They changed his set-up, added a leg-kick and worked on creating a level bat path. June 18, 2018 was the day Elliott came to the same conclusion Hurtado had reached nearly two years earlier. That’s when, in his GCL debut, Moreno ripped two home runs, including a no-doubter to straightaway center field.

“This is it,” Moreno told Elliott of his mechanical changes. “I'm gonna stick with it.”

By the end of that year, Moreno still only had 72 games of professional experience, all in rookie ball or below. But a .360 batting average that season was enough for the secret of Gabi Moreno to spread through the organization.

“We knew what he could become and we could see it coming down the road,” catching coordinator Ken Huckaby said. “We could see that the major league club was gonna want him soon.”

After that season, the club wanted to get Moreno further work in instructional ball without the physical demands of additional innings. So they hatched a plan that spoke to his newfound value to the organization.

For the first seven innings of instructional league games, he would sit behind home plate, charting the game and listening to conversations between coaches and catchers through an earpiece. Then, in the last two innings, the team would hand Moreno a walkie talkie and have him call the game from the stands.

“The rush was to try and get his mental game (ready), as far as handling the staff, game calling, handling the scouting reports, doing all those things,” Huckaby said. “We had to put those on overdrive to teach him how to do those things because we knew he was gonna make it at a young age.”

The next season rewarded the Blue Jays’ confidence. In 82 Single-A games, Moreno hit .280 with 12 home runs. He moved from 22nd in the organization’s prospect rankings to seventh. 2020 could have been his breakout.

Then COVID hit. On the day he should have reported to High-A, Moreno was stuck in a hotel room in Dunedin, Fla., trapped by COVID restrictions on flights home like the rest of the sport’s Venezuelan players. Limited to a handful of ad hoc workouts per week, the Blue Jays expected some rustiness when he showed up at the alternate site in Rochester, N.Y.

Instead, Moreno was the star of the summer.

“He showed up, he looked more like a man,” Mense said. “He added some muscle and was thicker but still kept the same athleticism. His first at-bats, it was kind of like, oh boy, this is gonna be pretty good.”

Moreno produced no shortage of moments that linger in the minds of those who saw him in Rochester. There’s one, though, that stands out in conversation after conversation. Nate Pearson, the Blue Jays’ top prospect, spotted a 99 mph fastball inside, off the plate. The type of pitch most hitters would be glad to make contact on. Without cheating, Moreno turned on the ball and crushed it with home run distance down the left-field line. It sailed just foul, but the impression was made.

“It was something I'll never forget,” Mense said. “… That’s what quickness does is not having to cheat. He's got ridiculous quickness.”

This, mind you, was a 20-year-old who hadn’t played above Single-A.

“As coaches, we got immune to it because it's what we started to expect out of him,” Mense said. “I look back on it now, and the expectations that we had started to see and think of with him were so sky-high because he was just consistently doing it.”

In 2021, Moreno rewarded that confidence. Across two levels, he hit .367 with a 1.060 OPS in 37 games. The rest of the baseball world took notice. So did Moreno.

“When I was named and ranked, a 'prospect,' that kind of propelled me a little bit to know and understand that I can get to that level,” Moreno said.

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All of it led to last June, the sleepless nights and “dream come true” of his big league debut, as Moreno puts it. Even with a .319 batting average as a rookie, he knows there’s more work to be done. After each game, he and Mense would sit down, look at the TrackMan report and diagnose his swing decisions. Becoming more selective at the plate remains a work in progress, one aimed at maximizing untapped power.

But Moreno also isn’t forgetting the magnitude of his accomplishment. He might spend the next decade in the major leagues, making millions of dollars, but he’ll always be Gabi Moreno, son of a construction worker and stay-at-home mom; product of the economic calamity that engulfed Venezuela in the 2010s. For six years in the minor leagues, his driving force was helping them.

“That was one of the biggest motivations in his career and his life,” Hurtado said.

With his first year of major league earnings, Moreno was able send money to his brothers and build a new family home. It’s the latter that fills Moreno with the most joy, in part because it was a balancing act. His family loved their neighborhood and had a lifetime of connections there. But his mother wasn’t quite happy in the old house, so Moreno bought a new plot of land, in a nicer corner of the neighborhood, and erected a modern house on it.

“She's extremely happy with that location and that house,” Moreno says, his voice beaming with pride. “Something I always wanted to do."

A moment made possible by the six years that preceded it.

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This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Gabriel Moreno's journey from afterthought to potential D-Backs' star