HOUSTON — Growing up in Cuba, Yordan Alvarez was taught that the United States was a bad country. The thought was so ingrained in him that when he was 12 or 13, he said, he skipped English classes at school.
“Why would I go to an English class if I’m never going to the United States?” Alvarez said he told himself then.
Look at him now.
He was the 2019 American League Rookie of the Year, a level he never thought he would reach. He blasts baseballs harder than all but a few other major leaguers, and even sent one over Fenway Park’s Green Monster in Boston in Game 5 of the A.