Gerald Young was the only player from Honduras to reach the major leagues until July 7, 2019. He stole 155 bases between 1987 and 1994 for Houston, Colorado and St. Louis. Twenty five years would pass between Young's and the debut of the second Honduran to reach the majors. Today he is a Houston Astro like Young was but he began as a draft choice of the Boston Red Sox. This is the Mauricio Dubon story.
Dubon was born in San Pedro Sula, far from the baseball hotbeds of Latin America where you would expect big leaguers to come from. Honduras is number 48 in the WBSC rankings, a far cry from the likes of neighboring Nicaragua or Central American powerhouses Mexico and Panama. Little info is available about the national league online. The Honduran news outlet El Heraldo even published an article asking why baseball is dying in Honduras. And yet, there is a Honduran born major leaguer on a team with a real chance to win a World Series. That would make Dubon the first Honduran to play for a World Series winner, something Young was never able to do.
Dubon's journey began at the Liceo Bilingue Centroamericano where he learned his baseball. It is also where he first attracted attention. At the age of fifteen, a Christian mission from the United States arrived in Honduras and happened to see him play. Sensing an opportunity, he asked to return to the US and wound up an exchange student in Sacramento. This was around 2010. By 2013, he was wrapping up high school in his new hometown and was draft eligible. The Red Sox took a chance on the Honduran, using their 26th round pick.
In spite of being a lower draft choice, Dubon successfully worked his way up the system and was the big club's #25 prospect by 2015 when he moved up to A ball. By the end of 2016, he was in AA and establishing himself as a high average hitter with speed and clean defense. That winter though would see him traded for the first time setting up his eventual major league debut with the Milwaukee Brewers.
He would be a Southern League all star in 2017 and win a spot on Milwaukee's 40 man roster for the 2018 season. This would be limited to 27 games due to the injury bug but it would simply delay the inevitable. He would finally get the call in July 2019 after an impressive start in San Antonio. He would get all of two at bats for the Brew Crew though before finding himself traded again.
Dubon wound up back in northern California courtesy of the trade that sent Drew Pomeranz to Milwaukee. Dubon was now a Giant. A brief stint in AAA at Sacramento of all places followed the trade but by late August he was back in the big leagues and finally getting starts at the highest level. He would get his first hit on August 29. He spent the 2020 pandemic season and the 2021 season where the Giants won 107 games in San Francisco. In so doing, he has established himself as a versatile piece with speed, good defense and occasional power.
A May 2022 trade has sent him to Houston where he has pretty much picked up where he left off in San Francisco. He plays all over the field (2B, SS, OF) and has become a valuable depth piece for a bona-fide contender. He needs to be versatile to play on this team given that the Astros boast a middle infield of Jose Altuve and Jeremy Pena.
Signs point to Dubon having a solid and fruitful career as Gerald Young did. The exception is Dubon has more power than Young did although he probably will finish his career with fewer steals given the way the game is today.
For Hondurans, he is proof that they can make it to the highest level of baseball. For an increasingly large Honduran diaspora in the United States, he can be seen as a model of success and an example for their children who are growing up exposed to baseball in the United States. The same would probably hold for other large Central American diasporas like Salvadorans and Guatemalans who are still waiting on someone to break through for them.
For baseball fans as a whole, Dubon's story and others like it are another positive sign of the game's growing global reach. We want the game to be played in more places and more new countries represented by at least one major leaguer in the future. No baseball is not dying in Honduras or anywhere else. It is very much alive and growing in places that one would not have associated with baseball in the past. I am confident that in the future, there will be plenty to be said online about baseball in Honduras and Mauricio Dubon like Gerald Young before him will be an important part of that story.
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