The Vladimir Guerrero Jr. Show Has Begun

This article originally appeared on VICE Sports Canada.

In Bluefield, the state line between Virginia and West Virginia cuts through the parking lot adjacent to Bowen Field, where the Bluefield Blue Jays play their games against a picturesque backdrop of mountain greenery. Officially, the Blue Jays are a West Virginia team. In fact, they play their games in Virginia.

So when Vladimir Guerrero Jr. goes to work, he and his teammates take a 15-minute walk from Bluefield, West Virginia, where they live, to Bluefield, Virginia, where they play baseball.

Guerrero is 17, and already a multi-millionaire, but like each of his teammates, he shares an apartment with three other players in student housing at Bluefield State College, just around the corner and up the hill from the ballpark.

A year ago, the Toronto Blue Jays gave him a $3.9 million signing bonus because they believe he will become a star slugger in the big leagues. But despite being the richest, youngest, biggest and most prominent player on the team, he meshes nicely into his new workplace culture. After all, he is one of the kids (the players' average age is 19.6). They joke around a lot. But they are also hungry to prove they belong in the pro ranks, so they take their new job seriously, and fret when they make the sort of mistakes that you would expect from trying-too-hard teenagers.

Like Guerrero, nine of his teammates are playing pro ball for the first time. Like him, 11 speak Spanish. Five are fellow Dominicans.

One of his Spanish-speaking friends is the fluently bilingual Juandy Mendoza, who was born in Miami. Mendoza is a second baseman with a sideline: he serves as Guerrero's translator when an English-only reporter comes around to interview the already-famous son of a long-famous father.

Last Wednesday, Mendoza translated for me when I talked to Guerrero, who told me he felt "lost" for a while during his first spring training and continues to search for a comfort zone at his new position. On Friday night, during a phone interview with a reporter from milb.com, Mendoza was translating again.

The reporter's angle was obvious. Guerrero had just hit his first professional home run, presumably the first of many. It was a two-run shot into the dark beyond the left-centre field wall. But for the big, tree-covered hill beyond the fence, that ball might have crossed the state line.

On Sunday night, in another state, he hit another one.

On Friday evening, in the completion of a suspended game, Guerrero collected his first professional hit, an opposite-field single to right field that drove in two runs. Vladimir Guerrero Sr., the former Expos star, and several other family members sat in the rough-hewn box seats above the first-base dugout and bore proud witness to both milestones.

Vlad Jr. wears braces and looks like he could lift a locomotive. (His official weight is 200 pounds, which might be a bit on the low side.) As his dad once did, he can hit a baseball a very long way, which inspired the Blue Jays to give him all that money last July.

He was 16 then. That meant he had to wait a year to start his pro career, which was probably a good thing, since spring training this year came as a bit of a shock. Then, in extended spring training while awaiting assignment, his comfort level began to rise.

"In spring training, I felt really lost," he told me. "My timing wasn't too good. But once extended started, and the coaches kept working with me, my shoulder was staying a lot closer, a lot tighter. I started working toward hitting to the middle and right side of the field a lot more."

He had been trying to live up to the hype, and perhaps trying too hard, and falling victim to a common flaw: flying open with his front shoulder.

"Maybe trying to do too much, hit it too hard," he says. "Once I realized that a guy like me doesn't need that much power, all I have to do is make contact, I started to do a lot better."

Because he had never played a pro game, and had never played under the lights, the Blue Jays decided to assign him to a short-season team. Bluefield, the next-to-lowest rung on Toronto's developmental ladder, plays a 68-game schedule over 71 days in the Appalachian League. It is a grind for players unaccustomed to playing every night, and staying in hotels, and riding buses, and facing stiffer competition than they've ever seen before.

Bluefield opened its season Thursday night at home. Guerrero batted third. In his first at-bat, he grounded to short.

As lightning began to flash in the distance in the third inning, Guerrero charged a routine grounder, dropped it, tried to pick it up with his bare hand, and dropped it again. His shoulders sagged.

When the inning ended, the PA announcer told the sparse crowd to take cover or get to their vehicles as fast as possible. A big storm was coming. There were flash flood warnings.

Moments later, the rain began to fall in such violent, gusty torrents that the grounds crew could not get the tarp on the infield. It sat in a helpless heap in right field as the infield turned into a soggy mess.

If they could manage to get the field in shape, the plan was to complete the suspended game Friday, then play the regularly scheduled game afterward.

Vladimir Guerrero Sr. was 20 when he played his first full season for the Expos affiliate in Albany, Georgia, a city of 75,000, roughly 10 times that of Bluefield. His signing bonus was somewhere between $2,000 and $3,500, depending on which source you believe. His team, the Albany Polecats, went 62-78 but, remarkably, included 14 players who went on to play in the majors.

Playing in the deep south undoubtedly deepened the culture shock for the young Dominican outfielder who would become a nine-time all-star and an MVP before he retired after the 2011 season with a .318 average, .931 OPS and 449 homers.

The son benefited from the father's genes and experience, and the daily coaching of his uncle Wilton, who also played for the Expos. Like his dad, Vlad Jr. is also starting his career in a foreign environment where Spanish is seldom heard away from the ballpark and the local accent tends to elongate vowels.

Guerrero seems unfazed. It did not matter where the Jays sent him to start his career, he said.

"I didn't really have any expectations," he said. "That stuff, where we're at, is out of our hands. Wherever they send me, I just have to do my job and play hard."

Some of Toronto's player development staff would not be surprised to see Guerrero move up a rung to Vancouver before the summer ends.

Mike White, the athletic director at the nearby college, heads up the Bluefield Blue Jays grounds crew. Following the big storm, he and his staff worked all day on Friday and somehow managed to make the field playable.

Vlad Jr. grounded out twice more when the suspended game resumed. Then, during a seven-run rally in the seventh, he lined a two-run single to right for his first hit.

In the regularly scheduled game that followed, he connected for his first homer. On Sunday night, in the team's first road game in Burlington, North Carolina, he hit another one.

Over his first four games, he went 3-for-14 with seven RBIs. He also committed four errors at third base, two fielding and two throwing.

Guerrero was an outfielder in the Dominican, but the Blue Jays thought he had the tools to play third. He admits he has a long way to go to prove them correct.

"Obviously, the transfer from the outfield to third base isn't something that you get overnight," he said. "But I've been there two, three months, and I feel a lot better, more comfortable. I'm reading the ball a lot better than I did. I don't think I'm 100 percent ready but about 80 percent. I'm going to keep working and try to get better."

Based on his range and reaction time on defence in his first few games, 80 percent is a stretch. But Guerrero is a confident young man. And the Jays' player development staff praise his work ethic and say he learns quickly.

"With all the coaches that were helping me (in extended spring training), and helping me make any adjustments that I had to make, and all the advice that they gave me, it made it that much more comfortable," Guerrero said. "And all the guys in the clubhouse made me feel right at home. I felt really good about that."

Said Bluefield manager Dennis Holmberg: "On and off the field, around the clock, Vlad is a special guy."

Last July, shortly after he signed that big contract with the Blue Jays, Guerrero predicted he would make it to the big leagues in two years. Having experienced a boot camp with professional coaching in extended spring training, he now modulates that forecast.

"If God has that in his plan, it'll happen," he said. "With God first, and hard work, obviously I have to perform. It all depends on how fast or how slow the team wants to develop me. I obviously know that I'm only 17 and I still have a long way to go, but if I keep improving and getting better, then hopefully it will happen with God's help."

He mentions God a lot. I ask him about that.

"If it wasn't for God," he says, "none of us would be here. He's the reason why I'm a professional baseball player right now. If I do an interview and I don't mention God, I wouldn't feel right about it."

It is a refrain the son obviously picked up from the father.

Thank God for the blessings. I can not describe what I felt when I see my son hit his first professional home run. — Vladimir Guerrero (@VladGuerrero27)June 25, 2016