Freedom is a 1.8-ounce piece of sponge cake with a cream filling. It is too many sprays of cologne. It is a washer and dryer. It is everything the teenage boy did not know, did not understand, when he left Cuba and arrived in the United States with an ability to play baseball that inspired a bidding war like none seen before.
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New York wanted Moncada at $25 million. Hastings said another team was over $30 million. The Yankees refused to budge. Hastings said Moncada would go elsewhere. The Yankees pulled their offer. Hastings called Eddie Romero, the Red Sox’s VP of international scouting, and said: “We’ve got a deal.” Just like that, over the course of two minutes, a 6-foot-2, 205-pound, switch-hitting infielder with game-breaking speed, legitimate power and a jeweler’s eye went from being convinced he was a Yankee – “I really thought that’s where I’d end up,” Moncada said – to the Red Sox.
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Nothing brought Yoan Moncada, a teenage boy stuck inside a man’s body, quite the satisfaction of a Twinkie. He never could limit himself to one. Or two. He wolfed them down like a snake eating its prey whole. This may sound like an exaggeration, and it may be apocryphal, but those closest to Moncada swear it’s true: One time, over the course of one week, he ate 225 Twinkies.
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Moncada will eat just about anything. On Thanksgiving in 2014, the Hastingses hosted a party for about 100 people. On the island in their kitchen sat cookies, candy, cakes, all sorts of sweets, and to keep ants away, they set bright-colored boric-acid traps. Moncada thought it was liquid candy and tried to eat it before screams of “No!” caused him to drop it. This wasn’t the first time Moncada mistook a household item for food. He once tried to ingest a berry-scented liquid air freshener, too.