This Story Never Gets Old

NEW YORK —  The nation’s most famous high school baseball player might never fully live down his infamous past, a sobering possibility that 17-year-old Danny Almonte has yet to fully grasp.

The slight, shy James Monroe Campus High sophomore, an all-city pitcher and first baseman as a freshman, would like to have his record wiped clean, as was his ill-fated moment three years ago in the Little League World Series.

He would like everyone to forget.

But it’s not that simple.

Unwittingly or not, Almonte was at the center of a global scandal in the summer of 2001, a media-driven brouhaha that renewed debate about the role of overzealous parents in youth sports and winning at any cost.

After he’d led his Bronx-based team, the Rolando Paulino All-Stars, to a third-place finish in the Little League World Series, it was discovered that Almonte’s birth records had been falsified, allegedly by his father.

The dominating pitcher, it turned out, was 14 years old, two years over the age limit. Expunged from the records were Almonte’s eye-popping but ill-gained accomplishments for the so-called Baby Bronx Bombers: a no-hitter in the regional final, a first-in-44-years perfect game in the World Series, 62 strikeouts against the 72 batters he faced in four Series games.

Not expunged, of course, was the stench of the scandal, which resulted in lifetime bans from Little League for his father, Felipe de Jesus Almonte, and league founder Rolando Paulino, the younger Almonte’s guardian.

Danny Almonte, who was new to this country from the Dominican Republic and spoke little English, says he acted unknowingly, simply doing what his elders told him to do and what he loved doing anyway -- play baseball.

He was cleared of any wrongdoing.

But unfairly or not, complicit or not, Almonte was tarred.

Even his friends know that.

“He says the past is the past,” says Felipe Cordova, an assistant coach at Monroe and one of Almonte’s closest confidants. “What he don’t like is, whenever he does good, they’re still talking about the same thing.

“That’s the only thing that bothers him. ‘I’m 17, give me a break. I face big competition now: kids bigger than me, older than me. Cut me some slack.’

“That’s the only thing that he complains about. But I told him, ‘That’s not going to go away. That’s going to be there forever, no matter what.’ ”

Of course, nobody is saying he can’t move on with his life.

And that’s what he’s doing.

Baseball is still at the center of it, his reason for three times a day scaling the stairs in the projects where he lives in a 14th-floor apartment with Paulino, Paulino’s wife and their daughter. Hoping to follow in the footsteps of Monroe alumni Hank Greenberg and Ed Kranepool, he has set his sights on reaching the major leagues, like his idol, Pedro Martinez of the Boston Red Sox.

His father, visa expired, returned to the Dominican Republic shortly after the scandal broke, and Almonte, stung that he was left alone in an unfamiliar place to face its aftermath, has only recently started speaking to him again.

Asked this week if he had ever considered returning to his birthplace, the younger Almonte quickly responded, in English, “Hell, no.”

His frequent phone calls home almost always are to his mother.

It’s easy to imagine him recounting to her his great success at Monroe. The Eagles (37-2) are seeded No. 1 in the Public School Athletic League A Division playoffs and, if they reach the city championship game for the fifth consecutive year, are expected to send Almonte to the mound in the June 11 finale at Shea Stadium. Four of his Little League teammates also play for Monroe, three on the varsity.

Almonte hit his seventh home run of the season in Wednesday’s 20-0 first-round playoff victory over Forest Hills and is batting .456 with 55 runs batted in. Scheduled to pitch this morning against Walton High in a second-round game, he is 7-1 with a 1.38 earned-run average and 64 strikeouts in 41 innings.

Last season, Almonte was 10-1 and pitched two no-hitters.

“He’s real good,” says his coach, Mike Turo, noting that in his 27 years at Monroe, where he has won nearly 750 games, he has had only five or six freshmen chosen to the all-city team, as Almonte was last season. “He has all the tools. He’s growing, so he’s very wiry -- maybe 160 [pounds], 5-10 or 5-11.

“But he’s got a real good sense for the game. His bat speed’s tremendous. His fielding knowledge is outstanding. He’ll get ground balls at first base and he’ll just know when to throw to third base to nail a kid. He’ll do it instinctively.”

About four inches taller and 30 pounds heavier than when he played in the Little League World Series, with a fastball that Turo says has been clocked at 87 mph, Almonte will get a long look from pro scouts, his coaches say. Defensively, Turo says, Almonte is “by far the best first baseman around.” At the plate, notes the coach, he is strong enough to have hit 380-foot home runs to the opposite field.

“And then he can pull them over the building,” Turo adds, eyeing a four-story brick structure beyond the right-field fence. “So he can hit the ball.”

Turo calls Almonte “a great, great kid,” adding that “without a doubt” he was a victim of the scandal that blew up around him, not of his making.

“He was a naive kid just playing baseball,” the coach says.

References from opponents and fans to Almonte’s past have subsided but still surface. Not all are bad. Last year, a student ran onto the field and hugged Almonte, thanking him for enrolling at Monroe. Others ask for autographs.

From detractors, the taunts are predictable: “How old?” “Cheater.”

Mostly, they are met with silence from Almonte or, better yet, a well-timed hit. When fans from a rival school taunted him this month, questioning his age, Almonte responded by going four for five with two triples and four RBIs.

But when Paulino took a team to the Dominican for a tournament last year, Almonte begged off, citing the intense media interest in the scandal.

He doesn’t like to talk about it, or much else, with strangers.

Cordova, his confidant, says that Almonte is naturally quiet and shy, but that he grew ever more inward when the scandal broke. He cried, stung by the criticism.

“Everything was on him,” Cordova says. “He was here by himself. All the weight fell on him. Everybody else was gone. That’s when he felt lonely.”

But Cordova says Almonte has shown signs of coming out of his shell. It can be tiresome, but a part of him seems to enjoy the attention.

It’s all about his past, but it keeps him focused on the future.

Like it or not, people are watching.

“I’ve got to prove myself,” he says through Cordova. “Whatever happened in the past happened. I’ve got to become a better man now.”