Surprise Father's Day messages greet delighted Rays players in clubhouse

ST. PETERSBURG -- Junior Caminero walked into the Rays’ clubhouse on Sunday morning, looked at the nameplate above his locker and stopped in his tracks. He scanned the writing in the space that would normally have his name and No. 13, and he couldn’t help but smile.

The words read, “I’m still too little to write, but if I could I would tell you thank you for being my favorite hero. With Love, Valentina.” It was a message from his daughter, who was born in November, from his wife, Francesca.

Happy Father’s Day, indeed.

“It's the best thing that's ever going to happen to me,” Caminero said through interpreter Kevin Vera. “Me being a father, that's the best thing that I'll have in life.”

The nameplates were a surprise from Tyler Wall, the Rays’ director of Major League equipment and clubhouse operations, and the rest of the clubhouse staff, who coordinated with the players’ significant others to decorate the celebratory nameplates and post them in the clubhouse before they arrived Sunday morning.

Above Drew Rasmussen’s locker, his wife, Stevie, had written “Rhett’s Best Buddy” for their 3-year-old son. Taylor Walls’ nameplate said “BEST DAD EVER.” Jonathan Aranda’s read, “BEST DAD IN THE WORLD,” from daughter Regina, with the rest filled out with stickers of Disney princesses.

That was just one of many family-oriented flourishes the Rays put together for Sunday’s Father’s Day matinee against the Nationals at Tropicana Field.

When the Rays took the field for the national anthem, the players’ kids came with them. The dads in the lineup got another surprise when they came to bat, as their children picked their walkup songs for the day. No, Aranda does not usually come to the plate to the parental earworm “Baby Shark.”

Some were more visible, like the cleats worn by Caminero and Yandy Díaz. Caminero’s featured a photo on the heels of him holding Valentina. Díaz’s were similar, with a photo of him and his nearly 3-year-old son, Yandy Jared. Chandler Simpson recognized his father, Ralph, who was in attendance Sunday, with similar cleats.

“It's a beautiful thing, right? It's a blessing from God to be a father, especially to be her father,” Caminero said. “Today I'll put on the cleats before the game, and I kind of don't want the game ever to end.”

Sure, Díaz has plenty of pictures on his phone of “Yandito,” and he sees him every day. But finding the cleats at his locker was a surprise, and “seeing him on a set of cleats is even cooler,” Díaz said. And there was another special moment in store, as Díaz held his son as he threw out the ceremonial first pitch to the Rays’ mascot, Raymond.

“It changed me a lot. I try to be the best in anything that I do, but I try to be even better now for him,” Díaz said through Vera. “It's changed me in every single possible way that I can imagine.”

The Father’s Day celebration continued throughout the game. Players put on blue gear and swung blue bats. Walls’ daughter, Sutton, served as “junior reporter” on the scoreboard, asking players questions like whether they ate vegetables growing up and if they’d roar like a dinosaur with her.

It was a day the dads won’t soon forget.

“Becoming a father has taught me a great deal in patience, for starters, but it also just brings a lot of perspective, right?” Rasmussen said. “For a lot of time, my world revolved around the game of baseball. And now, there's bigger things and significantly greater things that my world revolves around. Baseball, it makes up a part of it, but it doesn't have as big of a significance in my life anymore.”