PHOENIX -- It’s 9 a.m. on an Arizona morning and one of the newest members of the Brewers’ pitching development machine is pondering all that baseball has given him. When he begins to speak, the words get stuck in his throat.
For Juan Sandoval, the answer is everything.
“To really answer,” he said, “we would need a long time.”
Sandoval, 45, is heading into his first season as an assistant pitching coach for the Brewers, 20 years after his path to the Major Leagues as a player detoured because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. In February 2006, he was a right-handed pitching prospect for the Mariners, making a steady rise toward the Majors from Rookie ball to Class A to High-A to Double-A in his first four seasons -- including a 2003 season with the Wisconsin Timber Rattlers when they were a Seattle affiliate. Triple-A was next, and then, Sandoval dreamed, the big leagues.
One instant changed everything. He was about to leave for Spring Training with the Mariners when he took his then-fiancee, now-wife, Elisa, to a restaurant in his hometown of Bonao in the Dominican Republic. While they were seated, he noticed the security guard at the door arguing with a passerby on the street. Then a shot rang out.
“It was a shot into the floor that spread pellets everywhere. Three went into my right eye,” Sandoval said.
He underwent eight hours of surgery in Santo Domingo. Doctors saved the physical eye but not Sandoval’s sight, a salient detail that Sandoval says was not clearly communicated to him until months later. Finally, in June, he asked the surgeon directly. He was informed he would never see out of that eye again.
It felt, Sandoval said, “like the ceiling was falling down on me.” For a minute or two, he didn’t say a word.
Then he had a thought that changed his outlook.
“The first name that came to my mind,” Sandoval said, “was Jim Abbott.”
Abbott was born without a right hand, so he pitched 10 Major League seasons with his left hand. He went 18-11 with a 2.89 ERA in 34 starts for the Angels in 1991 and threw a no-hitter for the Yankees in 1993. When he finished his career in 1999 with the Brewers, it meant he had to hit. Abbott managed to go 2-for-21 at the plate, and both of his hits drove in runs.
“He pitched in the big leagues with only one hand, so I thought, ‘That has to be worse. That has to be more difficult,’” Sandoval said. “‘If he was able to do it, I should be able to do it, too.’”
Sandoval set about learning to pitch with one eye. He had support from the Mariners scout who signed him, Patrick Guerrero, the brother of Brewers Double-A manager Mike Guerrero and son of legendary scout Epy Guerrero. It wasn’t until December 2006 that he could travel to Seattle to see Mariners doctors.
By then, Sandoval was determined to control his own destiny.
“Nobody was going to decide if I could keep going or not. I was going to decide,” he said. “I’m going to get the ball, I’m going to get to the mound, and if I feel like I cannot, it was over. Thank God it was not.”
Not by a long shot.
Sandoval not only made it back to the mound in 2007, he pitched 40 times that year and made it to Triple-A Tacoma. The Brewers plucked him in the Minor League phase of the Rule 5 Draft for 2008 and he kept going, logging a total of 10 seasons in affiliated ball for the Seattle, Milwaukee, Philadelphia and Tampa Bay organizations, then continuing his career in Mexico, the Dominican Republic and Venezuela.
His mind adapted to pitching with one eye, but fielding the position would be a major challenge for the remainder of his career. Sandoval learned to count the bounces of bunts or soft comebackers into his glove. He found ways to keep baserunners in check. He adapted.
In all, he pitched in 962 games over 17 professional seasons, capped by three scoreless appearances for Venezuela in the 2020 Caribbean Series.
Sandoval never made it to the Majors. But he’s proud of how far he got.
“This game teaches you how to find the best version of you,” he said. “To not give up. To understand that you need to keep going. To find different ways to be successful. Discipline. Education. One of the coolest things is that you meet a bunch of great people from different areas, different perspectives, that allow you to grow your mind. That’s growth.
“I really enjoy competing. When I was playing, that was a great feeling to be on the mound competing.”
He’s still competing, though not from the mound. The Brewers hired Sandoval in 2022 as a pitching coach in the Dominican Summer League, then promoted him to assistant Minor League pitching coordinator for 2024 and to assistant pitching coach for this season, positioning him to work alongside pitching coaches Chris Hook and Jim Henderson and bullpen coach Charlie Greene. Greene speaks Spanish, but the Brewers believe it will be a plus to have another coach on manager Pat Murphy’s staff for whom Spanish is a first language (they also hired Guillermo Martinez as a hitting coach over the winter).
“He started from zero as far as coaching experience, but he was incredibly curious. Incredibly curious,” said senior special assistant Carlos Villanueva, who pitched against Sandoval beginning in the early 2000s. “I probably talked to him 10 times a day when we first hired him, and he was just asking questions, asking questions. I remember being the same way.”
“If I’m putting myself in his shoes,” said Mike Guerrero, who has known Sandoval for more than two decades, “he has the ability to understand not to underestimate what people have inside. The ability to use your brain to battle. You cannot put limitations on people. It’s an incredible story.”
If a player asks about his eye, Sandoval is happy to share the story. There are lessons there, of course. It’s one of the reasons he wanted to coach.
“I see it this way: What else am I going to do with all of the knowledge the game provided to me over 20 years?” he said. “I need to give something back. This is my way to touch people’s lives. The game needs people that can give back for what we have taken.”
He’s made it to the Major Leagues after all.
“I can not even describe the emotions and how I feel about it,” Sandoval said. “It has been a long journey for me, and here I am.”