They grew up in a rented room and this was Edmundo Sosa’s world. He was the youngest of four brothers. His mother worked long days in subzero temperatures packaging chicken at a manufacturing plant. They all shared a bed and a small television in Panama City. But the Sosas were a baseball family. That passion reached even the youngest child.
He loved the game. It was his escape. She allowed him to harbor a modest imagination.
“My dream,” Sosa said, “was always to have my own bedroom.”
They called him Mundito because his father and his older brother were both Edmundo. Mundito couldn’t be contained in a single room. “He was very hyperactive,” he said. He ran everywhere and his mother, Nilka, warned him not to. There was something special about Mundito. Nilka knew it. He had played shortstop in a Panamanian softball league. Her husband was a referee. His oldest son played amateur ball, but Mundito was different. So, whenever she could, Nilka took Mundito to the field and hit ground balls for him. He was gifted. He had that vitality that he couldn’t teach himself. They began to dream big.
“Remember where you come from,” Nilka told her son.
Sosa is now 28 years old. He is a millionaire. He has started 12 of the last 14 games at shortstop for the Phillies, the team with the best record in the major leagues. He has reached base in 11 of those games. He is a reserve infielder. He doesn’t complain. He has made a beautiful life with that work.
“He’s always ready to play,” Phillies manager Rob Thomson said. “He is just a wonderful human being. I love him.”
But Sosa has a secret and he carries it on his right arm. Mundito is the last living Edmundo of his family. He hasn’t forgotten that little bedroom.
Last week he lifted his shirt sleeve to reveal a tattoo, written in Spanish: I wish I had a stairway to heaven so I could hug you one more time, Dad. Beneath the words there are clouds from which stairs descend. At the base there are two silhouettes, a father and a son.
They are having a problem.
Edmundo Sosa shows part of the tattoo that honors his late father. (Matt Gelb / El Atlético)
The day a path to professional baseball opened, Sosa was on the bench. There is a national youth tournament every January in Panama. It is televised throughout the country. People fill stadiums to watch teenagers play.
Moisés Rodríguez liked to explore Panama for this reason. The international director of the St. Louis Cardinals was there in 2012, when 15-year-old Mundito arrived at Metro de Panama, Panama City’s main amateur team. But Sosa had to wait his turn. He entered the game in the eighth inning as a defensive replacement at second base. He made an athletic play that caught Rodriguez’s attention. He didn’t do much in his only at-bat. But, in defense, Sosa was committed. He did the little things. He let everyone know how many outs there were. He directed traffic in the box. He encouraged the pitcher from him.
“It was obvious how much he enjoyed being there and how much he loved playing,” Rodriguez said. “Overall, I didn’t see much. But I just felt drawn to him.”
Rodríguez met for breakfast the next morning with Sosa and his mother. They told the scout about Edmundo, the family patriarch, who umpired in the local baseball leagues. He died of lung cancer in 2002. Sosa was 6 years old. For years, in that rented room, Nilka and her husband had slept on the floor. The children had the bed. Sosa’s older siblings moved out one by one, leaving her sister, her mother and him. They still shared the bed.
“You could tell he came from a close-knit family,” Rodríguez said, “and he was close to his mother.”
The Cardinals followed Sosa. “He was a kid you had to watch more in games to appreciate him,” said Rodriguez, now St. Louis’ assistant general manager. They offered him a contract. Sosa signed for a $425,000 bonus once he turned 16 in 2012.
The first thing Mundito did with his money was buy his mother a new house in Panama City.
“And,” Sosa said, “I made sure each of us had our own room.”
In March, Thomson was worried about Sosa. “She wasn’t acting normal,” Thomson said. “It looked like it was down.” So the manager thought they should chat in his office. Sosa said he was fine. Then, he clicked on Thomson’s head. The Phillies had signed Whit Merrifield, another right-handed utility player.
“Sosa,” Thomson said, “you know you’ve been part of the team, right?”
Sosa exhaled.
“Thank you,” he said to his boss. “I love Philadelphia. I love the team. “I just want to be here right now.”
There is a certain joy with which Sosa plays. He is underestimated. It’s not flashy. He often takes at-bats as if it were the last time he will be allowed to bat. Sosa attacks everything. But since he replaced Turner, the $300 million shortstop who is out with a hamstring injury, Sosa has looked calm. He is more patient. He has made fluid plays at shortstop.
He feels comfortable in this place.
“For me it is a privilege to play this sport,” Sosa said through a team interpreter. “I’m living my dream. Somehow, my dream came true. And I am very grateful for that. I don’t take it for granted. That’s why I come here and every time I go out on the field I have fun. I play the best I can. I do the best I can.
“I like to treat people the same way I want to be treated. That’s why I think I have good chemistry with my teammates. They appreciate my honesty, my energy and my way of being.”
Many of them are unaware of the losses that Sosa has suffered. In 2014, a year after starting her professional career, her older brother Edmundo was murdered in Panama. Sosa said it was a case of mistaken identity. Like Sosa, her brother had played in the Panama Metro when he was a teenager.
Sosa carries his legacies in his body. She turned her left arm to show another tattoo: There is nothing more precious than family. The birth dates of her brothers and nephews were written below those words.
Rodriguez said that within the Cardinals’ farm system, managers revered Sosa. He was competitive and focused on his work. St. Louis traded him in July 2022 when he failed to produce with limited playing time. Coming to Philadelphia, Sosa said, was like a second life.
He remembered why he loved baseball. She has loved him too.
“The opportunity I have now is very big,” Sosa said. “And it’s not something that everyone has. That’s why I always try to respect every person who crosses my life. Because I know where I come from and I know where I want to go.”
“I’m living my dream. Somehow, my dream came true. And I am very grateful for that. I don’t take it for granted,” said Edmundo Sosa. (Bill Streicher/USA Today)
The house he bought for his mother still belongs to the family. Sosa’s sister lives there with her family. Nilka moved to a bigger house with Sosa, his wife, and his daughter Naya.
He doesn’t have many memories of his father. She knew how important baseball was to him. “There is an afterlife,” Sosa said. He likes to imagine his father and brother watching him fulfill his collective dream.
Rodríguez never visited the family apartment while the Cardinals courted Sosa. But after Sosa signed, his coach took Rodríguez to see the wooden housing complex in an area of Panama City called Juan Díaz. “Humble beginnings,” Rodriguez said. “It was very modest, to put it kindly.” The owners of the complex became a second family to Sosa. Some of them still live there. It’s in ruins.
Sometimes Sosa stops by when he is at home in Panama. She hasn’t forgotten that room.
Has an idea.
“At some point in my life I want to be able to go back to that place and rebuild something there,” Sosa said. “Something where a family can have a proper home.”
(Top photo by Edmundo Sosa: Nick Wass/Keynote USA)
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