When pitcher Luis Avilan signed with the Braves at 15, he didn’t speak much English except for the words he learned from Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger and the rest of the Rolling Stones.
Around the time Avilan began developing a love for baseball and the Braves, he started cultivating his second passion: rock ‘n’ roll.
“My dad loved that kind of rock all his life,” Avilan said. “I grew up listing to him listen to all those bands. So my siblings and I inherited his taste in music.”
While Avilan was growing up in Barquisimeto, Venezuela, his father Manuel had vast CD collection, which included the Stones, Dylan, the Beatles and the Bee Gees, among others, instilling in Avilan a taste for classic British rock that he would carry with him all the way to the Turner Field clubhouse.
“A lot of my teammates are surprised that I listen to that kind of music, especially because I’m Hispanic. And even they don’t listen to that music,” Avilan said. “But then I explain to them that my dad loves that kind of music and I grew up with it.”
Avilan also grew up following Braves pitchers like Tom Glavine and Denny Neagle — both left-handed, as he is — but his love for the team stemmed from fellow Venezuelan Andres Galarraga’s stint with the team (1998-2000).
“He’s my favorite player and this was the team he was playing for when I started watching,” said Avilan, who was 8 when Galarraga came to Atlanta.
Though he listened to British rock, he didn’t learn to speak very much English as a child and started to learn the language when he was drafted by the Braves as an international free agent in 2008.
“I’ve always loved to talk and I’ve always befriended the American players during my entire minor league career. I always tried to learn English from them,” Avilan said. “I was never embarrassed to make a mistake or anything. I didn’t mind if they laughed at me for it. I always said, ‘OK, laugh at me but then explain to me the right way to say it.’”
With positivity and persistence Avilan learned English in about two years.
Though Avilan has been living in America almost full-time for nearly seven years and is fluent in English, he is not an American citizen and said he doesn’t plan on becoming one. When he isn’t living in a rented home in Buckhead, he spends his three-month offseason at his home back in Barquisimeto, where most of his family still lives.
In his second full season in the majors, Avilan got off to a difficult start, posting a higher average ERA (7.36) in April than in any other single month of his seven professional seasons. A five-run inning in Philadelphia on April 14 was particularly damaging.
“I had a lot of difficulties in April, I had a very high ERA and had a lot runs made on me,” Avilan said. “I had never been through a slump like that in my career. But thank God, things turned out OK and I’ve pitched much better since May.”
The club’s busiest reliever — he enters the series in Houston Tuesday night with a team-high 39 appearances, third-most in the majors — Avilan’s numbers have improved. Since that day against the Phillies, his ERA is 2.70.
“To put it simply, it’s the mentality,” Avilan said turning around his performance. “A lot of my teammates talked me through it. They reassured me that it happens to everyone. It was a bad time and that’s it. I’ve generated more confidence in myself to overcome that.”
One person Avilan turned to for advice was his locker neighbor, starter Ervin Santana.
“A lot of times, you just put all these thoughts in your head and you want to think too far ahead. But I told him to just take it slow,” Santana said.
Manager Fredi Gonzalez said he never lost confidence in Avila.
“I’ve never lost confidence in him because I understand that everybody, whether you’re a pitcher or position player, you go through a little spell,” Gonzalez said. “But his last four or five outings, maybe even a little longer, has been pretty good. So we need to keep him that way.”
Now that Avilan is pitching better, he can’t ignore that his team is facing a similar challenge.
“The most important thing — and everyone knows — this is a sport and in sports, luck matters,” Avilan said. “We’re having a bad time right now but maybe when the second half comes, we’ll go back to being the best, like last year.”
