Against All Odds

Tayron Guerrero fought an uphill battle to even sign a pro contract, but the 6-foot-8 reliever has developed into a two-time Futures Gamer. Now he aims to get back to the big leagues with the Marlins.

- Walter Villa

Colombia native and Double-A Jacksonville righthander Tayron Guerrero remembers feeling terrified.

For a six-week period when he was 17, Guerrero would get up at 5:30 a.m. to take a boat out of his remote village, the town of Bocachica on an island called Isla de Tierra Bomba.

The 20-minute ferry took him to Cartagena, one of the larger cities in Colombia, where he practiced basketball until noon and then baseball until late at night.

Since the ferry stopped service at 6 p.m., Guerrero was forced to take a smaller boat and then walk through the woods for two hours before making it back to Bocachica.

“I wouldn’t get home until midnight, and I could hear the owls and I could see some snakes,” Guerrero said in Spanish. “All I had was a stick in my hand to cut through the grass, which reached up to my ribs.