Jharel Cotton was 16 when he left home, and his family. The journey to the beginning of the rest of his life covered 1,500 miles, to a place where he would be a stranger. For a boy, the decision to leave must have been excruciating.
“It was easy,” Cotton said.
He grew up in the Virgin Islands, a baseball player in a sporting land dominated by basketball and soccer, a homeland with about as many people as Visalia, Calif. He lived with his uncle, since his mother had died when he was 12.
When his coach suggested that his baseball future could be enhanced by playing high school ball in Virginia rather than the Virgin Islands, his father blessed the move, and Cotton jumped at the chance.