He’s 27 years old now. No one cares to dispute that. Those first wisps of a mustache have been replaced by a goatee that covers his chin, the lean boyish face lost beneath puffy cheeks and a worried brow. He assistant-coaches the high school team at Cardinal Hayes and plays a little ball around the boroughs on the weekends.
Danny Almonte is 13 summers removed from becoming the biggest sensation — and then pariah — the Little League World Series has ever seen.
And to hear him tell it now —Â as he does in “Kid Danny,” a 30 for 30 documentary short streaming on the website Grantland — he was an unwitting pawn in a fraud perpetrated by his coach and his father (in that order) that scarred his youth and ruined his reputation.
Almonte was the flame-throwing lefty star of the Rolando Paulino Little League team from The Bronx that made an astonishing run to the US championship game in Williamsport in 2001. His helpless opponents were 11 or 12; he was 14.
“They always say that I’m the cheater guy,” Almonte says in the documentary. “‘That’s Danny the cheater.’ And they don’t know the whole story.”
In his telling, the villain of the whole story is Paulino, a taskmaster he moved in with when he immigrated from the Dominican Republic at the (real) age of 12.
“Living with Paulino was hell,” Almonte says. “He never let me do anything, like go outside. It was baseball 24/7.”
Of his coach and his father, he says: “I think they took advantage of me, and it made me feel bad.”
With a fastball that ticked as high as 75 miles per hour, Almonte threw a perfect game in his LLWS debut (with 16 strikeouts in six innings). In another start, another 16-K shutout. The Baby Bombers were eliminated in the semifinals on a day Almonte was ineligible to pitch, but they returned to New York as conquering heroes. Then: the birth certificates, the scandal, the humiliation.
“It was confusing at first because they never asked what age I’m going to play,” Almonte says. “I could not even go to school because cameras everywhere. It just looked like you were in some reality show.”
But Almonte remains vague on just what he knew of the con — and when.
“I knew I wasn’t playing with kids my age,” he says, explaining he realized during the tournament, before adding, confusingly: “I just felt a little guilty at the same time, but at the same time not, because I wasn’t sure.”
The most affecting parts of the documentary concern the parental drama: the homesick telephone calls with his mother, back in the Dominican Republic, stricken with cancer; the freeze with his father, who wanted the next Sosa or Pujols for a son. AÂ trip to his homeland in 2011 brought a tearful reunion with his mother and the opportunity to heal.
“My father just think that he was doing the right thing for me,” Almonte says. “I did forgive him.”