[Announcer] Kim Izaguirre-Merlos freelance contributor to Latino USA. She documents everyday life in professional baseball.

[Announcer] That’s Michael Simon Johnson, a producer at Latino USA. His feature Beisbol ran in July of 2015.

[Kim] I just kind of got sucked into this world and haven’t been able to leave since?

[Announcer] Kim Izaguirre-Merlos was a contributor to that story.

The thing I took away was show up. So the way that I earned trust was I said, let me look at what they do and I will just do that. So when I did that first story again at the time I didn’t realize really the story that I was telling. I had a great Producer at Latino USA. His name was Michael Simon Johnson.

[Announcer] She embedded herself in the bleachers for a season to answer exactly that question. What is the experience of coming from Latin America trying to make it in the big leagues?

And what he did was he helps me write the story that I wanted to tell, the story that I heard while I was here I started out looking at Latinos in baseball, Latin Americans in baseball. What’s that experience like? And really what I was seeing and hearing through all that was how was someone successful. So on top of baseball these guys also have to fit in class, English class.

[Interviewer] Like school?

[Kim] Yeah, like school, like education. They’ve only been in the country maybe two seasons, one, two seasons so they’re still pretty new to the country. And so he encouraged me and he said I think that you should like into whatever this is that is really underneath here and see what comes out of it.

[Interviewer] What happened to these guys? I mean, what happened to Browsabel a year later, where are they?

[Kim] He finally got what every guy here wants, he got the call up.

[Interviewer] The call up to a higher level.

[Kim] Yeah yeah, he got the call up to Modesto. The thing that I am really fascinated by right now is everything that baseball is: talent and development, the idea of when a person is really great at something and they practice it every day and what happens as a result of that. Everybody here is on some sort of path to try to get to their major leagues and this is just kind of one step in the six that they have to climb to get there and so that’s what I’ll be looking at next. My name is Kim Izaguirre-Merlos and I’m a storyteller.