What's In A Name? That Who We Call Concepcion

Joining me at the Cincinnati Reds fantasy camp is Miami cardiologist Gilbert Concepcion, a lifelong New York Yankees fan. Given his revered last name in Reds baseball land, Concepcion, of Cuban heritage, spent most of his professional life fielding questions from his Miami patients wanting to know if he had any family tie to the great Big Red Machine shortstop Dave Concepcion, a native of Venezuela. He didn’t give much thought to the Concepcion name connection and was planning to wear his old high school number 10 at the Reds fantasy camp.

That is until he was recently looking through some of his childhood photographs at his parent’s home and realized that he wore the number 13 on a Little League baseball team. That discovery also perked another special memory.  As a physician, he was asked by the Venezuelan national baseball team physician to step in as onsite physician for the Venezuelan national team during the inaugural World Baseball Classic in 2006 because the former was feeling ill.

While filling in as the Venezuelan team physician, he met many important baseball figures from Venezuela and ironically one of those was Dave Concepcion, who had been named honorary team captain. He exchanged stories about the questions about his last name and reminisced about how the Big Red Machine had taken down his Yankees in four consecutive games during the 1976 World Series. After chatting about these experiences with me, I told him it was a natural and would be a great conversation piece at camp. He agreed and now the announcer will say…...”now batting, number 13 Concepcion”.