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Juan Encarnacion, Statesman?

By Aaron Schafer on Thu, Aug 6, 2009 at 1:14 pm

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RETRACTION: This story was based on an inaccurate news report (linked below.) We will leave the post up, but know that Encarnacion is not running for office, and is living in Florida, according to his fiancee, reached by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Juan Encarnacion, the former Cardinal right fielder who lost much of the vision in his right eye after being struck by a foul ball off the bat of Aaron Miles, is running for a Senatorial seat in his native Dominican Republic.

Unfortunately, being a non-Spanish speaker, the article announcing Juan's candidacy is less than informative to me. However, due to the miracles of modern technology, namely Google Translator and Wikipedia, I can tell you that Encarnacion is running as part of the Dominican Revolutionary Party (Spanish: Partido Revolucionario Dominicano, PRD), against the Dominican Liberation Party (Spanish: Partido de la Liberacion Dominicana, PLD). I can further tell you the PLD is the current ruling party, and is the more right-wing of the two, while the PRD occupies a center-left sort of position.

Encarnacion is running in the province of San Juan, and has said that only the PRD can rescue the people from a disaster of government that has occurred under the PLD and the current president of the DR, Leonel Fernandez.

I'll be honest with you; I know exactly nothing about politics in the Dominican Republic I didn't learn in the fifteen minutes I researched this article, but it is fantastic to see Juan taking some steps in a positive direction post-baseball. I can't imagine what it would be like to just one day lose my sight, my career, my passion, just everything the way he did. Thankfully, it looks as if he's moving on with his life and trying to do some good in his home country.

So good luck to Juan, and I'll try to keep up with this story and let everyone know if his candidacy is a success.

I do worry, though, that even if Juan runs a good campaign, people may think he could have run it a bit harder, and not be happy with him.