Clubhouse chatter: Here's who the Padres rooted for as kids

The Gurriel family is baseball royalty in Cuba, largely because Lourdes Sr., Lourdes Jr. and Yuli’s success with the national team translated to success in the majors.

Lourdes Gurriel Jr. has been an All-Star with three 20-plus homer seasons, while Yuli Gurriel was a two-time World Series champ who won a batting title and a Gold Glove long before playing his last year in the majors in 2025 with the Padres.

Needless to say, Adrián Morejón was excited to share a uniform with someone who grew up idolizing.

The only thing better?

Striking out Yuli Gurriel via a 3-2 changeup as a starting pitcher in his second year in the majors in 2020.

"Last season, I told him about that," Morejón said with a smile. "I told everybody last season when he signed here (that) I'm very excited for that. I think all the Cuban players close to my age, he's their favorite player."

There are all sorts of reasons why the Padres gravitated to certain players as kids, from the positions they played, to their notoriety in the league to their status as hometown heroes.

Like Morejón, Sung-Mun Song found himself cheering for players who had success in the majors after making a name for themselves in his homeland. The left-handed-hitting Hyun Soo Kim played for the Baltimore Orioles and Philadelphia Phillies in the middle of a nearly two-decade career in Korea. Song shared the field with Kim a number of times - as an opponent - before his own sojourn to Major League Baseball.

"The first time was like (being here with the Padres), seeing the superstars from TV in real life," Song said through interpreter Juneseo Yi.

He added: "He was a lefty. He had a good contact, line-drive (swing). A similar hitter to me. I always looked up to him."

Yuki Matsui's favorite player, Yoshinobu Takahashi, had an 18-year career as a Gold Glove-winning outfielder for Japan’s Yomiuri Giants. He even managed the team for three years.

"He was very cool," Matsui said in English. "He was a great player."

As an up-and-coming shortstop and son of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, Xander Bogaerts' rooting interests were split between two players as a kid. The Aruba gravitated toward the Curacao-born Andruw Jones, but anybody playing shortstop as a kid in the early 2000s did well to watch Derek Jeter go about his business.

Bogaerts even got to rub shoulders a bit with Jeter toward the end of his playing career.

"My first homer at Yankee Stadium, he was at short also," Bogaerts said. "It wasn't primetime Jeter, but it was still Derek Jeter. I was there for his last hit, too."

Fernando Tatis Jr. played shortstop until moving to right field in 2023. The son of a former big-leaguer, he had access to all sorts of resources as a kid, but he found himself closely watching guys who played up the middle: Hanley Ramirez, Jose Reyes, Alex Rodriguez and, of course, Jeter.

"I liked the attitude of Jose Reyes," Tatis recalled. "I liked how A-Rod was on the top of the world and Jeter was the captain."

Jackson Merrill saw someone that he wanted to emulate in Red Sox second baseman Dustin Pedroia - "He was a little grinder; he was a beast," Merrill said - while Michael King's fascination with Roy Halladay began as someone to mimic. That's one reason he wears the No. 34 that the late Halladay wore with the Phillies.

"That's who I tried to model my mechanics after," King said. "I got a little too far across my body, but that lower three-quarter arm slot was who I was trying to be when I was 13, 14, 15 (years old). Once I got into higher-level pitching, I realized we were even more similar than I thought. My college pitching coach was big on me watching him and seeing how he attacked hitters."

Ramón Laureano liked all the greats - from Jeter to Carlos Beltran to Adrián Beltre to Albert Pujols - and Ty France certainly watched guys like Pujols, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa. But France was also an Angels fan growing up in Southern California, so the Halos who helped that team win its World Series in 2002 - Troy Glaus, Darin Erstad, Tim Salmon, David Eckstein - are high on his list.

Mason Miller's Pittsburgh Pirates didn't win much for him in his youth, but they did appear in three straight postseasons (2013-2015) while leaning on outfielder Andrew McCutchen.

"They weren't a very good team for a while, but he was the star player," Miller said. "He was the face of the Pittsburgh Pirates for a while."

New Jersey native Ron Marinaccio had a lot of players to choose from while coming of age during the last Yankees dynasty.

It was enough to make anyone feel a bit spoiled if they really thought about it.

"It was that whole team," said Marinaccio, who was later drafted by the Yankees in the 19th round in 2017. "It was cool. It just felt like teams stayed together longer back then. There was less moving around, so it was cool to watch that same group stay around and it was that tradition back then. That was the Yankees culture. It wasn't quite the same at the beginning of my career when I was there, but growing up, it was cool to watch.

"They won every year."

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This story was originally published May 28, 2026 at 10:26 PM.