The New York Times has an interesting profile of Alibay Barkley, a talented, but raw, hitting prospect from Washington Heights' George Washington High School, Rod Carew's and Manny Ramirez's alma mater. Compared favorably to the Phillies' Ryan Howard, Barkley is projected to be taken somewhere in the MLB 2010 draft, after a year at St. Petersburg College, a junior college baseball factory in Florida. How his future pans out, though, is anybody's guess: Barkley, it seems, is a little mixed-up:
The last seven years have not always been kind. Friends in the Bronx have died, his mother and three younger siblings live in a Queens shelter and Barkley skipped school and spent a lost year in Texas unsuccessfully trying to fast-forward his baseball career.For his sake, I hope Barkley gets to play baseball for a very long time, especially if his coach thinks he could end up being a less strike-out-prone version of Ryan Howard. For a look at more of Josh Haner's photographs of Barkley, past and present, click here.
He is home now, planning his latest getaway from New York. For all the time and effort spent getting this far — on the verge of graduation, with the baseball draft a month away and colleges making offers — everything still seems so uncertain.
“All I wanted was to get away from New York,” Barkley, 19, said while sitting in the stands at George Washington High, the hilltop campus in Manhattan’s Washington Heights neighborhood with a baseball heritage that stretches from Rod Carew to Manny Ramirez.
“New York is home, but it’s always good to get away from home, understand?” he said. “It’s always good to get away and go somewhere where you don’t have to worry about one of your friends being killed or how your family or your mom is going to eat, or how we’re going to pay the light bill or the rent. Just get away and have fun. And play baseball.”
