They call it the Rally Cat.
It’s not real — just a stuffed animal — but they say every time Eduardo Escobar sees it, he goes off. A big home run, a pair of doubles, maybe a triple. It’s an effect his fellow Venezuelan teammates find almost eerie — with the cat in the dugout, you can bet Escobar will produce.
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It also strikes the Diamondbacks third baseman strange, but for a different reason: The stuffed cat freaks him the hell out.
Escobar is an ailurophobe — someone who is afraid of cats. Not lions, not tigers. Housecats, the currency of the mid-2000s internet and the most fertile of meme fodder. He can’t stand looking at them, much less being near them. Fake ones, like the Rally Cat, give him the willies. Even a picture of one sends a chill up his spine.
It’s a fear that’s both odd and hilarious, at least if you’re not Escobar. That’s why his teammates — David Peralta, Wilmer Flores and the recently demoted Ildemaro Vargas, all of whom are Escobar’s countrymen — delight in stoking it. They sneak up on him in the dugout, thrusting Rally Cat into his face. They cackle as he recoils in terror and sprints away.
In this, they are merely copycats. His torments at the hands of teammates began long before he was traded to Arizona last year. And unfortunately for Escobar, a few of his original oppressors have come to town. This weekend, the Diamondbacks host the Nationals, a series that will reunite Escobar with former Twins teammates and close friends Brian Dozier and Kurt Suzuki.
At least if friends are people who love to scare years off your life span. “It’s the funniest thing ever,” Suzuki said.
There will be nowhere to hide.
Escobar claims he can’t remember when or why he developed his fear of cats. There may have been an instigating incident when he was a child, although he seems to have recalled more than that to his old Twins teammates. “He said his mom got him a cat one time,” Suzuki said of the version he’s heard, “or someone got him a cat and he fainted when he was younger.” Dozier’s also involves a family cat. “The story behind it is when he was a kid, he was attacked by a cat at the dinner table,” he said. “I don’t know if he was attacked. His family said, ‘No, it just came up to him.’”
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The origin may be a thing of legend, but the phobia’s persistence is a clear reality. Escobar’s teammates long have attempted to help him face his fear. Vargas remembered watching Escobar run away from a live cat during a winter league game in Venezuela when Escobar was still a young infielder with the White Sox. When Suzuki and Dozier first heard about it — “He really has a phobia of cats,” Dozier said, “and obviously don’t tell me that because we’re going to rag on your every single day” — they tried to ease Escobar into some feline exposure. “We were like, ‘No way,’” Suzuki said. “So, we would even show him pictures on our phone and he would jump and be like, ‘Nooo!’”
Clearly, a more forceful hand was needed. The pair then took the step the Diamondbacks are now stuck on, upgrading to a stuffed cat. “It looked like a real one — made noises, all that stuff,” Dozier said. They wrestled him to the couch, held him down and brought the stuffed cat out, caressing and petting it to preserve the illusion. Escobar froze in horror. “He wouldn’t move, he wouldn’t even look,” Dozier said. “We were like, ‘Oh shit, something happened to him.’” Suzuki said he “literally at first thought he was having a heart attack.”
But the suffering they inflicted paled in comparison to the anguish wrought by Twins Hall of Famer Rod Carew. “He doesn’t have a cat,” Escobar said. “He has a lion, man.” There are two of them, and Carew would bring them around the clubhouse in strollers. During those visits, it became a tradition to lock the clubhouse doors to trap Escobar inside.
Just the thought of it gives Escobar heart palpitations.
“He’d tell me, ‘Hey, come here, touch my cat!’” Escobar recalled before speaking directly to a not-present Carew. “No chance, man. I love you and respect you. You’re a Hall of Famer. But no, I don’t want to touch your cat.”
Though Suzuki and Dozier still regularly harass Escobar with cat photos in the trio’s group text chain, the baton of persecution has been passed to Escobar’s teammates in Arizona. And while there have been no live cats in the Diamondbacks clubhouse, Rally Cat has made more frequent appearances in the last month.
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Ask where he came from, and you’ll receive a lot of buck-passing:
“Nobody wants to say it was their idea,” Flores said. “It wasn’t mine.”
Not so, Peralta said: “I think that was (Flores’) idea. He brought it.”
Vargas is with Peralta. “He got it at Wal-Mart,” Vargas explained. “Flores said, ‘Any time that Escobar pisses me off, I’m going to bring that cat out.’”
This is all frame job, Flores insists. “I have nothing to do with it! They want me to be in charge, they want me to be guilty,” he said. “It’s Peralta’s idea, though.”
Whoever was responsible, it’s clear Escobar was wrong if he thought he’d be safe among his fellow Venezuelans. But no betrayal could wound as deeply as that of another Venezuelan in his life — his mother. Sometime since Escobar stopped living at home, Adela Coronado got a cat, and you will never see it and Escobar in her house at the same time. “Every time I’m over there, she takes the cat out of the house,” he said. “I said, ‘If I come to see you, take your cat to a different place, or I won’t come in your house.’” If any other family members want to follow suit, they’ll have to abide by the same arrangement, including Escobar’s children. “You want a cat? Go live in a different house,” Escobar tells them. “Not here.”
Peralta followed the same rules when Escobar visited once for a backyard barbecue. His cat Maximus (“My wife always says, ‘No, he’s not big. He’s just strong,’” Peralta said. “I’m like, ‘No, he’s fat.’”) remained inside the house. And even as his teammates exploit it for their own amusement, they do not judge Escobar for his fear. Everyone has a fear of something weird. “My mom is that way with frogs,” Flores said. “I have an aunt, she’s afraid of snakes. Like really bad, she can’t see it. I get that.”
So, don’t expect Escobar to join you at the screening of the “Cats” movie (which frankly looks disturbing enough even without a phobia to consider). But the new, hyper-realistic version of “The Lion King”? Maybe. Lions will kill you, but they won’t haunt your dreams.
“If you said, ‘Escobar, you can take a cat or a lion,’ I’ll take a lion,” Escobar said. “For sure.”
The Athletic’s Nationals reporter, Brittany Ghiroli, contributed to this, um, report.
(Photo courtesy Sarah Sachs / Arizona Diamondbacks)