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Kansas City Royals' Eric Hosmer (35) celebrates his RBI single to score Chris Getz from third in the bottom of the 11th inning during Monday's baseball game against the Toronto Blue Jays at Kauffman Stadium on June 6, 2011 in Kansas City, Mo. John Sleezer/The Kansas City Star

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Three visitors from Florida make their way through a concourse behind home plate at Kauffman Stadium.

One of the men is Mike Hosmer cheap formal dress , a longtime former Miami firefighter who pulled babies out of burning houses and bodies out of charred vehicles. His older son, also named Mike, is to his right. The woman’s name is Ileana. She came to this country more than four decades ago, a refugee from Cuba, with the promise of a better life and the relief she had escaped the Communist control of her first seven years.

The final member of the family is the one the others have traveled here to see. He’s down in the on-deck circle, waiting his turn. Royals first baseman Eric Hosmer swings a bat, standing on a patch of dirt in the evening sun. He represents the future to many Royals fans. But to the three standing here in the concourse, he represents something else: Opportunity and belief, bygone hardship rewarded now by the American dream.

They head toward their seats in Section 220 as Eric’s name is announced.

“He’s coming up,” Mike Sr. says.

• • •

Eric Hosmer sits alone in the Royals’ clubhouse, killing the long hours before an afternoon game. It’s the morning after a late-night loss, a time when most big-league managers will let a little tardiness slide. Hosmer was one of the first players to enter, because when you’re a rookie in the majors, no time feels wasted.

He’ homecoming dresses for cheap ;s talking about how he got here. How he reached the majors three years after graduating high school. How he came to signify all that the Royals might someday be: Young and powerful, with expectations of success. For now, the new still hasn’t worn off, and he thinks back to when this was little more than a dream for him and his family.

“We’d go to the Marlins’ games,” he says of his days growing up near Miami, “and just hope one day I could be in their shoes.”

The face of the Royals’ future has high cheekbones with a dark, patchy beard. He is reserved, ambitious and, at 6 feet 4 and 230 pounds, he possesses one of the smoothest and most effortless left-handed swings in baseball.

Hosmer debuted for the Royals on May 6, and since then, his career has been both dazzling and frustrating. He was chosen the Royals’ player of the month after hitting .283 with five home runs in May. A month later, his average dipped to .268. He didn’t hit a homer in June. He was criticized last month by manager Ned Yost for showing impatience at the plate.

Some say Hosmer’s mental approach — that ability to bounce back from a bad game or a bad month — is what sets him apart from other talented youngsters. He seems to possess a rare kind of determination.

“In Baltimore one night, he was oh for six,” Royals outfielder Jeff Francoeur says. “A lot of young rookie guys would come in all bent out of shape. He came in and he was: ‘All right, I’ll get them tomorrow.’ Wedding Favors Unlimited has the largest selection with prices discounted up to ... wedding accessories cheap, and bridal party gifts by shipping direct to you from ourdress.co.uk Sure enough, he goes to Texas and gets four hits. That’s impressive.”

At 21 and his career still in its infancy, to know Hosmer is to know where he came from. For now, men's accessories trends men's accessories trends he is more a product of his parents and their experiences than his own.

Sitting alone in the clubhouse, Hosmer says his family is used to overcoming. He says he has been prepared for this for years. A slump, he says, is nothing.

• • •

They met in the fury and chaos of the Coral Gables Hospital in South Florida, a firefighter working his required paramedic rotation and a nurse rushing the injured and ailing from here to there.

It was 1979. Ileana had agreed to work a shift for her supervisor, whose daughter had suffered an asthma attack. One of Mike’s assignments was to assist in the operating or emergency rooms, and on this day, a nurse named Ileana stole his attention.

“I walked in and was like, ‘Wow,’ ” Mike says now with a laugh. “I just followed her around a little bit.”

Before long, the firefighter asked the nurse on a date. They dated four years, sometimes exchanging stories about life and the rigors that can bring together two people from different backgrounds and experiences.

Ileana was a quiet immigrant who needed time to establish trust. Mike was an all-American kind of man, a tall firefighter with the courage to run into a burning house because he’d heard a child was in there, the training and ability to find the unconscious boy and carry him toward fresh air, and the stomach to wait almost an hour to ask a doctor if the boy woke up.

“You don’t have to do those things,” he says. “You want some kind of reward.”

Ileana was more reserved about the things she’d seen. She was 7 when the paperwork was approved, a temporary visa for her family to travel from Havana to the United States. There would be no reunions with her homeland or the family that stayed behind as long as Fidel Castro was alive and Cuba and the U.S. remained embroiled in what has become more than a half century of tension.

Before the family boarded its plane, two of Ileana’s dolls went missing. Cuban officials took inventory of citizens’ possessions, and if those dolls didn’t reappear, the family’s visa would be cancelled. Ileana had given the dolls to a neighbor, and before her family could move past the restraints of Communism, the neighbor had to produce the dolls by 6 p.m., just to show that young Ileana was telling the truth.

“Just a scary thing for a kid,” she says now, her voice still low and careful so many years later. “You lived in fear.”

The plane landed in Pittsburgh, and after the family was adopted by a suburban Baptist church, Ileana began learning English. To help her understand, a tutor placed something in the girl’s hand and kept repeating a phrase: “Throw the ball.”

Eventually, the foreign sounds were associated with meaning — shapes, colors, sounds and emotions — and Ileana began to feel American. Even now, she says without a trace of an accent from her homeland, it feels unnatural to discuss her life in Cuba. Silly as it might sound, she says, her mind still suggests that the wrong person might be listening. She grew up determined to someday raise children who didn’t worry about limits.

“You’d have to live it to understand,” she says.

Mike Hosmer understood. They told each other that life was complicated, and through this bond, they talked sometimes for hours. In time, Mike’s tough exterior melted and Ileana’s inborn paranoia began to dissolve.

“He was the one,” Ileana says of Mike. “You could feel it.”

They were married in 1983, white prom dresses and two years later, Mike Jr. was born. Four years after that, they had a second son. They named him Eric.

• • •

The boys never seemed to stop running. In and out, this way and that, an endless stream of energy that the firefighter and the nurse couldn’t always keep up with.

When their sons were still young, Mike Sr. and Ileana noticed an interest in baseball. They brought home a contraption called the Tony Gwynn Solohitter, a 6-foot apparatus with a ball attached to four cords, which returned the ball to a waist-high location after it had been hit. The boys took to it immediately, taking swings at the ball for hours.

“Our neighbors probably hated us,” Ileana says with a laugh.

Mike Sr. saw his sons’ affinity for baseball, and he negotiated deals at the firehouse to make it possible to attend his sons’ games. Most firefighters work 24-hour shifts, one day on and two days off. Mike Hosmer agreed to work occasional 48-hour shifts at Station 9 in the high-crime neighborhood of Liberty City, two days on and three days off, so that he could spend long weekends with his boys.

They traveled to tournaments in Cooperstown, N.Y., and North Carolina and throughout Florida. Mike sometimes passed the long hours in the car with stories about the dangerous and gruesome things he’d seen on the job. His sons, spring wedding guest dresses spring wedding guest dresses of course, loved those tales.

The stories weren’ navy blue cocktail dress navy blue cocktail dresst so much entertainment to Mike Sr. as they were a front-row seat to real life in a big city. Standing in the stadium now, he recounts car crashes and botched drug deals, the kind of drama that might wear on a man if he weren’t determined to provide — and to use the grit he saw to teach his boys. A drunken driver decapitated in a car crash? A drug dealer shot in the street? Both were examples of cause and effect: Drugs and drunken driving meant bad things.

“He doesn’t lie to us,” Mike Jr. says. “It was just reality.”

When his shifts finally ended and the stories ran out, Mike Sr. coached his boys’ baseball teams. Ileana sat in the bleachers with a video camera. Eric was maybe 8 when she began filming his games, and he and his brother began studying the tapes to compare their swings with those they saw on television. Ken Griffey Jr. keeps his hands here. Tino Martinez follows through like this. Look where his hips are as his hands pass through.

“We’d just watch the games and hope that one day, we might get here,” Eric says.

The brothers watched the tapes often, later directing their mother on how to aim the lens, how to hold the camera, when to zoom.

Ileana eventually told her sons about Cuba and the way her life had once been. There was a message there, too: Take nothing for granted — not freedom or opportunities or dreams. They listened to their mother’s words and watched her tapes, eventually running back outside to experiment with new techniques on the Solohitter.

“They were locked in,” Ileana says. “They wanted perfection.”

Mike Sr. walked in sometimes while the brothers were watching a major-league game, and he’d point to the television.

“Why can’t that be you?” Mike Sr. remembers asking, and it wasn’t the only time he’d ask the question. “ wedding dress color swatches wedding dress color swatchesYou just have to work hard. And believe.”

• • •

The years passed, and the brothers grew. Their parents kept working to make certain that baseball remained not only possible, but that Mike Jr. and Eric could play alongside the best. Eric was playing on teams with older boys, and Mike Jr. played at the American Heritage School, which has one of the nation’s best high school teams.

Eric wanted to follow his brother, ignoring the fact that tuition at the prestigious private high school was about $18,000 per year. Mike Sr. and Ileana couldn’t afford it on their salaries, so twice a week, Ileana worked shifts in the school’s science lab to offset the tuition.

“They would do anything for me and my brother,” Eric says.

Eric became a star, showing off a swing that had been honed over years in tournaments and in the family’s backyard. College recruiting letters poured in. When Eric was 16, super-agent Scott Boras said he would be interested in someday representing Eric. With Eric in the lineup, American Heritage won state and national baseball championships in 2008, with Mike Jr. returning to his old school as a volunteer coach.

When that year’s baseball draft began, Eric was seen as the nation’s best high school player and the best position player overall. The Royals held the third overall pick, and general manager Dayton Moore had noticed something about the left-handed kid from Florida.

“He throws easy, fields easy. His swing is easy. He did things very easy,” Moore says now. “There’s just a lot of naturalness to his game.”

The family was together on draft day. Mike Jr., who played some baseball in college but says he never pursued a pro career, transferred from Florida State to Broward Community College, partly, he says, so he could be with his brother as the draft approached.

The phone rang. Kansas City was calling. Eric was the Royals’ pick at No. 3. The work had paid off.

“It’s very rewarding, especially for my parents,” says Mike Jr., 25, who now trades equities and funds in Miami. “They sacrificed everything, and to see that pay off for them is very satisfying.”

• • •

Two months later, Eric Hosmer and Boras agreed with the Royals on a contract that included a $6 million signing bonus, and Hosmer joined the Royals’ minor-league system. That’s where he faced something his parents couldn’t shield him from.

Hosmer hit .241 with six homers in his first full season of pro baseball. Maybe an injured pinkie finger was affecting his swing. Maybe he was adjusting more slowly than expected to pro baseball and using a wood bat. Or maybe the kid just wasn’t what the organization thought he’d be. Maybe he was one more draft-day flop in a long line of them.

“A tough year,” Hosmer says now of the 2009 season.

As Eric, then 19, struggled, his family watched with concern.

“He didn’t say too much at first,” Mike Sr. says.

When he did, Hosmer told his parents that he could stand in the on-deck circle and see only a blur of a scoreboard. As the ball approached during an at-bat, there seemed to be a halo around it. He was diagnosed with astigmatism, a vision problem in which the cornea is oval instead of round. He underwent corrective laser surgery and, after a week, returned to Delaware to rejoin the Class A Wilmington Blue Rocks.

During his first at-bat with sharpened vision, Hosmer laced a triple, sending a wave of relief through the Royals’ organization and into south Florida.

“I was ecstatic,” Mike Sr. says. “He said (the difference) was incredible. It was like being high-def.”

Hosmer finished the next season with a .338 average and 20 homers in Wilmington and Class AA Northwest Arkansas. There was a chance he might start the 2011 season in the majors, but the Royals sent him to Class AAA Omaha after spring training.

Then, on May 5, the Storm Chasers were taking batting practice before a game in Albuquerque, N.M. Manager Mike Jirschele called Hosmer into his office. As they had done nearly three years earlier, the Royals were calling.

“He was ready,” Moore says. “Built to play, ready to play.”

Hosmer would join the Royals the next night in Kansas City. He went into a hallway and made a call. His parents were on the other end.

“I told them we made it — not just I made it,” he says. “They’ve been there every step of the way for me.

“A total family effort.”

• • •

They lean forward and watch as Eric steps into the batter’s box at Kauffman Stadium. It’s a Friday in June. Mike Sr., 57, who retired as a lieutenant at Station 9 two years ago, wears a navy T-shirt with the words “Major League Firefighter” on the back. As she did years ago, Ileana, 52, lifts a video recorder and points it toward her son. Mike Jr. sits to his parents’ right.

“A baseball family,” the elder son says.

They watch as Eric strikes out on four pitches, eliciting a groan from the crowd and slumped shoulders from the Hosmer family. He’ll have slumps like the one he slogged through in June, and for a while, no one — not even the Royals — will know just how good he’ll be. For Eric’s part, he says he’ll remain confident, cocktail dresses online because he was raised to believe that with the right mindset, all things are possible.

“When I was 21,” Francoeur says, “I wish I had half the approach he has now.”

Two innings later, Eric steps back into the box. The family is watching as he takes ball one.

This is the family’s third trip to Kansas City since Eric was called up. They’ve also traveled to New York and Baltimore. A trip to Boston is planned for later this month. Mike Sr. and Ileana say they want to soak it all in, watch their boy while he’s still their boy, unmarried and at a time when it all seems new.

In many ways, Eric’s rookie season isn’t just his reward for the work of the past; it’s a reward for his family, too. They crossed obstacles years ago so that their sons wouldn’t have to. Eric is a product of his past, even as the Royals look only toward his future.

“Our life experiences spilled over,” Ileana says. “It was something that we really didn’t have to instill. It just happened. The way he acted — just, everything.”

On the third pitch, Eric rips a pitch deep toward left-center, and it bounces over the wall for a ground-rule double. The crowd erupts, and the family in Section 220 is smiling. Eric stops at second, big-league lights shining on his 21-year-old shoulders.

The family cheers, not only because it’s a proud moment — but also because it’s an example of how much effort sometimes goes into looking effortless.

“We’re here,” Mike Sr. says above the crowd noise, “living the dream with him.”

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