Evan Gattis is more than just a baseball player. Right now, he is a terrific story of redemption and perseverance masquerading as a baseball player, an enormous man nicknamed El Oso Blanco – the White Bear – during a winter league stint in Venezuela.
The hulking frame, the cool nickname, everything down to the lack of batting gloves and wristbands, Evan Gattis is a hacky screenwriters dream, even more-so now that he is playing baseball at an uncommonly high level.
If Evan Gattis continues playing baseball as he’s played for the first two plus months of his big league career, he’ll no longer be a story first and a baseball player second. But for now, he is the subject of feature-length profiles everywhere he goes. His rich backstory is prime for the profiling (here are two such profiles, by Erika Gilbert of the National Post and Emma Span for Sports On Earth) but his numbers are beginning to eclipse the story of the troubled/wandering soul who made his way back to baseball after years away from the game.
