Fernandez’s life a tale of the American Dream

Everything about Jose Fernandez radiated hope.

Those brown eyes that had seen so much but shined so bright. The electric arm. The contagious smile. The enthusiastic way he rooted for his teammates. The passion he had for his family, for his sport, for his adopted country. And most recently, the excitement he shared with all of us on Instagram, where he announced he would soon become a father.

That hope left us early Sunday morning. Fernandez, just 24 years old, was one of three men who died when a 32-foot boat overturned on a jetty off Miami Beach. And it is a gut-wrenching loss for Fernandez’s family, for his girlfriend and unborn child, for the Marlins and for the entire baseball world.

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It is also an incomprehensible ending to what had been one of the game’s more uplifting stories.

Fernandez was pure joy personified, and he never shied from his goal of becoming one of the game’s all-time greats.

“I think that what makes a player good is not out there on the field; it’s who he is as a person,” Fernandez said in 2013, the season he was named National League Rookie of the Year at the age of 20. “I know where I came from, and I know what I want.”

Fernandez and his family made three unsuccessful attempts to flee his native Cuba when he was a child, each resulting in a prison stay in which, he would say, he was treated “like an animal.” Finally, on …

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