Where is esteban loaiza now

His arrest was part of an ongoing drug investigation by San Diego County police. The marriage bottomed out two years later as the couple began divorce proceedings before Rivera died in a plane crash in Nuevo Leon, Mexico on December 9, Drug Enforcement Administration special agent Karen Flowers has accused the All-Star twice of choosing another path in life ten years after throwing the final pitch in Major League Baseball.

As an all-star baseball player, Loisa lived the dreams of every boy. Today, society chooses to make him accountable and rob him of his freedom. I did. He finished his year career with a record of and achieved an earned run average of 4. It was nothing that bothered me. That's life. That's Ashley's life, to be with Loaiza, and by the way, they were a very good couple for a long time.

I was very happy, and Loaiza was always very respectful to Ashley as well. Varrasso also claimed Esposito made harassing and threatening phone calls to her throughout , and and that in July Loaiza met Esposito at a resort in Arizona while Varrasso was at a wedding in Mexico, adding that he invited his cousins to the resort and paid for everyone's airfare and hotel.

Referring to herself as a "private person," Varrasso declined comment for this story but in published a novel , Running for Yellow , a tale of a young lady's self-discovery during a relationship with a professional baseball player who is traded, after which the protagonist receives "a series of harassing phone calls from an anonymous woman claiming to be her husband's lover.

By , one relationship that had run its course was that of Loaiza and the Rangers. The team was on the verge of slipping into fourth place and was in need of a reboot. Texas had traded impending free agent Juan Gonzalez to Detroit after the season—but not before an incident that further signaled a deterioration between Loaiza and the club. Gonzalez, a character himself who, in , refused to play in the Hall of Fame Game in Cooperstown because his uniform pants were too big, accused Loaiza of stealing it and was going around "threatening to punch his lights out.

Most people did," the Ranger who requested anonymity says. Knowing Esteban, he wasn't doing it to flip people off. It was just him. But as the Rangers slipped into a descent that led to the free-agent signing of Alex Rodriguez after the season, late manager Johnny Oates gently approached then-GM Doug Melvin with a message: Look, I know we need pitching, but if you can move him, I'd be OK with it.

I'm not going to be critical even if you move him for nothing. The next series was in Anaheim, and in the early hours after Texas landed in Southern California from the Bay Area, Melvin finalized a swap to send the right-hander to Toronto for infielder Michael Young and a pitcher named Darwin Cubillan.

In an era before cellphones were ubiquitous, the Rangers couldn't locate Loaiza to inform him of the trade until the next morning. Before one key start when Loaiza was still in Texas, Eric Nadel, the Rangers' Hall of Fame radio broadcaster, conducted an interview with the pitcher that still makes Nadel chuckle today.

The whole meat will be on the grill,'" Nadel says. By the time he was in Toronto, Esposito had been paralyzed because of a benign tumor near her spine that was discovered while she was giving birth to Sage in ' She spent much of the next year in the hospital and rehabilitation center before she could walk again, leaving her mother and Esteban as Sage's primary caregivers. Between child care duties and the contentious divorce, Loaiza's personal life was a wave of emotions during his two-plus seasons with the Blue Jays.

But as a ballplayer, he had a different role to play, that of an inspiring figure to young players, especially those from Mexico. Like the time Loaiza invited Lopez and his wife to Tijuana for a two-day party celebrating the 50th wedding anniversary of Loaiza's parents, Luis and Maria.

Or when he sprung for an expensive steak dinner for the Lopezes when the Blue Jays were in Baltimore during Rodrigo's first season with the Orioles. To this day, Lopez says, he thinks about Loaiza every time he is in Chicago because, among other things, there was a taco joint Loaiza loved.

In the offseason, he and Ashley would spend time at their Southlake, Texas, home, hosting neighborhood Christmas and New Year's parties replete with piece mariachi bands in their living room.

When Loaiza would play in Arlington during the season, every now and again there would be parties with music blasting late into the night. It was just a rich neighbor who wants to be a good host. Loaiza immediately meshed with longtime White Sox pitching coach Don Cooper upon signing with Chicago as a free agent before the '03 season, but on the field, Cooper noticed one giant red flag: In Toronto the year before, Loaiza was more hittable than someone of his talent should have been.

Your stuff is too good to give up this many hits, Cooper told Loaiza. How the hell are you doing it? If you're ahead in the count and giving up that many hits, you're an ass, you're not very intelligent. If it's early in the count, we've got to look at the quality of your early pitches. Are they out when they're supposed to be in? Down when they're supposed to be up?

He threw two shutout innings in the All-Star Game. Crowds around the bullpen were noticeable, very noticeable. On the last day of the season, Sox ace Mark Buehrle volunteered to skip his start to allow Loaiza to go on short rest to give him the opportunity to tie Valenzuela's 21 victories.

Loaiza threw 7. Loaiza and the Sox were ecstatic. But the pitcher's idiosyncratic ways again emerged the following spring when the White Sox were mapping out their rotation. Out of respect for what Loaiza had done in '03, Cooper and new manager Ozzie Guillen asked whether he preferred to start on Opening Day or the home opener eight days later. Loaiza's response: I want both. Cooper explained that it wouldn't work because the number of days between the road and home openers didn't mesh with the rotation.

Loaiza countered by saying he could start on Opening Day, pitch a shorter relief stint a few days later and then come back to start the home opener. Though Loaiza was with a 4. And July 31, less than three weeks after the game, he was reunited with his All-Star manager, Joe Torre. Loaiza was dealt to the Yankees for Jose Contreras and cash, pitched 10 games six starts and was the losing pitcher in Game 5 of the epic American League Championship Series in which Boston erased a three-game deficit to stun the Yanks.

But while he finished with a 4. Only a day after his release, Loaiza started and earned a win over Seattle. According to court officials familiar with the case, Loaiza was convicted of reckless driving and given a three-year probationary sentence. He was always helpful for what we needed to do. He was a little quirky, but you can say that with a lot of people. The paint was starting to dry. You were starting to capture the full portrait of the guy.

When he got to Oakland, it got stranger. Sidelined by neck and knee injuries, Loaiza was waived the following season and scooped up by the Dodgers, only to be released in mid, when a phenom named Clayton Kershaw replaced him in the Los Angeles rotation.

He was just a knucklehead guy with some decent stuff upon occasion. It's sad. In so many ways, most of them not known to many around him during this time, Loaiza was extremely vulnerable. Ovations on the field now silenced, Loaiza, still a hero in Mexico, stepped into another kind of spotlight with a relationship to Mexican American pop star Jenni Rivera. They met at one of her concerts. She was the top-selling artist in regional Mexican music and referred to by the New York Times and Billboard as one of the biggest stars in the genre.

His career victories ranked second in baseball history by a Mexican-born pitcher behind Valenzuela's —a mark that stands today.

Together, they were national royalty. For Loaiza's baseball friends from Mexico, it was a heady time whenever they'd encounter him, especially if he happened to be with Rivera, who was all over the charts with hit songs such as "De Contrabando" and "Culpable o Inocente. She was very nice. Lopez scored an invitation to the Loaiza-Rivera wedding, but because it was in September and Lopez was pitching for the Diamondbacks, he had to pass. He was pulled over, and after dogs scented drugs in his Mercedes SUV, the cops obtained a search warrant for the house where Loaiza was headed, where they found 20 packages of cocaine in a Nissan parked in the garage.

Loaiza admitted in a plea agreement that he transferred the drugs from one vehicle to the other. Loaiza declined an interview request for the story. Since he was born in Tijuana, he is also set to be deported to Mexico after serving his prison sentence. Contact The Author Name required. Email required. Comment required. May 28, pm Updated May 29, am.