Helping others instilled in Pablo López from early age

MINNEAPOLIS -- It’s not that Pablo López and his wife, Kaylee, were necessarily looking to add another dog to their little family, but when they attended an open house held by Ruff Start Rescue meant to find homes for a litter of 12 puppies from a rescued mother dog, they found that one of the little guys was named Pablo.

“He's a cute little thing,” López said. “We held him, we talked about it and then we told ourselves, ‘It's destiny! His name is Pablo!’ So we filled out the application.”

Puppy Pablo is now named “Bosco,” after the pet bear in the show “Avatar: The Last Airbender,” of which López is a big fan. And the moral of the story seems to be this, then: Do good in the community, and you’ll be rewarded with puppies.

Not that López has ever needed the extra motivation.

Growing up in Venezuela as the son of two doctors, López remembered how his father, Danny -- a general practitioner and internist -- and his mother, Agnedis -- a pathologist -- poured their lives into service. His grandmother -- his mom’s mom -- was a leading figure in the community church and had an open door, especially when it came time for her Christmas Eve feast.

Danny was the go-to who was always available in the neighborhood for anyone who needed health-related guidance. Agnedis was always at her microscope, looking at samples, explaining to Pablo how her work aimed to help those no longer on Earth by giving closure to their families and relieving the unknown. Neither is around anymore -- but their impact firmly guides Pablo.

“Just seeing how my dad was just like, that's his duty, that's what he signed up for. That's what he wanted to do,” López said. “And then so many more little things like that within what they did. You know how doctors are. They're never thinking about themselves. They're always thinking about other people.”

That’s what he and Kaylee think about, too, as they navigate their new-ish life in Minnesota, where the López family has dove in headfirst with three local organizations -- Ruff Start, Project Success and Children’s Minnesota -- as part of the service they hold core to their beliefs.

So much so, in fact, that when López was traded from the Marlins ahead of the 2023 season, his first communication with the Twins’ organization was to ask for the contact information of their point person for community relations.

“It was astonishing to get his phone call,” said Kristin Rortvedt, executive director of the Twins Community Fund. “[Communications vice president] Dustin Morse had texted me and said, ‘Just want you to know that Pablo López asked for your number.’ And literally two minutes after Dustin texted me, Pablo called me and introduced himself and was gracious and kind and just said, ‘Any day that I’m not pitching, I'm yours.’”

Those three organizations are the ones that benefit from proceeds from the Twins’ special “Pablo Day” ticket package, as hand-picked by Pablo and Kaylee López, lining up with their priorities of healthcare, education and animal rescue.

López said the magnitude of his platform as a professional baseball player first struck him when he was a 20-year-old in Class A with the Clinton LumberKings as part of the Marlins’ organization. The club hosted a baseball clinic for local kids, and he saw how even simple engagement like teaching them how to throw and hit meant a good deal to them.

So, from the “Pablo Day” package to the “Pickleball for Pets” event that the López family hosted in Miami last November, they’ve simply been looking to take advantage of the increasingly prominent platform they’ve found over the years as López has established himself in the Majors.

“The kid experts can't deliver the type of care that our families have come to expect without the generosity of our donor community,” said Kayla Shafer, manager of child life, music therapy and bereavement services at Children’s Minnesota. “Donations like these provided through Pablo Day ensure that kids continue to receive essential wraparound services that never appear on a patient's bill.”

It is, of course, in those hospital settings where López thrives the most, considering that’s where his charitable roots and influences have always been. And Rortvedt will never forget watching López’s first visit to Children’s Minnesota to meet pediatric patients, and in particular, an interaction with a Spanish-speaking child.

“To see that child's wall come down the second that Pablo started speaking to him in Spanish was like, ‘Oh, here's a person who understands me, who connects with me,’” Rortvedt said. “He just brought the hugest smile to that little boy's face.”

Through all this, López is also a deeply worldly and curious person, the kind who seeks out flight simulators on off-days, flies a photographic drone around cities on road trips and is the first to ask questions of people with novel life experiences.

So, of course, he has what he calls a “long-shot” direction in mind with all this work.

Being from Venezuela and having gone through the decision to sign with a Major League team as a teenager (in his case, forgoing the opportunity to go to medical school and follow in his parents’ footsteps), he knows how education often ends up overlooked for those athletes who are establishing a new life in the United States.

If there’s some way to create an educational backdrop for those athletes, to better set them up for life outside baseball, López wants to be part of that, too.

“Especially when you're 16, 17 years old, you come to a whole new country and a whole new culture, having some background with education can make that a lot easier to connect with people, to get the right message across, to connect with the community,” López said. “So I do see myself trying, in the future, to really try to make that change happen.”

And already, López has often been that agent of change.