Sunny view helps Pena help Rays

Carlos Pena hit three home runs and drove in six runs in the Rays' ALCS win over his hometown Red Sox. AP

A few minutes of chatting with 30-year-old Rays first baseman Carlos Peña would be enough to make even the least cynical person wonder: is this guy for real? Can anyone -- especially a multi-millionaire professional baseball player -- truly be this open, this upbeat, this nice? There must be another side to this man, moments when the darkness creeps in -- mustn't there?

There is not, and there are not, insist those who know him best. Peña's ceaseless optimism, they say, is not just some superficial strategy that he picked up from one of the self-help books that he devours, or from one of those posters that you can buy from SkyMall that depicts, say, a wave crashing on a boulder above a word like PERSEVERANCE. It's simply how he is. "He doesn't just talk about it. He lives it 24 hours a day," says teammate Rocco Baldelli. "That's how he always is. You're never going to find him being down. You don't even see him in just an OK mood. He's always above that. It's infectious."

"He's a pretty magic dude. Seriously," says rookie center fielder Fernando Perez. "We always joke that he would be our pick to host, like, a kid's show on Nickelodeon. He's so nice it catches you off-guard sometimes."

"Carlos doesn't know what the word 'negative' means," says Dave Kazanjian, 47, who first met Peña 14 years ago when Peña and his teammates came into Kazanjian's sporting goods store -- Whirlaway Sports Center, in Methuen, Mass. -- to be outfitted for spikes. "It doesn't exist in his world."

That outlook can be traced partly to nature, and partly to the example set for him by his parents, Felipe and Mery, who emigrated with their family to the United States from the Dominican Republic in the summer of 1992, when Carlos, the oldest of four siblings, was 14. The Peñas' search for a better life led them to settle in Haverhill, Mass. Even as Felipe and Mery, who had worked in their native country as a mechanical engineer and a teacher, respectively,were forced to take jobs upon arriving in the U.S. at a waste treatment center and a nursing home in order to make ends meet, they refused to allow themselves or their children to focus on anything but life's gifts.

That focus was reinforced for Carlos through regular hours-long discussions he had in his late teens with Kazanjian at his store. Kazanjian would sit on the counter, and Peña would stand, and the two would talk about how Peña could best handle the pressures he would face as a rising baseball star. "He'd ask me questions about stuff, about life," Kazanjian recalls. "In the early years, I did a lot of the teaching, but in the latter years I've learned a lot from him, too."

Peña came to view Kazanjian as something of a big brother, and when he hit his first professional home run, the ball went to his father, but the bat went to Kazanjian.

Baldelli, 27, says that Peña's personality has had a big impact on the Rays' stunning ascension to the World Series, and on Baldelli's personal effort to manage his mitochondrial disease, a disorder that causes him to experience muscular fatigue so debilitating that he at one point contemplated retirement. (Baldelli didn't play this season until August 10, but has contributed one home run and five RBIs in 14 at-bats so far in these playoffs). "I had some days when I was pretty depressed, and things weren't really looking up for me," Baldelli says. "When I was down, he'd always include me and make me feel like I was involved somehow, even though I wasn't doing much -- just sitting on the bench. In the absence of negativity, a lot of good things happen. You don't want to be negative when you're even around the guy. He kind of eliminates that altogether. He almost has an aura about him."

Peña's aura wouldn't be anywhere near the Rays' clubhouse, however, if he lacked a bat that has recently proven to be as Hobbesian (in a Roy sense) as his worldview is not (in a Thomas sense). The Texas Rangers made him the tenth overall pick out of Northeastern University in the 1998 draft, but he was a quantifiable bust for the first nine years of his professional career, a rollercoaster that was marked by such unpredictable highs (27 home runs with the Tigers in 2004) and lows (just 33 at bats with the Red Sox in '06) that a man of lesser character would have been tempted to quit.

In fact, Peña says that he could have stomached it had his career ended after that abortive stint in Boston, which is just thirty miles south of Haverhill. "When I got to this country, I remember playing in my backyard and hitting balls off the houses in the neighborhood," he says. "I'm thinking, Wow, there goes a ball over the Green Monster, there's one the other way.... Then, when I had the great fortune of playing with the Red Sox in '06, for a little bit, I even hit a walkoff home run" -- his only homer of the season, a game-winner at Fenway Park against the White Sox. "I kept saying, this is a dream that's come true for me, because it was."