SURPRISE, Arizona — It didn’t matter that they were still in elementary school. Delino and Diamond DeShields had put in the necessary practice at home, spending hours and hours in the backyard and on youth league teams, and they decided it was time: they were going pro, and they needed to start writing up contracts.
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“It was like five years and 400 million dollars, or something obnoxious,” Delino says with a laugh. “You gotta set the bar high, though. We knew we were gifted and talented, and we just wanted to help each other get to where we wanted to be.”
“Yeah, like trillion-dollar contracts,” Diamond says, raising that bar even higher.
The siblings both made good on their shared quest to become professional athletes, even if they had to negotiate down from the initial financial demands of their childhood. Delino was drafted eighth overall by the Astros in the 2010 MLB draft and — after one season at North Carolina, two in Tennessee, and one playing overseas in Turkey — Diamond was chosen by the Chicago Sky with the third pick in the 2018 WNBA draft.
But for both kids, there was some question as to which sport they would play professionally. Delino would go on to be a star running back in high school, and Diamond’s childhood dream was to follow in her dad’s footsteps and play baseball.
“Probably the Mariners, since Ichiro is my all-time favorite player,” she suggests. “But I don’t remember exactly which team.”
Like his kids, the elder Delino DeShields’ path to professional sports was not clear-cut. After signing a letter of intent to play college basketball at Villanova, he preceded his children in becoming a first-round pick, going to the Montreal Expos with the 12th overall pick of the 1987 MLB draft. He opted to take the signing bonus and pursue baseball. By the time he retired in 2002, he had played for the Expos, Dodgers, Cardinals, Orioles and Cubs. He had also given his eldest son ten years of hanging out in big-league clubhouses with Dad before it was time to write out a home-made contract and start chasing his own dream.
“It was really more about (Delino Jr.) growing up,” says Diamond of those early years. “Like, my experience was: being in the batting cages with him, going to baseball practice with him, traveling across America to his tournaments, carrying his baseball bag after his games, being in our mom’s RV in between games and the tournaments with him and all of his teammates. It was really just – I was living in his world for most of our childhood until baseball really kinda kicked up a notch, and then he was not in the house as much. But it was a lot of fun, you know?
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“It wasn’t frustrating, because I felt like I really shared his success. When he won, I felt like I won, too.”
“Very strong support system,” says Delino Jr, who also has a younger brother D’Angelo and younger sister Denim. “We were just always there for each other, never competed against each other, never thought one was better than the other. My sister wanted to go outside and hoop? We’d go outside and hoop. I wanted to hit in the cage, she’d flip me balls in the cage.”
Meanwhile, with all those years of big-league experience, it would have been easy for Delino Sr. to become an overbearing coach-parent in the stands at his eldest son’s games. But the elder Delino says he did his best to stay as hands-off as possible.
Well, sort of.
“Actually, I did end up coaching his travel ball team,” says DelinoSr., who now works as the first base coach of the Cincinnati Reds. “I was helping. I’d be at practices, of course, (but) they had a head coach.”
Delino DeShields works with youth baseball players during spring training at Dick’s Sporting Goods, showing off Easton bats andHitTrax hitting cages.
As Delino moved out of travel ball and into baseball (and football) games at Woodward Academy in the Atlanta suburbs, the dynamic began to shift for Diamond, who was in middle school. Withno more travel ball family trips, Diamond says it was her turn to start considering her athletic future.
“I was kind of faced with, ‘Alright, Diamond’s in sports now, what is she gonna do?’,” she says. “And I was like ‘Well …sh*t. I like baseball, obviously, but I can’t play anymore because I’m a giirrl‘,” she says, slightly dragging out the last word with a hint of sarcasm.
“So that’s when I started softball. And I was really good at softball, but long-term, I was like ‘I can’t really make a living doing this.’ I ran track, but same thing, and I was like ‘I don’t really love it,’ so I just kind of fell into basketball, took that to another level and committed to it, and that’s really where my journey started.”
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It didn’t take long for that journey to prove successful; she switched schools to nearby Norcross High School and led the girls’ basketball team to three state championships. Meanwhile,Delino — who had been recruited by both Georgia and Ole Miss to play running back — decided to follow his dad’s path and set his sights on baseball.
“I wanted to go to college to play football,” Delino says. “But I let it be known to everybody that I didn’t want to pursue that at the next level above that. So baseball just kinda was the obvious choice after coming up with that conclusion. Like, I don’t want to play in the NFL, so baseball was my path.”
Why not play in the NFL?
“Longevity,” DeShields says with a shrug. “Like, if I played quarterback, it might be a little different, but I played running back. That’s a beating every day. You line up against 280-to-320-pound dudes every day, and you get smacked. College would have been fun for the experience, but I didn’t want to pursue it past that, and I didn’t want to take that opportunity away from somebody else that wanted to have dreams or pursuits to go into the NFL.”
The decision was a relief to his dad.
“I just had to let him get football out of his system,” says Delino Sr. “Honestly, it was a trying time for me. I just held my breath through all of that and hoped that he didn’t get hurt. Ultimately, if he had chosen football, we would have supported him either way, but I always believed in my heart that baseball was going to be (it) … A lot of parents steer their kids and try to control their destiny, and I knew I couldn’t that. There would have been some pushback if I’d tried to say ‘Hey, you’re not going to play football!’ that wouldn’t have been good for us.”
Another thing Delino Sr. says he tried not to force was giving of his kids any unwanted coaching as they pursued the sports in which he had excelled.
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“I don’t want to say he wasn’t involved, because when I decided to play basketball, it was kind of like, I went off on my own,” says Diamond. “My dad’s role in all of that was kind of just being a supporter. He wasn’t at every one of my tournaments, and he wasn’t in the gym with me, because at that point he had started his coaching career as well. But he was a very good supporter, and kind of just did what a parent should do when their child decides that they want to play a sport.”
“When we talk about the game now,” Delino Sr. says of conversations with his son, “I tell him that the last thing I want him to tell a coach is ‘This is what my dad told me.’ You’ve got great coaches, and you have to have that bond with your coaches. You have to be able to communicate with your coaches; that’s very important, and the last thing that — I’m telling him from personal experience now — the last thing I want to hear from one of my players is ‘This is what my dad told me’. So that’s something that I made him aware of early, but I think he’s done a good job of it.”
Delino Jr. suggests that his dad might be giving him too much credit.
“My dad played a long time in the big leagues, so I had trouble listening to other people who didn’t play in the big leagues,” Delino says with a half-grimace. “I mean, I would hear them, but at the same time, I’d be like ‘I’m gonna go ask my dad about it, because I feel like he would know better than you’. It wasn’t really until I got drafted that I actually started opening my ears, really, to other people. My dad was always a phone call away if I never needed anything, so I was in a unique situation to have that so convenient. I was fortunate for that. But obviously, when you get to this level, you want to pick everybody’s brain.”
While Delino was learning to listen to his new coaches in the Astros organization, Diamond was moving up as well. She started her basketball career at North Carolina University, but though it cost her a year of eligibility, she transferred. 2015 was a big season for the DeShields family: Delino was selected by the Rangers in the Rule 5 draft, and Diamond played her first game as a member of the Lady Volunteers of Tennessee University, the same school where her mom had been an All-American heptathlete.
That’s right; Delino Sr., Delino Jr. and Diamond weren’t the only members of the family who had to choose what sport to play. Tisha DeShields just happened to choose eight: 100-meter hurdles, high jump, shot put, 200-meter sprint, long jump, javelin throw and 800-meter run.
But while Delino Jr. has always had his dad to call for advice about baseball, Diamond says she has naturally been more independent.
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“That’s never been my relationship with my parents in regards to what I do (in sports),” she says. “I think that’s kind of the difference between my brother and I. When he’s going through things, he almost always calls on my dad and is able to talk with him and get advice and do that whole thing. For me, I don’t use my relationship with any of them for what I go through as an athlete, and I’ve kind of had to find resources outside my family to help guide me and seek advice through other channels and other people.”
That independence likely served her well after she left the University of Tennessee and chose to play her first season of professional basketball with the Cukurova Basketbol Mersin in Turkey.
“A lot of people ask, first thing, ‘Did you feel safe?’ and my answer is always like ‘Nowhere is safe! We’re not even safe here in America. We paint over everything with this ideal image of life and what it should look like, but it’s not safe anywhere.’ However, when I was in Turkey, I really enjoyed myself. I lived on the border of the Mediterranean Sea; I lived on the coast, I lived on the water. Every day I was able to see palm trees and see the water, and it was good weather, good food. So my experience in Turkey was really nice. There’s a political climate everywhere that evokes some sort of danger, but that’s just the reality of the world we live in.”
Her 17.8 points per game in Turkey were enough to convince the Chicago Sky. They took her with the third overall pick in the 2018 draft. As fate would have it, while she was in Chicago signing with the Sky, Delino and the Rangers were playing the White Sox.
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But if her dream to play professional sports has come true, her “trillion dollars” contract is still a ways off. After her rookie season with the Sky, Diamond returned overseas to try to make ends meet; first to Turkey, then to China, then back home.
“The entire culture of overseas basketball (is) very unreliable,” Diamond explains. “People switch teams a lot, teams fold, teams lose money, teams don’t have money, teams pay people late. So there’s a lot of that that goes on, and you just always have to be ready to up and move to another country or to another team, or back home. In my case, it was back home. I was like ‘Yeah, I’m done for this season; (I’ll) try again next season.”
Meanwhile, Delino is the incumbent in center field for the Rangers as he hopes to rebound from a 2018 season that was derailed early when he broke his hamate bone. Delino Sr. says that with every passing year, his son needs less guidance on the field.
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“We talk about the game in general,” Delino Sr. says of those conversations. “It seems like the older that he gets — I’ve always told him that he needs to get to a point where he’s his own best coach. And that’s in all aspects of the game, so you know, I’m trying to just have more of those father-son talks of late. Just talk about ‘How you doin’, how’s the dog?’ you know? Just father-son stuff, but we do talk about the whole game.”
With the serious portion of our interview over, I tell Delino Sr. that I have one last question. What does he think of Delino’s bright blue hair this season?
He co*cks his head to one side, holds up a thumbs-down sign, and walks away, a la James-Harden-dot-gif, before giving a smile and wink.
Sometimes dads just can’t help but be dads.
(Source photos by Getty Images)
