The Seam · September 22, 2026
The Other Side of the Family
He is a Brooklyn kid from a Brooklyn basketball family — Stephon Marbury and Sebastian Telfair are cousins on his mother's side — and he is the first of them to go professional at his father's game. To do it he had to leave Brooklyn at fifteen. He reached the major leagues on September 11, at 21, having never played a game above Double-A.
Josue De Paula · By Andy Whetstone · Los Angeles Dodgers
The year the city closed, Josue De Paula was fifteen and there was nowhere in New York to play.
"I wanted to play ball," he told Yahoo Sports in February. "There was no shot of playing ball in New York, so my dad was like, 'You want to go play ball? I'm going to send you down there.'"
Down there was Santo Domingo, his father's country. He went in 2020, moved in with his paternal uncles, and enrolled at El Niche Baseball Academy — the place that had already sent Juan Soto and Elly De La Cruz into the major leagues, and where De Paula lived among about thirty-five boys chasing the same thing.
"Each (room) had like three bunk beds in it, some of them had four," he said.
On January 15, 2022, the Dodgers signed him — for $397,500, or $400,000, depending on which account you read.
The part that makes it a Brooklyn story is who he left behind.
On his mother's side, De Paula is kin to Stephon Marbury and Sebastian Telfair — two Coney Island point guards, two of the most famous high school basketball players New York ever produced. Accounts differ on the degree: second cousin by most of them, a step nearer by Yahoo's, which has his mother as Marbury's cousin. Telfair went thirteenth overall in the 2004 NBA draft out of Abraham Lincoln High, the year before De Paula was born.
"I saw him a lot when I was younger," De Paula said of Marbury. "It was cool knowing that I have some NBA genes in the family."
By the reporting on his family, he is the first on that side to go professional in baseball. His father is Dominican. His mother's people play basketball. He picked his father's game — and then discovered that the city that had made two NBA guards out of his own bloodline had no field for him.
So he got on a plane.
What he built down there, and at four minor-league stops since, is a strike zone.
This season at Double-A Tulsa: 124 games, .303/.401/.547, 27 home runs, 31 stolen bases, and 81 walks against 87 strikeouts. Ten games into the major leagues, through Monday, September 21: 38 plate appearances, .286/.474/.500, three doubles, a home run — and ten walks against four strikeouts.
Add the two rows. Ninety-one walks. Ninety-one strikeouts. Six hundred and twenty-six plate appearances at two levels, at 21 years old.
Asked in February how he handles a major-league at-bat, the most disciplined young bat in the organization said this:
"I have no thoughts when I go up there. I just let everything flow. I feel like the less I think up there and let everything happen, the better it gets."
Whatever the ninety-one and the ninety-one are, they aren't a man counting. MLB.com, writing on September 15, noted that his plate approach has drawn comparisons to Juan Soto's — which, given where he learned it, is less a comparison than a return address.
On Friday, September 11, at loanDepot park in Miami, he started at designated hitter and batted seventh, and the Dodgers won 6-2. He was 0-for-3 with a walk. MLB.com noted he was the first position-player prospect promoted straight from Double-A Tulsa in Andrew Friedman's tenure running the club.
He had been sitting in front of his locker in Tulsa when the manager of the Dodgers' Double-A team called him into the office.
"It was not something I was expecting," he told Dodger Blue the next day. "I was sitting in front of my locker and [Tulsa manager Eric Wedge] called me in his office and basically told me, 'Hey, we're going to get you on a flight tomorrow. You're going to be with the big boys.' I was in disbelief."
"I literally was like, 'What? I'm going up where?'"
The glove is the problem, and nobody in the organization pretends otherwise.
He has been worked on by people who would know. Yahoo Sports reported in September that he has had help from Jason Heyward, a special assistant with the club and a five-time Gold Glove winner, on his glovework. Mookie Betts has given him pointers on shagging fly balls. Dave Roberts, who played ten years in big-league outfields, keeps after him about details. Friedman, speaking in February, framed it as a habit rather than a skill: "Like really stressing the importance of defense. Really, it's one thing to stress it, it's another to have deliberate work and being consistent with it."
De Paula has heard the criticism too, and he answers in the voice of a 21-year-old.
"I know that's a big area of improvement for me. I know I got a lot of hate on it," he said this month. "I'm that type: if I get hate on it, I'm going to focus on it more. So I'm gonna shut a lot of people up with my defense very soon."
Most of his major-league at-bats have come at designated hitter.
This column runs on feverbaseball.com.
Feverbaseball's farm file carries a flag marking players worth writing about in this column. Exactly one name in the whole file carries it, and it is his. The engine has never measured him. Not once since he signed.
The reason is a line the site draws and doesn't cross. Exit velocities exist where the ballparks are wired for them — the major leagues and Triple-A — and nowhere below. De Paula spent this season at Double-A Tulsa and last season climbing toward it. There was never going to be a percentile on him, because there was never a population to hold one.
So the file has carried him as a name and not a number, and it's been right to. His player page says so in its own words, as of its September 21 stamp: "The engine hasn't placed him on a board — not a hold, just a lack of sample, with 80 balls in play as the threshold." That is true of him now, eleven days into a major-league career, short of eighty tracked balls in a league the engine does read.
Those two states look identical from outside. A hitter short of eighty where the engine measures is a hitter the number is coming for — wait six weeks, or wait for April. A hitter playing where it measures nothing isn't waiting on anything. No amount of time produces a Double-A percentile. The first is a sample problem. The second is a map.
From the day he signed until September 11, De Paula was the second. Now he is the first.
Everyone else has a number on him — Baseball America fourth, MLB Pipeline first among outfielders in its August update, FanGraphs sixteenth. This instrument has a blank. Its own watch put his name forward and it has had nothing to add about him — the one hitter in its file it can see the outline of and has never been able to weigh.
On the site's card rack, as of September 21, his flagship is a 2025 Bowman Draft Final at $166 for a PSA 10 across 57 recent sales. That is the highest graded price on the rack among the three men who debuted this month, on the thinnest sale count. Fifty-seven sales is a thin row carrying a heavy number, on a hitter nobody here has measured. The market isn't doing the engine's job badly. It is doing a different job — pricing where a career is going, which is the only question a card has ever been able to ask.
Six games are left in the regular season, and the Dodgers clinched their division a while ago, so the ten games he has played were played with the pressure off in a way almost no debut ever is.
"At the end of the day, I love competing, so whoever's on the mound, I'm looking to take their head off," he said.
He is 21. He has ninety-one walks and ninety-one strikeouts, a glove he has promised to fix, and a major-league locker in the city his family left New York to reach by way of Santo Domingo.
Brooklyn had no field for him. He went and found one.