Mauricio Dubón: A dream worth chasing

By Mark Bowman, Braves.com

ATLANTA — Six days.

That’s all the time it took to change Mauricio Dubón’s life.

Dubón was a 15-year-old growing up in Honduras in 2010 when Ben Ritchey and his father, Andy, arrived with a church group from California to conduct baseball clinics.

Among hundreds of children participating, Dubón approached Ben with an extraordinary question.

“Can you take me back with you?”

By the end of the week, that’s exactly what happened.

Dubón’s biological mother, Jeannette Dobaldo, believed her son’s baseball dreams would have a better chance in the United States. Andy and Sandy Ritchey agreed to welcome him into their Sacramento home.

Six days after the boys met, Dubón left Honduras for California.

Sixteen years later, the gamble has produced a remarkable baseball career.

Dubón is the only active major league player born and raised in Honduras, a two-time Gold Glove winner, a 2022 World Series champion with Houston and now a valuable member of the Atlanta Braves.

“It’s an amazing story,” Sandy Ritchey said. “He cried and cried when he first came. He was homesick. He was just this scrawny little 15-year-old. But he had a dream, and he made that dream happen.”

Dubón spent the summer of 2010 playing baseball in California before returning to Honduras for the school year. When he came back to Sacramento the following summer, Ben Ritchey barely recognized the player he’d become.

“He really wasn’t very good at first,” Ritchey said. “I mean, he was OK. Then he went back to Honduras, and he must have really trained and put his head down to get better. He came back that next year, and he was truly different.”

Dubón attended Capital Christian High School, where his defensive ability and rapidly improving bat began attracting scouts.

The Boston Red Sox eventually selected him in the 26th round of the 2013 MLB Draft.

Some encouraged Dubón to turn down the $70,000 signing bonus and attend junior college instead.

He wasn’t interested.

“I knew if I stayed in Honduras, I would not be able to do what I wanted to do,” Dubón said. “I felt like this was my chance to come here. They trusted me and I trusted them.”

He had already taken a much greater gamble by leaving his mother, friends and country behind.

“He’d say, ‘I’m afraid to go back to Honduras. This has got to work for me,’” Sandy Ritchey said. “I said, ‘It’s going to work for you.’ I never told him it wouldn’t.”

It did.

Milwaukee promoted Dubón to the majors in 2019. His first phone call was to Sandy Ritchey. His second was to Dobaldo, the mother who had made the difficult decision nine years earlier to let her teenage son leave Honduras with a family she had just met.

Dobaldo immediately boarded a plane and traveled to Pittsburgh to watch her son make his major league debut.

Dubón has since built his reputation on defensive versatility. He won American League Gold Gloves as a utility player in 2023 and 2025 and earned a World Series ring with Houston in 2022.

But his journey to the majors remains rooted in two families — one in Honduras willing to let him go and another in California willing to take him in.

“I’m just so proud of him,” Sandy Ritchey said. “When he was in high school, he said, ‘I want to make it big.’ I told him, ‘You’re going to make it big and regardless of what happens, you’ll always be my son.’”

Dubón did make it big.

And he hasn’t forgotten all the people who helped him get there.

“It’s been pretty cool having everybody along the way,” he said.