How an ankle injury helped a young Adrián Beltré become a Hall of Famer
LOS ANGELES — Adrián Beltré was considered a teenage prodigy when he signed with the Dodgers for $23,000 in 1994, but there was little about his early career, marred by a birth-certificate issue and his slow recovery from a botched appendectomy in the Dominican Republic, which screamed "surefire Hall of Famer."
Beltré was a good-but-not-yet-great player during his first five big league seasons in Los Angeles, where he hit .262 with a .748 on-base-plus-slugging percentage and averaged just 16 homers and 65 RBIs a season from 1999-2003.
The Dodgers nearly lost Beltré to free agency in 2000 when a Major League Baseball investigation found they had signed him before his 16th birthday, and Beltré missed the first six weeks of 2001 after undergoing surgery to close a wound in
