ESPN’s broadcast of Sunday Night Baseball between the Boston Red Sox and the Los Angeles Dodgers featured an in-game interview with Red Sox outfielder Ceddanne Rafaela. During the interview, the broadcast team turned the conversation to Rafaela’s past as a star of the Little League World Series.
Many fans may not remember that Rafaela, a second-year outfielder amid his best MLB season to date, first made waves to the national baseball audience in the Little League World Series playing for his hometown team of Willemstad, Curacao in 2012.
Since ESPN has the archives of all of the old LLWS clips as the broadcast host of the yearly tournament, the Sunday Night Baseball broadcast team showed an old clip of Rafaela during their in-game interview with him.
“I don’t know if you remember this Ceddanne,” said ESPN play-by-play man Karl Ravech. “But you also did like a backflip, remember that?”
“Yes, yes I do,” replied Rafaela.
“Can you still do that,” asked Ravech.
“Yes, sometimes after I finish a workout I do it a couple of times.”
How it started ➡️ how it’s going with Ceddanne Rafaela 🤩 pic.twitter.com/KHRiWkeWrv
— ESPN (@espn) July 21, 2024
Rafaela’s time in the LLWS wasn’t an overly long one. Curacao went just 2-2 in the event, eventually getting eliminated in Round 3 of the International loser’s bracket to Mexico. Interestingly enough, Rafaela didn’t even play that well in the event, recording just one hit in nine at-bats.
Despite this, Rafaela ended up making it to the major leagues. So the growth from then to now for the Red Sox star certainly seems to have been quite significant.
