Hands-On Mora Helps Keep Family Running

The Orioles' Melvin Mora is an active father in raising six children, including quintuplets, with his wife. (By Marc Serota -- Getty Images)

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla., March 10 -- Of course all eight of them are staying together in the two-bedroom apartment Baltimore Orioles third baseman Melvin Mora leased for spring training. Mora seems surprised at the suggestion there could be any other arrangement. There are a couple of beds, a couple of queen-size air mattresses, a sofa. There is plenty of room. This, after all, is his family.

And just after the first pitch of Saturday's spring training game against the St. Louis Cardinals, they all arrived at the ballpark. A pack of Moras spilled out of both sides of a large sport-utility vehicle, starting with Mora's wife, Gisel, and eldest daughter Tatiana, 10.

They were followed by the quintuplets. Genesis, Rebekah and Jada wore identical red sunglasses, pigtails secured with red beads, red halter tops, floral skirts and shiny gold shoes. Christian and Matthew sported button-down red shirts with denim shorts and brown sandals.

Five years after their nerve-rattling premature births at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, they filed into the third and fourth rows behind home plate at Fort Lauderdale Stadium to watch their father play baseball during a week off from kindergarten at a Maryland public school.

And after his final at-bat in Saturday's 4-0 loss, Mora quietly ushered his children into the batting cage and allowed each to hit baseballs with a full-size bat off of a tee. Those who weren't hitting scurried around the cage in bare feet, chasing balls or pretending to pitch.

"To not have a father when I was little -- my father died when I was six years old," he said. "I just want to give my kids what I never received. Sometimes it's hard, because I want to be with them every day.

"[But] I'm happy the way I'm working hard for my family," he said. There's "no joking around. I know my family depends on me. I do what I have to do to take care of them."

Mora, who grew up in a one-room house in Agua Negra, Venezuela, with 10 siblings, watched his father die in his arms, the victim of a gunman who mistook him for someone else. After his father's death, he supported his family, cleaning houses and hawking ice cream. His work now, he says, is much easier.

Gisel Mora said even after regular season home games that keep him out until after midnight, her husband awakens at 6:30 a.m. to help ready Tatiana for school, make her lunch and then drive her there. He then returns to help brush five sets of teeth, make five more lunches and man another shuttle run to classes.

After the Moras' morning rush hour, she said, her husband goes back to sleep.

"He takes pride in that," Gisel Mora said. "He says he doesn't want his children to grow up and say their dad was a provider. He wants them to grow up and say he was the best dad he could be."

Melvin Mora said the unsettling weeks in July and August 2001 when he couldn't hold his babies, all of whom weighed around two pounds and were hooked to feeding tubes, are seared in his memory.

Now, each is healthy. Before going to their stadium seats, three of the girls tried to shimmy up poles holding an awning. The boys skipped around, their shirts flying open, chattering to each other.

"When you have five kids in the hospital and you're not sure whether they will survive or not," that's pressure, Mora said. "After that, nothing is going to bother me. . . . The pressure I have now is I don't want my babies to get sick."

Don't even bother asking Mora about last season's offensive struggles. He hit .274 with a three-year low in home runs (16) and RBI (83).

Mora's view?

"I think I have a great year," he said, "and I'm looking forward to another great year."

Does his mind feel unburdened this spring, having earned a contract extension last summer?

"I worry about my kids, my family, my wife," he said. "When people put pressure on me, I like it."

Years ago, when Mora's first agent told him he wouldn't make it past Class AAA, Mora fired the agent. Gisel Mora says her husband brings the same sense of optimism into their family life. When they found out they were having twins, she said, they were thrilled. When they found out six weeks before the babies were born there were five and not two, they delighted in knowing each in the quintet had a beating heart.

Asked to describe life in the Mora household, Gisel is at a loss. To understand the scene at dinnertime, she said, "talk to the cafeteria lady." But, she added, the daily chaos is all they know.

"Melvin and I always shared the same philosophy that there's nothing we can't do," she said. "Melvin taught me when I married him always to see the glass full. Even if it's two drops, it's not empty. Even if he's feeling down and wishes his numbers were better, he's always saying things have been worse, and he will come out ahead."