In a security video released by the New York Police Department in June, a couple of guys attack a deli clerk with avocados at a bodega near Yankee Stadium in the Bronx. The attackers would later be widely identified as former college baseball players.

The disturbing clip shows one of the assailants firing the fruit at the 21-year-old clerk from point-blank range. The clerk, a new employee at the store, reportedly suffered a broken jaw in the attack.

Soon after the video came out, police arrested the two men: Brad Gomez, age 28, and Jestyfer Henriquez, 25.

The man alleged to be Henriquez in the video — the bearded guy in the denim vest — postures with a few haphazard, off-balance throws while the man alleged to be Gomez repeatedly hurls avocados directly at the clerk. News stories following the attack and a long trail of digital breadcrumbs show that Henriquez played baseball — however sporadically — at Onondaga Community College in Syracuse, N.Y., so at least one of the alleged assailants did, in fact, play college baseball. He’s even on LinkedIn, with a page that notes his education at Onondaga.

But Gomez’s baseball biography is a lot less clear. The news of his arrest and the video spread online, as a local story in New York media, as an item of international curiosity as far afield as New Zealand, in roundups on college baseball sites, and on at least one horrifyingly racist message board. Many of the reports across various media note that the men in the video are college baseball players, but those with any details of Gomez’s college playing career identify him as a member of the Monroe College team in 2012 and 2013. A couple of reports claimed that Gomez’s given name is Vladimir, and the only Gomez listed on any of Monroe’s rosters since 2009 is a Dominican-born Bronx resident and aspiring police officer named Vladimir Gomez. And considering that the team photo is five years old and he’s wearing a hat, the Monroe College baseball Gomez does at least vaguely resemble the avocado-throwing Gomez in the video.

Only it’s not him. The only guy named Vladimir Gomez who has played baseball under Monroe head coach Luis Melendez — coach of the Bronx school’s baseball program since its inception in 2005 — does not go by “Brad” and is completely innocent of the crime to which his name has been attached.

“The kid that threw the avocados never played for me,” Melendez told For The Win by phone. “Never. I’ve never had a Brad Gomez with me. I have had Vladimir Gomez.”

There’s another discrepancy: The ballplayer Gomez bats and throws righty, but the Gomez in the video throws the avocados left-handed. The Fruit Loops in the foreground show that the footage is not reversed.

“He’s a righty,” said Mike Turo, who managed Vladimir Gomez at James Monroe High School. “He’s an infielder. Shortstop-second baseman. Not a big kid; very, very fast runner. But he was not a lefty.”

Gomez is now playing professionally for the Vallejo Admirals of the independent Pacific Association. He played his first game this season on June 2, just a few days after the bodega incident in question. And he played games on June 15, the day Brad Gomez was arrested, and on July 19, when Brad Gomez was indicted.

Here’s Vladimir Gomez in early July, celebrating the Admirals’ Military Appreciation Night with a veteran:

The Vladimir Gomez who played college baseball at Monroe in 2012 and 2013 is not, at all, the Brad Gomez who attacked a deli clerk with avocados early in the morning on May 29 in the Bronx. He is also from the Bronx and he is also named Gomez, but the similarities appear to end there. A spokesperson for the Bronx district attorney’s office said there’s no indication in their records that the Brad Gomez arrested on June 15 and set to appear in court on Oct. 30 actually has the given name Vladimir.

The real, baseball-playing Vladimir Gomez’s story features nothing as shocking as a violent waste of avocados, but there’s nonetheless something endearing and compelling about the lengths he has gone in pursuit of his big-league dreams, and the way the people who know him talk about him.

“This kid is a great kid,” Turo said. “This is not that kind of kid (who’d throw avocados at a deli employee), at all.”

“Whatever you’ve heard as far as his integrity and character is true,” Melendez said. “This kid could be my son. He’s a wonderful kid. He would never have done that.”

The righty-throwing, righty-hitting infielder laughed about the mix-up on a phone call with For The Win last week, and said that everyone who knows him knows he’s playing pro baseball in California and not throwing avocados near Yankee Stadium. He can’t even remember the last time he has been to the Bronx. His is the life of earnest itineracy cultivated by existing on the fringes of minor league baseball, hooking up with host families at every new stop and balancing the grueling training schedule necessary to pursue professional baseball with the low pay that comes at its lowest levels.

Gomez moved from the Dominican Republic to the Bronx as a teenager and played four seasons for Turo at Monroe. A couple of colleges recruited him out of high school, but he wasn’t ready to leave New York.

“I was afraid,” Gomez said. “Coming from the Dominican Republic, I was afraid to leave the city. It was my comfort zone. So I thought about hanging them up.”

After enrolling at Monroe to study criminal justice, he learned the school had a baseball program and contacted Melendez. He made the team as a walk-on and earned a starting role. After hitting .343 with five homers in his second season at the JUCO school, he left the Bronx to transfer to University of Arkansas-Pine Bluff, where he also threw shot-put and javelin (righty, of course) for the track team.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGs5yd2L-tw

Moving from the Bronx to a historically black college 45 miles south of Little Rock did not make for the easiest transition.

“It was rough,” Gomez said. “The first year there, I wanted to go home every day. But when the season started, coming to play every day, I got more focused on baseball and school, and got my mind off of it.”

Two solid seasons at Pine Bluff earned Gomez a spring-training audition with Vallejo in 2016, but he did not make the team out of camp. When he got cut, he caught on with the Pecos League’s White Sands Pupfish. The Pupfish make their home in Alamogordo, New Mexico, a town of 30,000 best known for its proximity to the otherworldly White Sands National Monument and the White Sands Missile Range that hosted the first atomic bomb test in 1945.

The Pecos League, which also includes teams in Texas, Colorado, Kansas and California, does not publish attendance figures. It has graduated a couple of players to the Majors in its seven-year history, but it is considered by some to be the lowest level of professional baseball in the United States. Life at the level means enduring endless bus trips, hot desert climates and playing for comically low pay.

“At the beginning, it’s like, ‘This is where players go to die, or this is where they come up,'” Gomez said of the circuit. “It builds character, playing every day. You’ve just got to make the best out of every day you play. You just worry about playing baseball.”

Gomez played well for the Pupfish, seeing time at five different defensive positions while posting a .961 OPS. That performance netted him a second turn with Vallejo toward the end of the Pacific Association season, and a strong nine-game finish to the year convinced the Admirals to bring Gomez back for 2017.

The Pacific Association is not like the Major Leagues. The Admirals typically draw fewer than 200 fans, players sometimes double as merch salesmen, and the games feature on-field sack races and tire-rolling competitions for young fans. The league currently includes only four teams, and the frequent exposure to every opponent presents a challenge for hitters. Playing there, Gomez said, requires near-daily adjustments. But Vladimir Gomez has been adjusting for baseball for his entire adult life at this point.

Gomez still plans to become a cop when he’s through playing, but he loves the opportunities baseball provides to see the country, meet new people, and network inside the baseball community. One of his current teammates, Sammy Gervacio, played big-league ball for the Astros for parts of the 2009 and 2010 seasons.

“My thing is, I don’t want to have any regrets,” Gomez said. “That’s why I’m still playing. I’m 25 years old, but there are guys older than me out here playing, too. I don’t want to hang them up and think of what could have been, or what I might have done with it. I’m really thankful for baseball because it’s taken me to places that I’ve never thought of before. Playing every day, that’s a dream. You don’t get paid much, but you’re playing professional baseball.

“I’m trying to put my work in, get my numbers up, and get into the winter league in the Dominican Republic,” he said. “That’s really big-time.”