Written by: Brady Lim

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Joey Cantillo is not loud. He’s big — 6-foot-4, 230 pounds — but not overbearing. He thinks before he speaks and chooses his words carefully. Every response is thorough and expansive. In today’s world, extroversion has increasingly become conflated with leadership. More words mean more knowledge, and whoever speaks the loudest has the best ideas.

Cantillo dispels that notion in a conversation that lasts just 15 minutes. The goals are bold, the belief is strong, and the voice is simultaneously confident and understated.

“One of the best to ever do it,” he says matter-of-factly when asked how he wants to be remembered in 20 years. “I want to be known as a competitor and a worker. And I think I am.”

But before he was Joey Cantillo the highly rated prospect, he was simply Joey Cantillo the kid. The one from Kailua, Hawai’i with big dreams on a small island. He knew he wanted to make it to The Show, but didn’t have many baseball players to emulate that came from where he came from. That all changed when he met Kirby Yates, a journeyman-turned-All-Star who is now the best closer in the game.

“He was never a huge name out of Hawai’i,” Cantillo said of his teammate. “He worked his way up, grinded his way through the system. And he’s done really well for himself the last couple years. A lot of guys are looking up to him — I’m certainly looking up to him.”

“We see each other in the complex every day and once in a while we’ll talk stories for a little bit.”

But those stories aren’t just about surfing and sunshine. They’re about work, they’re about struggle, and they’re about how a kid from an island in the middle of the Pacific can become an All-Star in the biggest baseball league on the planet. Those were lessons that Cantillo already knew, but it just meant more coming from someone who has summited a peak that he wants to one day reach himself.