The last we heard of Angel Villalona, the power-hitting San Francisco Giants minor league prospect accused of murder in his native Dominican Republic, he had just bailed out and had paid the victim’s family a cartload of pesos not to sue him.

That was in November, 2009. Nothing legally has changed in the case — but there is one big difference that has nothing to do with the courts and everything to do with baseball.

Lea Suzuki / The Chronicle

Villalona, 20, is out hitting and throwing again.

“He’s out on the street, practicing ball — out playing ball,” his former lawyer, Jose Arturo Cevallos Cedano, told The Chronicle with the translation help of our more Spanish-able colleague Nanette Asimov.

The newly anointed world champion Giants are still officially waiting to comment on the case until it has been legally resolved, and Villalona’s U.S. visa has been pulled. But the fact that the team’s once-promising slugger is working out indicates he still hopes to return to playing if he can be cleared of the September 2009 shooting that put him behind bars.

Villalona is a first baseman who grew up poor and showed amazing potential early. At age 12, he could slap a baseball over the wall of the local dirt-lot ballpark, and by 14 he was reaching more than 400 feet.

In 2006, at age 16, Villalona signed for $2.1 million with the Giants as their then-most expensive prospect ever and started playing in the minor leagues. Already a superstar in his homeland, Villalona was now a rich superstar — and that’s when the narrative of his meteoric rise started to fray.

His power hitting slacked off in the ensuing years as his critics said he gained too much weight from too many Big Macs. And though the locals in his impoverished hometown of La Romana overall considered him a hero, calling him “Papa” for his generosity with the children’s ball clubs and neighbors who needed a few bucks, others said he’d become arrogant. He showed off his big silver SUV, some said, and always ran with a posse of about a half-dozen acolytes.

The posse, everyone agreed, was probably part of the problem on Sept. 19, 2009, when Villalona dragged it along with him to a rough downtown nightclub. An argument broke out between his posse and another group, and by the end of it, 25-year-old Mario Felix de Jesus Velete was shot to death.

Villalona was jailed on one count of murder after witnesses said he pulled the trigger. In November 2009 he posted bail of $13,830 in U.S. dollars and paid Velete’s family $138,306.

His supporters insist he was fingered because he has a lot of money, and even the prosecutors say they love watching him play baseball. But justice is justice, says prosecutor Jose Antonio Polanco — who told The Chronicle that he still intends to bring Villalona to trial.

The slugger underwent a preliminary hearing in April, and may have new court proceedings this month.