SAN PEDRO de MACORIS, Dominican Republic — There’s your kid right there, the man says.

PENA and OVIEDO and BAUTISTA start jogging out to stretch. It is Monday, on a windy morning at the Detroit Tigers’ Dominican Republic academy, and Roberto Campos is walking through the batting cage.

Campos, a 16-year-old, is the best Tigers prospect you don’t know about. He grew up in Cuba, moved to the D.R. nearly four years ago and signed with the Tigers in July for a $2.85 million signing bonus — the team’s highest for an international amateur player.

Campos already looks like a big-leaguer. Strong handshake. Makes you forget for a second that he knows little English when he replies, “Nice to meet you,” after an introduction for the first interview of his baseball career.

The next second, Campos jogs by with the rest of his teammates, younger and richer than the rest. He bought a place for his parents with the money. They say he’s been a captain on every team. He lines up first in his group for calisthenics.

He has grown a good three inches and put on probably 25 pounds since the man, Oliver Arias, stumbled upon him in 2016. He has switched positions, from third base to outfield, signed a life-changing contract and started a professional career. But he's basically a sophomore in high school.

This week, with Arias translating, we meet a kid still too young to be considered a prospect but far too promising to be hidden in another country.

Three bombs and a Tigers hat

Oliver Arias was at the field to see other kids.

“He wasn’t even there to see me,” Campos laughs.

Campos won’t let it rest. Arias, director of the Tigers' D.R. academy, was scouting some kids from Cuba that day. One of those kids was Raul Campos, a shortstop. But it was Campos’ younger brother who stood out, a third baseman with an OK swing and no arm.

“He was just there practicing with the guys and I just kind of saw him,” Arias says. “It was just one of those cases where you go in and see some of the players, like, ‘Oh, look at this player,’ but he kind of showed me something with the bat.”

That something got Campos on Arias’ list. But the bat was no secret back home in Cuba, where Campos stood out as a youth player in Havana.

At 8 years old, nobody believed a water tank in left field could be hit, but Campos almost did. At 10, he made Cuba’s national team. At 12, he hit .600 with four home runs in a tournament, and that’s when he realized, “You know what, I’m born for this. I’m made for this.”

That year, he traveled with a team to a tournament in Orlando and went 15-for-20, putting plans for the family to defect from Cuba in place.

“When Roberto was in that tournament in the states,” his dad, Yuniel Campos, says, “He did pretty good and we felt there was a time where it might get to be a little bit — they might try to hold him back a little bit ... so we decided to come over.”

His dad came first. The next year, after Campos was named Most Valuable Player of a showcase in Punta Cana, the two brothers hopped into a car with their dad and drove away.

“Just like that,” the driver said.

Campos began training at Universal Baseball Academy with former Tigers center fielder Alex Sanchez and former minor-league power hitter Julian Yan. The one-field academy is next to the Tigers’ academy. There is a torn-up batters eye in center field and a palm tree to the right of it. It’s only 390 feet to center field, but one day, Campos cleared it. Another day, he got his first Tigers hat.

“He said, ‘Oh, I like that hat,’ ” Arias says. “I said, ‘You know what, when you hit three balls out to where that tree is. If you get three in a row there, I’ll do it.”

Campos did it, and the seeds of his signing were planted the scouting way: By building a relationship with a kid and his family.

The best since ... Miggy

When Yuniel Campos took his kids to the field when they were younger, he would tell them to grab the baseball stuff.

But Campos would only grab one thing.

“He’d just grab the bat,” Yuniel says, sitting on the patio of the family’s house in a small complex in Juan Dolio, a resort town about 20 minutes from San Pedro. “The bat was the only thing he’d like to carry around; the other stuff was nothing.”

Yuniel is sitting next to his wife, Tamara Proenza, who is a bit under the weather but needed to be out here today for her son. Her name is tattooed on Campos’ right wrist. His dad’s name is tattooed on his left. “He didn’t want to know about the glove or anything, it was just the bat,” she says. “It was just the bat. It was, ‘I grab the bat and let’s just hit and that’s it.’”

The bat is why the Tigers signed Campos. As their looks at him increased, they became impressed with his ability to handle older pitching — his academy would bring in 20-somethings to pitch for showcases — hit to all fields and especially, his power.

Campos swings right-handed. He is 6-foot-2, 200-ish pounds and projectable, meaning he's only going to get better.

On this day, he steps in and hits the first pitch of batting practice off the batter’s eye.

“I’ve saw him do that not once, not twice, more than at least four or five times,” Arias says. “He does it on the first swing when he’s not trying. He has natural power. But sometimes, when he tries too hard, it goes against him.”

One of those times was about eight months before he signed, at his most serious workout with the Tigers.

Everyone was there, from the team’s seven D.R.-area scouts, to international director Tom Moore, Latin American director Miguel Garcia and cross-checkers.

He was facing a Cuban guy they brought in from Santiago, about two hours away. His first pitch was a fastball for a strike. Second pitch, a curveball for a strike that he thought wasn’t a strike.

“Alex said, ‘Hey, come on! Get out of here!” Campos says. “After that second pitch, he yelled at me: 'Are you just gonna stay there? No! Swing on it!' ”

The next pitch — a fastball in, Campos remembers — he hit a line drive off the center field fence.

“And I was like, ‘Are you kidding me?’ ” Arias says. “With that kind of pressure? I kept thinking to myself, ’He’s just 15.’ ”

Asked if he ever feels any pressure, Campos says, "Yes."

“At times, you feel some pressure as an athlete, as a baseball player when you want to be into that moment where you feel some pressure,” he says. “But I have people here that is always teaching me, ‘Hey, just relax, be you, take it easy, take your time to get there, you’re going to be there and it’s going to be fine.’ ”

Said Garcia, the Tigers’ Latin American director, who is largely responsible for the Marlins signing Miguel Cabrera in 1999: “I feel lucky enough to be able to see Miguel Cabrera when he was 15, when he was 16 years old, and Roberto Campos, to me, is the closest thing that I ever have seen to me like Cabrera when he was that age.”

No pressure.

'If you love me, I love you'

The best way to sign top international amateur players is to, essentially, get there early.

Often times, players agree to deals well in advance of the July 2 signing period. When they do, their agents typically pull the player out of future showcases out of respect for the handshake agreement.

But just getting there early, like Arias did, is hardly a guarantee for success. There’s a certain name recognition that comes when you discover Cabrera. There’s ample opportunity to move fast in Detroit. Campos likes the Old English ‘D’ and there’s also $2.85 million.

When Campos signed on the dotted line last summer to receive the fifth-largest signing bonus in the 2019 international class, it was the culmination of years of trust built between Arias and the family.

Asked about that relationship, Tamara can’t continue past a sentence — she needs a tissue.

“They said they can’t explain how they feel about me,” Arias translates. “That I’ve just been part of their life because of the way I helped Roberto and give him some advice and the way that our organization has treated him. His father said, ‘If you love me, I love you,’ and that’s how they feel about me.”

Campos’ parents said the Diamondbacks, Red Sox and Reds also showed interest and it’s possible the Tigers were outbid, but from the day he was discovered at that field as Raul Campos’ little brother, his heart was pulled toward one team.

“He always identified himself with the Tigers,” Tamara says. “He’s known them from the beginning and they kind of followed him through the whole process. There was always something about Detroit that made him feel comfortable and he always said that, ‘You know what, ‘I want to sign with the Tigers, I feel comfortable with the Tigers, that’s the team I like, that’s where I want to sign.’

'I consider myself a leader'

Roberto Campos is a dream.

He already is a physical specimen, only getting bigger, and hits the ball hard. One of the home runs he hit almost went over the second fence which marks the end of the Tigers' D.R. complex, 10 or 15 feet farther than the left-center field fence..

He says things like, “Yes, I consider myself a leader,” and has a contagious personality with his teammates — on this day, he is spotted giving his teammate's bat a pep talk. He has experience making new friends and playing with new teammates.

When Campos is asked about Cuba, he beams. He misses it there, for sure, especially his grandmother and her food.

“She always said, ‘Hey, I want to see you some day on that TV playing over there,” Campos says. “That’s what I most want, to know that she’s going to see me over there.“

When he is asked about how to describe himself as a person, he puckers his lips, props up his chin and looks into the distance: “A happy kid,” he concludes. The best moment he had as a kid was probably going to Disney World during that trip to Orlando.

He knows Lakeland is only an hour-long drive from there.

In a few weeks, Campos will play in his first Dominican Summer League game. In June, he will turn 17. Next spring, he will likely arrive in the U.S., still years away from the big leagues.

Until then, he is a dream, hitting fifth behind Spencer Torkelson and Riley Greene; maybe he’s a top prospect, an All-Star, or even Juan Soto — a rookie hitter forcing his way onto a pennant-contending team.

There's always a chance he won't come true. But Campos is as good of a Tigers prospect to dream on as any, a top-10 organizational talent at the age of a high school sophomore. He is asked how quickly he thinks he can get to the big leagues.

“Four years,” he says. "Maybe less. Who knows?”

Contact Anthony Fenech at afenech@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @anthonyfenech. Read more on the Detroit Tigers and sign up for our Tigers newsletter.