SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. — The scripted Spanish on Gustavo Cabrera’s muscled right forearm, from the Book of Isaiah, proclaims a miracle.

The English Standard Version translates Chapter 41, verse 13: “For I, the Lord your God, hold your right hand; it is I who say to you, ‘Fear not, I am the one who helps you.’ “

The words remind him. The 10-inch scar reminds him. The fact he has a functioning right hand at all — that reminds him, too.

And this spring, when Cabrera, a 20-year-old blue-chip outfield prospect, fans out his fingers, wraps them around a bat and swats a baseball 420 feet, it serves as more than a reminder of all that has happened since that traumatic day in November 2013.

To everyone in the Giants organization who was involved in his rescue, repair and rehabilitation, it is pure astonishment.

“There’s nothing, at least for me in almost 25 years in baseball … ,” said Giants minor league training coordinator Mark Gruesbeck, struggling to find the words. “I couldn’t even come close to comparing to it.”

To save his baseball life and limb on that desperate day, Cabrera required much help. It had to be coordinated. And it had to be immediate. These are the stories of his saviors.

The scout

Pablo Peguero answered his cellphone, and the voice on the other end was frantic. In between sobs from Gustavo Cabrera’s mother, Alexandra Alvarez, he understood that something terrible had happened.

She told him that Cabrera, just 17 at the time, had a fall in his home. He was balancing a plate of food when he dropped a cup of water. He tried to pick up the cup while bracing his right hand on a glass table and slipped on the wet floor. His right arm went through the glass. Blood was everywhere. Just above his throwing hand, he severed every sinew, nerve and major blood vessel down to the bone.

The call, and the news, would have shaken Peguero regardless of who it was. But he knew that a catastrophic injury to Cabrera would be a particularly profound loss to the Giants. They had given the Dominican youngster a $1.3 million bonus in 2012 when MLB.com ranked him as the leading teenage international free agent.

Peguero recalled the first time he scouted Cabrera, and the instant connection he made to another player he had signed years earlier during his long tenure with the Los Angeles Dodgers.

“Right away, I see this kid, and he reminded me of Raul Mondesi,” said Peguero, referring to the Dominican outfielder who played 13 major league seasons and was National League Rookie of the Year in 1994. “You only needed to see him take 10 to 15 swings. Really plus-plus bat speed. We can project right away he’s going to have a lot of power. His arm was already average at that time. Center fielder, good athlete, good jumps. Right away, a five-tool player.”

Peguero noted that Cabrera had the right makeup as well. He grew up in La Romana, a fast-growing beach city and former sugar mill company town halfway between the shortstop factory of San Pedro de Macoris and the white-sand resort areas of Punta Cana. His parents were divorced and his father, Patricio Cabrera, worked in the sugar cane fields.

“A poor family, but a very good, educated family,” Peguero said. “I remember the first time I talked to his mother and she was very happy and very proud of him, not because he was a very good ballplayer and was going to sign for good money, but because he had good discipline.”

Now, faced with a medical emergency, Peguero ended the call with Cabrera’s mother and rang Giants vice president Jeremy Shelley, who answered while in the midst of a staff meeting with club officials in Arizona. Executive vice president Brian Sabean sat to Shelley’s left. Head athletic trainer Dave Groeschner was on his right.

Groeschner took the phone and gave Peguero two clear instructions: insist that the doctors in the Dominican hospital control the bleeding but do nothing more, and rush the kid onto the next flight to the Giants’ complex in Arizona.

Groeschner didn’t know how bad the injury was, but he knew it would be a race against time to attempt to restore any athletic function to Cabrera’s hand — or even save it altogether.

Peguero’s instructions were clear but rife with complications. Cabrera did not have a U.S. visa. And because he was underage, he required special permission from Dominican officials to take an international flight without a family member. That process usually takes three days, and sometimes more than a week. It was time that Cabrera didn’t have.

“I called people I knew in the government — big people,” said Peguero, “and they let him fly without permission. From there, I pray.”

The companion

Mario Rodriguez’s professional career as a left-handed pitcher did not last long. He showed just enough arm strength and feel for throwing strikes to play parts of five seasons for U.S. affiliates in the Giants system but never advanced beyond Low-A ball. Retirement holds no meaning for 23-year-olds. Better to say that Rodriguez stopped pitching in 2012.

He went straight into a coaching career with the Giants, who valued his dedication, focused direction and language skills. He was a pitching coach for the Giants’ Dominican Summer League team on which Cabrera played in 2013.

Rodriguez was driving home from his sister’s birthday party when he got the call from Peguero. Cabrera needed a chaperon to the U.S., and that meant dropping everything to fly 3,700 miles, through immigration and customs and a connecting gate, with a gravely injured 17-year-old who spoke no English.

Rodriguez met Cabrera at the airport in Santo Domingo the next morning. Doctors had tied off his ulnar artery to prevent major blood loss, put him in a splint to keep his wrist bent and sent him home. He wasn’t given any pain medication.

“The only thing I could do was be a friend,” Rodriguez said. “Let him talk. Try to make him comfortable. He was actually pretty good. He was staying positive. I looked at him, sitting next to me, and thought, ‘This is a strong boy. For anybody to be able to deal with anything like that … “

Cabrera wasn’t in shock. He couldn’t feel much of anything in his arm because he’d cut through all the nerves. And he was emotionally numb, after crying the night before.

“Not because of the pain,” said Cabrera, through interpreter Erwin Higueros. “But because I thought, ‘That’s it. My baseball career is over. I’ll never be able to play again.’ “

Rodriguez and Cabrera had a connecting flight in New York and then landed in Phoenix, where the Giants instantly recognized that the injury was far more devastating than they could handle there. Cabrera had cut through every single one of the 11 tendons on the volar (palm up) side of his arm. Almost 40 hours had passed since the accident, and the only blood supply his hand had received was whatever scant amount his capillaries could squeeze through.

They raced Cabrera back to the airport, and to San Francisco. Time was running out, and one more bureaucratic stumbling block would threaten everything.

The surgeon

Dr. Scott Hansen, the chief of hand and microvascular surgery at UCSF Medical Center, reviewed cellphone pictures of Cabrera’s arm while the teenager was en route to the Bay Area from Phoenix. He knew every minute was critical, and he wanted to be as prepared as possible for what he needed to repair.

Hansen had seen and stitched up hundreds of injuries more traumatic and destructive. He has created thumbs out of toes. But most of those patients were people who suffered industrial accidents or were mangled in high-speed car wrecks. Never a professional athlete.

“He had what we call a ‘spaghetti wrist,’ ” Hansen said. “All the key structures are on the volar side, and he cut everything straight across. It was just a terrible, terrible, terrible injury.”

Hansen and Dr. Charles Lee, chief of plastic and reconstructive surgery at St. Mary’s Medical Center in San Francisco, often collaborate in complicated microsurgery procedures. (They repaired nerve damage in Jeremy Affeldt’s hand when the former Giants left-hander suffered a deep stab wound while trying to separate frozen hamburger patties in 2011.) Now they, along with Giants chief surgeon Dr. Robert Murray, prepared to operate on Cabrera.

But with the clock ticking, officials at St. Mary’s Medical Center initially refused to allow the procedure. They required a legal guardian to sign for Cabrera, and the Giants couldn’t produce one. Like Peguero in the Dominican, the Giants had a connected person to cut through the bureaucracy. Murray, a practicing physician for 41 years and a St. Mary’s Board member, knew the right people to call and the right forms to process.

The operation took almost five hours, with Hansen and Lee simultaneously repairing structures using a multiheaded surgical microscope. Repairing those 11 tendons was the most straightforward part. Reconnecting tiny blood vessels, using sutures that can’t be seen with the human eye, was delicate but nothing they hadn’t done hundreds of times.

It was reconnecting the nerves that most concerned Hansen and Lee. A cut nerve dies off in both directions. After 48 hours, there usually isn’t enough living matter that can stretch to reconnect. Patients who aren’t seen quickly enough usually require a graft from a living nerve taken from elsewhere in the body.

“And when you have to use nerve grafts, the functional recovery falls off the map,” Hansen said. “It would have meant a lack of function forever.”

Another few hours and Cabrera would have required nerve grafts, ending his career. If he had stayed in the Dominican Republic another day, he would have lost sensation in his hand for the rest of his life. He might have lost the hand altogether.

“Any nerve cuts like the ones he had, you don’t want to call it a nonrecoverable injury, but a full recovery is rare,” Hansen said. “I don’t know that we left the operating room thinking, ‘We repaired everything, and hey, he’s going to do great.’ But we thought maybe, just maybe, he had a chance.”

The healer

Gruesbeck isn’t much different from the hundreds of kids and farmhands whose health and welfare he oversees as the Giants’ minor league training coordinator. Just as they aspire to rise through the ranks, so did he.

A Central Michigan University graduate, he began with the Giants in 1999 as the trainer at the organization’s short-season affiliate in Salem, Oregon. He worked two years there, then two more at Double-A Shreveport, one year with Triple-A Fresno and then the big leagues, traveling with the Giants for eight seasons as an assistant trainer. He was there when Barry Bonds broke the all-time home run record. He was in the dugout for two World Series clinchers.

“It was an exciting life,” Gruesbeck said. “But sleeping in your own bed, and being with your family, that’s pretty exciting, too.”

He began a second stint in his current role in 2014, and when the Giants and their affiliates disperse from spring training to begin their seasons, he stays in Arizona with his baseball casualties as the afternoons begin to cook and the long days of rehab begin.

He and members of his staff, including therapist Tony Reale, become constant companions for pitchers recovering from Tommy John surgery and broken-down minor league veterans trying to loosen themselves up for one last go.

Young Gustavo needed more help than any of them.

“We started with whatever (range of motion exercises) he could tolerate, and Gustavo was very, very good,” said Gruesbeck, who coordinated with Hansen and several therapists to devise a rehab protocol where none had existed for a baseball player. “We would give him things to do, and he would do them all day and all night. Being 17, he was able to work through some of the normal aches and pains that a 30-year-old probably wouldn’t have gotten over.

“But he kept asking for more things to do, and we’d find them.”

They traveled often between Arizona and San Francisco for follow-up appointments, and it became clear that additional surgeries would be required. Cabrera’s skin near his wrist had become so thin that the wound kept opening up. He couldn’t continue his rehab. Unless something was done, it wouldn’t be long before the scar tissue would become so thick that it would turn his wrist to concrete.

So three months after the initial surgery, Hansen devised a solution. He performed a microvascular free tissue transfer, or a “free flap” operation, in which a section of Cabrera’s right thigh was removed and grafted onto his arm.

“We’re not talking about a skin graft,” Hansen said. “You couldn’t just lay something paper thin over the top. It had to be healthy, durable tissue with a blood supply.”

In the microsurgical procedure, blood vessels from his thigh tissue were connected to those in his arm. Hansen removed masses of scar tissue as well. Cabrera, once he healed from the procedure, would be able to ramp up his rehab.

Then came the next complication. During his rehab exercises, Cabrera tore one of the repaired tendons in his thumb. So six months after the accident, he underwent a third procedure in which a tendon from his right ring finger was removed and fashioned into a thumb tendon.

That was May 2014. Cabrera has not required any additional surgeries, although when his hand becomes fatigued from overuse, the tendon sometimes seizes up and causes his thumb to spasm toward his pinkie.

“There’s obviously some deficits still,” Gruesbeck said. “Nervewise, just the very tips of his fingers are still missing some sensation, but 90 percent of it is back. We’re pretty happy with how it turned out, being that he’s out on the baseball field and playing a skilled sport at a high level.”

Cabrera played his first games for a Stateside minor league affiliate last year, collecting a triple and a single in seven at-bats for the Giants’ club in the rookie-level Arizona League. He played in just two games before an injury sidelined him.

He pulled a hamstring.

“I swear, we didn’t take anything out of his hamstring,” Hansen said with a laugh.

The player

This spring, Cabrera has no restrictions, and other than his daily massaging and stretching exercises, he is like any other player at the Giants’ minor league complex. He hit a 400-foot home run in a camp game last week that could be heard two fields away. He is making all the throws from left field, the position at which he’s likely to develop.

“It was a very, very difficult process,” Cabrera said through Higueros. “If I had to work 100 percent, I needed to double that effort to 200 percent.”

When the minor league seasons begin, there is a good chance Cabrera will begin at Augusta, Georgia, a full-season affiliate in the Low-A South Atlantic League.

He hasn’t changed. He’s asking for more.

“Maybe Augusta,” said Cabrera, through Higueros. “I would go to Augusta. But I feel strong enough that I would like to go to Class A-Advanced at San Jose.”

Wherever he goes, he’ll be leaving Gruesbeck’s nest. Ask Cabrera who has done the most to restore his baseball aspirations, and he doesn’t hesitate to answer.

“Mark,” Cabrera said through Higueros. “He’s been very helpful not just during rehab, not just during the process of the surgery, but he’s been there with me. And he is still with me now, in many ways.”

Higueros finished interpreting the answer. Cabrera repeated it.

“En muchas maneras,” he said.

So has Rodriguez, who moved to Arizona so he could help Cabrera adapt to U.S. culture. Last year, when Cabrera took batting practice for the first time, Rodriguez recorded a video with his cellphone and shared it with the coaches and players back in the Dominican.

“They saw it,” Rodriguez said. “They could not believe it.”

Cabrera estimates that he has regained 85 percent of his hand strength and 90 percent of his sensation, and he patiently hopes that the remainder returns as well. He cannot be frustrated with what he still lacks. Not when he asked a specialist after the second procedure about his outlook and was told that it was a 99 percent certainty that he’d never play baseball again.

“It’s always going to look different than his other hand or anybody else’s,” Gruesbeck said. “But for the most part, he’s back.”

Sometime last year, in addition to those words from the Book of Isaiah, Cabrera got several more tattoos on his right forearm. The most prominent is a flower with a clock face in its center.

“The flower blooms and it’s beautiful,” Cabrera said through Higueros. “But before the flower blooms, there is a process to get there. I had to go through a process of healing. Now I’m throwing, I’m hitting, I’m lifting weights. Everything. I’m going to play hard, give it my all, and I want to play the whole season.”

Gruesbeck will be watching the box scores. Rodriguez, set to coach in the Arizona League, will check in whenever he can. Hansen is writing a paper for a medical journal. All three are quick to deflect credit, saying it doesn’t belong to them.

“This is really a miracle in a lot of ways,” Gruesbeck said. “I mean, even organizationally, there was a feeling of, ‘This is over’ to, ‘Do you really think he has a chance’ to, ‘Yeah, let’s get him out there and see what he can do.’ “

They are about to find out. They hope to be astonished.