By Cassidy Lee · Republished 2026-05-16 · Originally reported by Richard Horgan on FishbowlLA, September 2011
In mid-September 2011, LA Times sports-desk copy editor Fernando Dominguez flew to Miami to watch his son Matt make his Major League Baseball debut with the Florida Marlins. Matt Dominguez had been a Chatsworth High School star and a Marlins prospect for years; the September 2011 call-up was the moment the family had been waiting for. The piece was the kind of human-interest LA-media story FishbowlLA periodically surfaced.
Then
Fernando Dominguez had been at the LA Times sports copy desk for years. The pride-of-parenthood-of-a-newly-debuting-MLB-player story was the kind of personal narrative that periodically broke through the newsroom’s institutional reserve and got told. The original FishbowlLA framing — Richard Horgan’s pickup — was admiring of both the father and the son.
Matt Dominguez had been the Marlins’ first-round pick in the 2007 draft. The September 2011 call-up came after four years of minor-league development. The piece captured the family’s trip to Miami for the major-league debut.
Now
Matt Dominguez’s subsequent MLB career was substantial but ended earlier than the 2011 debut might have predicted. After splitting the 2011 season between the Marlins and Triple-A, he was traded to the Houston Astros in 2012, where he became the team’s starting third baseman across 2012, 2013, and 2014 — playing in 405 games across three seasons with the Astros. He hit 30 home runs in 2013, his strongest offensive year. He was traded to the Toronto Blue Jays in late 2014 and spent the 2015 season in Triple-A; his major-league career effectively ended after 2014 due to ongoing injury issues.
He continued playing in independent leagues and overseas for a few years before transitioning out of active baseball. The Marlins-to-Astros-to-Blue Jays trajectory turned out to be the bulk of his MLB time; the 2011 debut piece captured the beginning of a four-year major-league career rather than the start of a longer arc.
Fernando Dominguez continued at the LA Times sports desk for years after the 2011 piece. The broader sports-copy-desk category at U.S. daily papers has thinned substantially across the decade and a half since, with sports sections at most major papers operating with reduced editorial staffing relative to the early-2010s structure. The 2011 piece reads now as a small documented moment of LA-media family pride that subsequent MLB history has filled in.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.
More from the FishbowlLA archive
- Guy Crowder, photographer of Black Los Angeles, dies at 72 — and the LA-press history he documented
- Robin Abcarian on the Today Show — how the LA Times broke the Schwarzenegger affair story, May 2011
- Ruben Vives and Jeff Gottlieb win the 2011 Selden Ring Award — LA Times’s Bell corruption investigation