And if there has been a hand guiding Guerrero's career, it has been the iron one of Altagracia Alvino.
She was three months pregnant when Guerrero's father disappeared. And when the boy was 6, his mother left too. But unlike his father, she did not abandon Vladimir and his eight brothers and sisters. Instead she went first to Colombia, then Venezuela, sneaking into both countries illegally to work as a cook and maid, sending her paychecks back to the Dominican Republic to support the family.
She didn't return home permanently until Guerrero was 17, about the time he left home to play with the Montreal Expos.
The two are making up for lost time now. For the last 10 years she has spent the summers with Vladimir, first in Montreal and now in Anaheim, cooking and cleaning and reading her Bible for at least an hour every afternoon.
"She keeps him in line," Mota says. "Vladdy is a guy that is pulled in so many directions. But she keeps that mind on one thing: get your rest, eat well. He doesn't have a posse going around with him.
"He's not a guy that needs to be pumped up by other people. It's so insignificant to him, so trivial, stuff like that."
As a result, Mike Scioscia, his manager the last four seasons, calls him "the most unassuming superstar I've ever seen."
Teammate Erick Aybar says Guerrero is humble, likening him to a second father.
"He's a good guy," adds the Dodgers' Wilson Valdez, who works out with Guerrero in the Dominican each winter. "Everybody likes him."
Guerrero, who habitually speaks of himself in the third person, believing the pronouns "I" or "me" to be boastful, laughs off such praise.
For Mota, among Guerrero's closest friends, such modesty is a product of the two most important things in his life: faith and family.
"He's seen the examples of guys that have not been humbled," he says. "They move away, they come back and they don't even relate to the people they grew up with. That's what Vladdy doesn't want to do.
"If this ended for Vladdy right now, he'd be out in the fields doing the crops. Happily. If this ended today, Vladdy would be Vladdy. Just somewhere else."
That somewhere else probably would be Bani, a dusty provincial capital of 62,000 near the Dominican's southwestern coast. Guerrero and his brother Wilton, a former major leaguer, own more than half a dozen small businesses there, ranging from a construction company and concrete-block factory to a small grocery and a hardware store across the street from the house where they grew up. None of the businesses make much money, Guerrero confirms with another hearty laugh and flash of his megawatt smile. But that's not the point.
