FIVE EXECUTIVES FROM Octagon and two others from Major League Baseball’s player marketing team traveled to Tampa, Florida, to meet with Gleyber Torres in January. They rented a private room near the back of a fancy steakhouse and spent five hours talking about his brand potential. Meetings like these are hardly ever staged for baseball players; they’re usually reserved for stars of the NBA and the NFL, sports with greater appeal to younger fans. But Torres possessed both the potential and the interest. He flew his parents and his in-laws in from Venezuela and stayed engaged throughout, constantly asking questions.
MLB commissioner Rob Manfred was partly right when, in reference to superstar Mike Trout, he said that baseball players are generally unmotivated to promote themselves. Marketing agencies have understood this for years. Players’ schedules are especially arduous, and their contracts are both lucrative and fully guaranteed, making them less inclined to do the extra work required to become culture-defining, front-facing athletes. There is even less incentive for many Latin players who aren’t as comfortable speaking English and don’t spend their offseasons in the U.S.
Torres, however, is different. He realized early on that he didn’t just want to be a professional baseball player; he wanted to be good and popular and transcendent, not because he’s arrogant or entitled but because he’s a long-term thinker who always placed himself within a larger context.
“He showed that at a young age, when he was 11, 12 years old,” Torres’ father, Eusebio, said in Spanish. “By then he was already thinking about bigger things — adult stuff.
Eusebio Torres
Torres, 23, sits courtside at Barclays Center and wants to attend New York Fashion Week. He constantly practices his English, has learned how to cultivate a certain image on social media and is working on looking fans in the eye when signing autographs.
Torres wore only Nike before the company even knew who he was because that’s what guys like LeBron James and Ken Griffey Jr. did. Today, the New York Yankees’ star infielder, who will move to shortstop on a full-time basis this season, owns a lucrative endorsement deal from Nike that gives him the freedom to fully customize his cleats and batting gloves. BioSteel, a sports-nutrition company with roots in Toronto, made him its first U.S.-based baseball client and also its first Hispanic client. The same occurred with PSD, a popular underwear retailer that also sponsors NBA stars such as Kyrie Irving and Trae Young.
Three national endorsements is exceedingly rare for a baseball player. It’s almost unfathomable for a Latin American in his early 20s who speaks English as a second language. Now consider this: a kid from Venezuela emerging from hardship to become the face of a seemingly unmarketable sport despite spending most of his life in another country. It’s a thought Torres is willing to entertain.
“It would be, above all, an honor,” he said. “A tremendous honor. I’ve worked since I was little to accomplish that. All those years, all those sacrifices — it would bring enormous satisfaction to me, but mostly to my family, which has supported me from the beginning.”
Source: Alden Gonzalez | ESPN Staff Writer
