Gleyber Torres came from Venezuela with that “can’t miss” tag. For a 17-year-old far from home, baseball was now a full-time job in an unforgiving business, and there would be tough times ahead.
The right man at the right place and time was Jimmy Gonzalez.
“He helped me with everything,” Torres was saying before a recent game at Yankee Stadium. “I’m a super-young guy, 17 years old. He watched me, and everything he told me — I feel super good he was my manager. … Super good guy.”
Do you remember Jimmy Gonzalez? It has been a while. He came out of East Hartford High with the “can’t-miss” tag in 1991, a massive catcher who threw BB’s across the diamond from his knees and sent home runs soaring out of McKenna Field, the Astros’ first-round draft pick. Fourteen minor league seasons later, he at last accepted that he was going to miss, and came home to raise his daughters, coach and teach the game to kids around here.
Then in 2013, Gonzalez took a job as hitting coach with the Cubs’ entry in the Arizona rookie league. A year later, he was the manager and he and Gleyber Torres found each other in Mesa.
Gonzalez, 45, and Torres moved together to South Bend, Ind., the Class A Midwest League in 2015, and the mentoring remained gentle, but firm enough that Gonzalez once yanked him from a game for not running hard on a ground ball. Then Torres moved on, and after a trade to the Yankees, has become one of the baseball season’s breakout rookies, barely 21, the youngest player in American League history to homer in four consecutive games. Nine homers and two walk-off hits in little over a month.
“I’m so proud of him,” Gonzalez said. “The only satisfaction we get is knowing that we helped that person. You don’t get any financial reward [in the minor leagues]. You know the relationship you had with the player, and you’re just rooting for them. You know how hard it is. You know it’s a dream. There are just so many things.”
As Torres electrifies New York, Gonzalez is back in South Bend, his fourth season there, helping the new batch of kids coming through. He has also managed a first-round pick, Ian Happ, with high expectations who also rose quickly to the big leagues. The young players the Cubs send to Gonzalez are in good hands.
Gonzalez still lives in Connecticut during the offseason. His wife, Eileen, is teaching at Fairfield University, and their daughters, Mariela and Isabella, are now teenagers. When the Cubs called, it felt right; Jimmy had something to give.
“I knew I wanted to get back in,” Gonzalez said. “I just had to find the right time. What I have learned about young minds is being positive and encouraging and sharing your experiences. Anybody can go out there and flip balls and they hit ’em, but when you share some experiences and you tell them what you went through — and how it changed me as a player — I have those things. It becomes personal; it creates a bond, a trust, a relationship that you build. And that’s how these players get comfortable in a good way, and they get better.”
One of those experiences is failure, lots of failure, for players unaccustomed to it. Gonzalez was “it” at East Hartford, but hit .204 and .176 as a teenager in his first two pro seasons.
“Those young guys were probably the best players on their team,” Gonzalez said. “Then you come to this level, and you see it in Rookie ball, now they’re playing with guys right at their level or better. They have some struggles, they deal with the emotional part, and the physical part of not producing, and that is hard for a young kid his first few years. That’s where the positive encouragement comes, knowing you’ve been through that and you think that a coach is not happy with you because you’re not performing. I make it a point to tell these guys, ‘I’m not looking at your results. The results will come.’ How’s your work ethic? How’s your process? That’s what this is.”
Gleyber Torres, his family back in Venezuela, where there is so much unrest, under the scrutiny and facing the temptations that came with his $1.9 million signing bonus, found he could talk to Gonzalez about anything. “We had a lot of conversations,” Gonzalez said. “Gleyber went through a lot of personal stuff.”
Torres hit .279 in Arizona and .293 at South Bend under Gonzalez. His current manager, Aaron Boone, remarks about his “mature approach” to hitting.
“He’s self-driven,” Gonzalez said. “You didn’t have to tell him to do something. He could make adjustments quick. It was amazing to see someone at that age understand and be able to do that. He’s just a guy that was strong mentally. Whatever happened, if he failed at it, he realized the things he did, or had to do.”
By July of 2016, Torres was playing in advanced Class A at Myrtle Beach when the news came that the Cubs had sent him to the Yankees in a trade for Aroldis Chapman, a move that helped the Cubs end the 108-year drought and win the World Series. Gonzalez reached out to talk that night.
“I had never been in a trade,” Torres said, “and he told me it was part of the game, part of the business, and just enjoy the moment. Play good, and you have an opportunity with another team.”
Said Gonzalez: “When he got traded, he expressed what he felt. When you’re that young and you leave what you know, there are so many emotions. He expressed that he felt kind of alone; he didn’t know anyone. But the type of person he is, I knew he would fit right in.”
While Gonzalez still cashes the Cubs’ checks and Torres is now crushing it with the Yankees, they stay in touch. Because that’s how this works — trust doesn’t go in a trade, and a reassuring voice will always be a keeper in baseball.
“He says, ‘It’s a negative sport,’” Torres said. “But he always told me something good.”
