Gleyber Torres, midway through his final season under contract with the Yankees, sits in the home dugout in the Bronx on a quiet afternoon, gazing out at the field. He is remembering the kid who first arrived, and the man who took him in.
"The day the Yankees got me from the Cubs [in the 2016 trade for closer Aroldis Chapman], he received me on the minor league side," Torres says of Carlos Mendoza, the longtime Yankees coach who is now a rookie Mets manager preparing for his first subway series. "I was really nervous."
Mendoza, during his long tenures in player development for the Yankees and then as Aaron Boone’s bench coach, assumed an almost parental role with Torres, a fellow native of Venezuela. Torres’ Yankees career, while full of highlights and All-Star appearances, has not always been clean or aesthetically pleasing.
Torres knows this. His style of play presents as casual, which obscures what Boone passionately defends as his "care factor." He has made mistakes of attention and hustle. In long and often tense meetings over many years, Mendoza and Boone — often with Mendoza taking the lead — rode Torres hard.
And Torres is profoundly grateful for it. He does in fact have a strong care factor, and has always wanted to grow and improve.
"He was always the guy, when I did bad things, he went hard with me," Torres says. "It was good. Maybe in the moment, someone can tell you something that you don’t like to hear. But that’s the best thing for a culture."
This is not a simple tale of a coach helping a player, and the player sailing to glory because of it. Torres is enduring a disappointing walk year, largely failing to make a case that the Yankees should retain him. But truly impactful coaches help their players evolve as people, not just athletes.
