Identity Overhaul: Mets Focusing On Hispanic Development

Pedro Graces Cover Of N.Y. Times Magazine

Mets P Pedro Martinez is featured on the cover of yesterday’s N.Y. TIMES MAGAZINE as part of Jonathan Mahler’s profile of the team’s Hispanic marketing efforts. Mahler wrote the Mets are now “engaged in the most overt acknowledgement yet of the game’s changing demographics,” with a plan that includes “dispatching coaches like Mets’ missionaries to run free baseball clinics around the world.” The Mets are “rebranding themselves as an international team whose ethnic makeup will reflect the increasingly Hispanic city they represent.” The Mets this season have unveiled a “parallel advertising blitz aimed at Hispanics” and have directed “much of their Hispanic marketing energy toward the radio.” The Hispanic population’s “appetite for the Mets is clearly growing,” but it is “not the Mets per se that many Latin fans are responding to; it’s their Latin players.” However, Mets GM Omar Minaya is “clearly not filling ethnic quotas.” The team is “far from predominantly Latin,” with a 40-man Spring Training roster that was 28% Hispanic and put them in MLB’s top ten, “but only barely.”

SCHOOL OF THOUGHT: Mets Dir of Int’l Player Development Rafael Perez expects the team’s Academia de Beisbol in the Dominican Republic to be “as much a finishing school as it is a baseball factory.” Perez wants prospects to “learn how to speak English and how to open a bank account and balance a checkbook.” Perez also will encourage “more cross-cultural mingling by taking down American prospects for a few weeks every winter.” Perez: “What we’re doing is no different from what IBM has done for years. It’s part of the globalized marketplace.” But Mahler noted “not everyone in baseball is convinced that spending more money [in the Dominican] is the best way to remain competitive.” The Brewers shut down their academy there in ’03. Then-Brewers GM Doug Melvin said that the academy “wasn’t a good use of their resources.” The Brewers’ Dominican prospects are now sent directly to rookie camp in Arizona (N.Y. TIMES MAGAZINE, 7/31).

MAKING THE PITCH: Martinez’ stint with the Mets is examined in this week’s SI. Minaya: “He transcends wins and losses. Attendance, the visibility of the franchise, everything. The best way I can describe it is that he affects your brand — Pedro makes the brand. I don’t think there is any other guy in baseball who can do that” (SI, 8/1 issue).