Top Red Sox prospect Marcelo Mayer opens up
FORT MYERS, Fla. - Marcelo Mayer walked into the meeting room at JetBlue Park Thursday morning looking like a major leaguer. The height. The weight. The hair. The confidence. That's simply the vibe he gives off.
Sure, he isn't even old enough to rent a car, but that's OK. Age isn't everything these days in baseball, as Mayer was reminded while watching his buddy and fellow 2021 first-round draftee Jordan Lawlar make his big league debut later that night with Arizona.
"I'm super happy for the guy. I grew up playing with him," the Red Sox prospect said, immediately beaming at mention of the former Dallas-area prep shortstop, who was taken two spots after Mayer.
You can tell by talking to Mayer, he can almost taste the life Lawlar is living. So what if his 2023 season was forced to end because of a left shoulder injury, forcing this current life of solitude and rehab at the spring training home of the Red Sox. The dream is becoming tantalizing close to evolving into reality.
"Trust me, I am," said Mayer on the 'Baseball Isn't Boring' podcast when talking about still owning the excitement of reaching the majors. "I think about it every single day. It’s what I think about when I wake up. It’s what I think about when I go to sleep. The one thing I want to do is be a big leaguer and I’m going to do whatever I can."
The Lawlar debut was latest eye-opener. But 12 days before, his major league whistle had truly been whetted. That was when he went to Fenway Park as a fan, taking in Mookie Betts' return.
He had watched games at Fenway before, but this was different. There were more autographs. More pictures. More recognition. And dramatically more anticipation when it came to believing he was going to soon be one of those players on that field.
"You just feel like your there a little bit closer that makes you live the dream or think about the dream a little bit more," he said, reflecting on that Monday night after having just finished his first day back in Southwest Florida. "I was walking back to the hotel and thinking, ‘Damn, I need to be here. This is so sick.’"
First things first. Mayer needs to get his body right. On the day he officially started his rehabilitation under the watchful eyes of Red Sox personnel at Fenway South - which began with a cortisone shot to that ailing left shoulder - he took some time to detail exactly how this 2023 season initially got derailed.
"I’ll go back to the day it happened," Mayer said. "It was May 7, we were playing in High-A in Asheville. I was 3-for-3 and I needed a triple for the cycle. I ended up hitting a ball in the gap. I tried to leg it out for the triple. I ended up stumbling past second base and fell. I didn’t really feel it on impact and then the next day I wake up and can’t lift my shoulder at all. I ended up taking that week off, come back playing a little too soon because the competitor in me wanted to play and didn’t want to rest. So I got used to playing hurt and ever since then it became a cycle and never really got better.
"It’s a good learning lesson on my end. Looking back at it I should have definitely taken care of it. You’re here to play and obviously it didn’t work out for me because I thought it was going to get better over time, but it just kept getting worse and worse and worse so I decided to say something to the trainers."
All of it makes so much sense now. Sure, the promotion to Double A in the final days of May would certainly be met with new challenges. But the drop-off for a player who had always seemed to meet the challenge of advanced competition seemed a bit dramatic.
The shoulder management was tolerable throughout those first few weeks in May, allowing for a batting average of .321 and OPS of .998 in the month. But playing made it worse, leading to bad results and bad habits.
With Double-A Portland, his batting average landed at .189 while managing just one hit in his last 20 at-bats, striking out 12 times during the stretch. Finally, after the Sea Dogs' Aug. 2 game at Bowie it was determined the discomfort was no longer manageable.
"When it comes to my swing, my swing was just giving out every single time," Mayer explained. "The littlest thing can impact your swing and you start compensating somewhere else, which is not a good thing, which is why I think I learned a lot from this experience. But as a player there is one place you want to be and it’s on the field."
All of it has led to a more convoluted path to the big leagues than Mayer, and Red Sox fans, were counting on. He understands that. He also is clearly very well-equipped to counter the questions about those expectations.
Talk to Mayer about the passion of his path and the responses are intense and unscripted. The conversation regarding expectations? He has been asked too many times to not start the response with, "I've said it before ..."
It came with the territory on the day he was drafted, took a jump when hitting a spring training home run off Nathan Eovaldi less than a year out of high school, and is only picking up steam with each day that continues to pass.
"That’s just outside noise," he noted. "That has nothing to do what we’re doing here within the closed doors. I’m still going out about my business the same way. I’m still doing all my work. My goal is to be a big leaguer and help the big league team win and I’m going to do whatever I can to do that. I’m going to work hard. I don’t think what other people outside of that is going affect my work and what I do on a day to day basis."
As Mayer leaned back in his chair it certainly uncertainty of the last few months had been replaced by increased resolve. He had come to grips with the fact there would be no more baseball games for him this year, but at least the plan to get the train back on the tracks for 2024 had finally been put in motion.
The virtually empty back fields in Fort Myers elicits an "it is what it is" from the Red Sox' top prospect. But what helps temper his out-of-nowhere isolation is that feeling that still lingers from that Monday night walk down Brookline Ave. away from Fenway and toward a whole new batch of big league dreams.
"It's still there," he said when asked if he still felt the electricity from that visit to 4 Jersey St. "It reminds you what you're working for. ... If anything it makes me work harder because I want to get there that much sooner."
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