When Manny Machado hit his seventh and eighth home runs of the season in back-to-back days this week at Petco Park, he trotted the bases wearing fluorescent-colored cleats.
That in itself is not unusual. Machado, a Jordan Brand athlete, sports unique and colorful kicks all the time.
But it’s not every day that he wears cleats created by a 10-year-old kid from Paradise Hills.
It was Kyle Martin’s inspiration and creativity that won him a contest arranged by Machado, in which 10 local kids were tasked with deg their own cleats.
The story goes like this: In December, a Padres representative called Maria Pelayo, league president for The San Diego American-Memorial Park Little League in Barrio Logan, to ask if she had 10 players to enter a coloring contest. Each participant was given a sheet of paper with the outline of a blank cleat and told they had 48 hours to finish it.
But there was no knowledge at the time that the design would become anything more than a piece of artwork.
“I didn’t think it was going to become something real,” Pelayo said. “It was more of a, ‘Hey, let’s color some shoes’ type of thing.”
At first, Martin wasn’t interested in entering. He changed his mind the night before it was due and decided to give it a go. He ripped up his first attempt — a mess up, he said — and used some of his favorite colors in his next effort, giving the shoe a brown and yellow base and adding bright green and orange accents and green shoelaces. The submissions were collected and given to Machado to review.
Though it was difficult to pick a favorite — “They were all beautiful and amazing,” he said — he narrowed it down to three before Martin’s was chosen as the winner.
“Just the look of it,” Machado said. “I liked the neon from it. And I kind of wanted to do neon in the back of my head. So when I saw it, I was like, ‘Alright, that’s probably it.'”
Six months ed during which, unbeknownst to the kids, Machado was working with his Jordan representatives to get the shoe made. In early June, Martin flew to Texas with his mother, Charrol Negron. When the plane landed and Negron checked her phone, she saw a text from Pelayo and a picture of Machado.
“It was Manny wearing the shoes in the field,” Negron said. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, these are my son’s cleats!’”
Martin stared at the picture in awe.
“I was surprised that I made it,” said Martin, who will be a fifth-grader in the fall. “I was just thankful that Manny chose my shoes.”
Martin said he went to a Padres game once several years ago and mostly watches highlights of the team between school, sports and chores, which include taking care of a chicken coop at his house.
When he learned Machado hit a home run in his cleats, his mouth dropped.
“What?” he whispered, before proudly acknowledging he has two home runs of his own under his belt.
The contest was something Machado said he simply wanted to do, though he drew inspiration in part from the Doernbecher Freestyle partnership, which each year allows young patients in OHSU Doernbecher Children’s Hospital to create their own shoe through a collaboration with Nike.
“I kind of wanted to do something along those lines,” Machado said. “I know kids nowadays just enjoy everything we wear on the field. So I thought it would be pretty cool to pick one of those kids to kind of see what I wear out there and be able to help me out with my decision making this year.”
Martin’s Little League team is based in Barrio Logan, an underserved community where many families live at or near the poverty line.
“This opened up my son’s eyes, in of anything is possible,” Negron said. “For Manny to do this really means a lot, especially for the area that we live in. And for him to give any child an opportunity to show off their art skills and turn it into real life, it’s baffling. It’s just amazing.”
