How a star lost a name and found himself

“He came in one day,” said Stanton’s mother, Jacinta Garay, “and said: ‘Mom, I hate my name. Why did you name me that?’ And on and on.”

What Stanton didn’t know was that it could have been worse. His mother was going to name him Fidel.

“No, you’re not,” she recalled her husband telling her at the time. “No, you’re not. No, you’re not. No, you’re not.”

Mike Stanton, now her ex-husband, stood his ground.

“That,” he recalled in March, sitting with Garay in the living room of her home in the Los Angeles area, “was something worth fighting for.”

A week later, outside the Yankees’ spring training clubhouse in Tampa, Florida, Giancarlo Stanton said he had no idea about any of this.

“Nuh-uh,” he said, laughing, but also realizing the name Fidel would not have gone over well with the Cuban exile community in South Florida. The Marlins drafted him in 2007 as a 17-year-old, eventually awarded him a $325 million contract and watched him develop into a National League Most Valuable Player before trading him to the New York Yankees in December.

“Thank you for not naming me that, especially being drafted by Miami,” said Stanton, who will make his home debut for the Yankees on Monday afternoon. “That would have been not so good.”

We are all born into names, and, like circumstance, some are more fortunate than others, particularly for athletes. Amid the dysfunction of the New York Knicks, Carmelo Anthony’s countenance remained Melo. Why wouldn’t Noah Syndergaard, towering with flowing blond hair, embrace his distant heritage and answer to the name fans gave him, Thor? And there would not be an admonition for all to rise for Aaron Judge if his adoptive parents had been named Jones.

While some athletes are destined to embody their names, Stanton’s name — polyglot, lyrical and lengthy — may reveal something about him, too.

If he had stayed with Mike — the name he used publicly through high school and during his first two seasons with the Marlins — he would not even be the first Mike Stanton to play for the Yankees. But there has never been another Giancarlo to play in the major leagues.

“You’ve got something unique, you don’t run from it, you embrace it,” said Stanton, whose bats and gloves have always been stamped with “Giancarlo.” “I’ve met some cool fans that come up and say, ‘Hey, we’ve got the same name.’ But, personally, there’s no one in my phone that I say, ‘Oh, what up, Giancarlo?’ I like the uniqueness of it.”

That is not to say he minds what people call him. His mother calls him Cruz, his father calls him Mike, relatives call him Mikey and his new teammates mostly call him G. His parents gave him so many names, they said, in part so he could choose the one he liked.

— Meet the Family

When Giancarlo was learning how to write, he made a drawing for his father. He spelled out his first name, all in lowercase, with brightly colored markers. His father took it to work at the post office and hung it in his locker.

If it was hard then to see his son growing up to be one of baseball’s best players, it was easier in that drawing to see an expression of what he might become — his attention to detail, his zest for rich experiences and an embrace of his name.

In that way, along with his uncommon size, 6 feet 6 inches and 245 pounds, Stanton seems to be neatly tailored for New York and all that it has to offer. Until now, his exposure to the city’s culture, clubs and cuisine has come in small bites: a night out here, a weekend there.

Home runs, like the two he hit on opening day Thursday in Toronto, will make it easier for the fans to embrace him. But they will also make it harder for him to blend into the background.

Stanton was raised in the melting pot Tujunga area of Los Angeles by a mother and father who were poles apart. His parents were married for 10 years — splitting up when he was 8 — and seem to have but one thing in common: They both worked for the Postal Service.

Mike has the wit and fashion sense of a suburban dad — khaki shorts with the shirt tucked in, white socks, a sweatband on his wrist — and is as deeply abiding as one. He was there for his son growing up — throwing him batting practice after school before putting in a night shift — and in his moment of peril, accompanying him to a hospital when he was horrifically hit in the face by a pitch in 2014.

Jacinta Garay, whose parents were African-American and Puerto Rican, has piercings on each cheek and musical tastes ranging from Afro-Latin jazz to Lynyrd Skynyrd. She recently got her first cellphone so Giancarlo no longer had to leave a message on the house phone to reach her. But she still rates as a cool enough mom that Stanton invited her to his birthday party at a Hollywood club so she could meet Snoop Dogg.

Of her son’s predilection for haute couture (and flashy sneakers, including a pair of gold metallic high-tops), his mother said: “He’s really into coordination and how things look and how to match the colors. The bling tennis shoes — he gets that from me. And he teases me about the furry boots?”

Said his father, with resignation: “He didn’t learn how to dress from me.”

When it came to naming her children, Garay’s eclectic tastes mostly reigned. Her older son, Egidio Carlos Moacir Garay, has a first name she found poetic with the Portuguese soft “g” (pronounced e-JID-e-o) — but off-putting with a hard Spanish “g.” Moacir is a nod to Brazilian jazz composer Moacir Santos.

Her daughter, who is two years older than Giancarlo (pronounced zhon-CAR-lo), was supposed to be a boy, so Kyricio became Kyrice (pronounced KIE-reece); her middle name is Valivia, the name of Garay’s grandmother.

When her plan to name her younger son Fidel was quashed, she pondered an alternative. An aficionado of foreign and independent films, Garay revered actors Giancarlo Giannini and Giancarlo Esposito, and she liked the way the name sounded. “I talked to my cousin and she was, ‘Yeah, let’s do it,’ because we just loved the way that Giancarlo flows,” Garay said, pronouncing it with a flourish.

(Stanton’s second name came because his mother’s favorite singer was Celia Cruz and because an actor who lived in the neighborhood — A Martinez — played a character named Cruz on the late-1980s soap opera “Santa Barbara.”)

If their names caused occasional angst, the children did not stew over it. Egidio went by E.G., Kyrice went by Ky and Giancarlo became Mike.

“We just chalked it up to, my mom went to too many Parliament concerts in the ‘70s,” said Egidio, 38, who teaches political science at Glendale Community College in California. “It just kind of was. It wasn’t something we spent a lot of time deconstructing.”

In retrospect, though, their names may have subtly spurred his worldview.

“Growing up in more suburban areas where you have that name that stands out, it’s already pointing you out as being a little different,” Egidio said. “Being a little kid in first grade being picked on for your ethnicity and identity, it compels you to make those broader connections to cultures and have a wider horizon about the world.”

For Giancarlo, there were other nudges to do that. His father had traveled to China, India and Africa. His uncle Miguele would bring him gifts and regale him with tales about his frequent visits to Colombia, and take him to local Latin festivals. Giancarlo’s eyes were opened further when he took a trip with high school classmates to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, at the tip of Baja California Sur. He went fishing, rode all-terrain vehicles on the beach, ate Mexican food and listened to mariachi.

“It was fascinating to me,” said Stanton, who in recent offseasons began to explore Europe, and then places further afield, cities like Istanbul, Bucharest, Jerusalem and Dubai. Asia and South America are being considered as the next possible destinations. “You don’t understand until you grow up a little bit how cool places are.”

The more recent trips have been with two housemates — former Marlins pitchers A.J. Ramos and Ricky Nolasco — and another friend, Marlins clubhouse attendant Jeremy Ruder.

— Getting Away

Stanton’s Instagram feed — a montage of photos from shirtless workouts, vacation spots, celebrity hobnobbing and other areas of the baseball life — are often accompanied by pithy captions that show an often self-deprecating wit.

“On the field it’s hard to joke around — I’m game time,” Stanton said. “But off, when I’m not working, I’m a jokester. I don’t want to spend all my energy being mad and focused.”

While Stanton’s Yankees teammates have been struck by how fastidiously he adheres to his hitting and workout routines, he is adamant about leaving his work at the office. He has told his father, at times, that he does not want to talk about baseball with him. And Ramos, who has lived with him since 2011, said that in the time they have known each other, they have not had more than 10 conversations about baseball away from the ballpark.

The travels over the winter also provide a necessary break from baseball.

“We play seven months, counting spring training, and you’re so regimented that if you don’t get away it makes you crazy,” said Ramos, the New York Mets reliever who will share an apartment with Stanton in New York this season. “We actually set a plan for what we want to do, and 100 percent of that time we don’t even stick to that plan. There’s no one holding us to it but us. That’s the balance.”

While Ramos has relished experiences like riding to a pyramid in Egypt on camelback — “It looks fake, like it’s in a movie,” he said — their group also returned home with conversations that challenged the way they think. “You go there and you see what’s true and not true,” he said.

For Stanton, his first trip to Europe was a transformational one. Though it was regimented — he did baseball clinics in the Netherlands, Czech Republic and Italy after the 2011 season — the architecture, the food and the culture were unlike anything he had seen growing up in Los Angeles, bouncing through minor league towns or living in Miami.

He also noticed how it sounded to hear names like Gianpiero, Gianpaolo, Gianluigi and even Giancarlo.

When he returned to Los Angeles, he matter-of-factly mentioned to his parents that the next season he was no longer going to go by Mike.

“I was shocked,” his mother said. “I had my mouth open for a week. He’s going to go by Giancarlo now? Are you serious?”

“Yeah,” his father said. “I didn’t see it coming.”

Stanton said it was simply a matter of growing up, of coming to a fuller appreciation of what was important to him. And part of that was making sure that people knew him not only by the home runs he hit, but also by his name.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.