35-HR bat or pepper magnate? Why not both?

ZOLFO SPRINGS, Fla. -- We first catch up with Joseph Anthony Mancini III -- known as Trey in Baltimore and across MLB -- somewhere outside the warehouse. No, not that one.

We are more than 900 miles away from the red brick of Camden Yards, sweating in the central Florida heat next to two crates stuffed with green peppers. We are 60 winding county road miles east of the Orioles Spring Training complex, an hour south of Mancini’s hometown of Winter Haven, on 35 acres of land lined with live oak and replete with cattle egrets, pecking feverishly at its lawns.

“You made it,” he greets, extending a hand. “It is pretty far out.”

The Mancinis have been here since the early 1940s, long before the state turned the neighboring railroad tracks into Highway 17, swelling Zolfo Springs’ population up near 2,000. They came from southern Italy, then down from New England to Tampa, where Trey’s great-grandfather, Antonio, heard from a connection with the American Can Company of some available land in Zolfo Springs.

They make peppers, up to 50,000 pounds per day, and have (in some quantity or another) for nearly a century. Their headquarters for the past seven decades has been here, where they’ve built two warehouses and one 20,000-square-foot processing building on the campus now run by Trey’s uncle, Rick.

Rick is the Mancini Packing Company’s CEO and president, overseeing retail and food service operations of 60 unique products, 70 employees and about $10 million in yearly sales. The Mancinis sell roasted peppers, fried peppers and blanched peppers, sweet peppers, hot peppers, tangy peppers and sliced peppers. They sell them in 7 oz., 12 oz. and 28 oz. jars, distributed to all 50 U.S. states and Canada. They’ve made them, more or less, the same way for almost a century, give or take some natural technological and equipment advancements.

“I grew up on these things -- every meal we had, we had the peppers there,” Trey says later, sitting under framed family photos in Rick’s office. “My mom didn’t even have to make them. You can just eat them out of the jar, and we had jars all over the house.”

Now he’s come back to learn how they got there. His parents brought him to the factory as a child, but Trey hadn’t been back again until this past Christmas. Back again just weeks before his 28th birthday, Mancini is full of newfound interest in his family history. After a breakout 2019 campaign that saw him realize who he was as a player, the Orioles slugger stands at the doorstep of his fourth full Major League season more curious than ever about where he comes from, and how exactly Mancini became a household name long before he ever reached The Show.

“I wish I would’ve asked more questions,” Trey says. “As I’ve gotten older, I’ve wanted to learn more.”

When Players Weekend came to Camden Yards last August, the Orioles brainstormed various ways to highlight the personality of their players. One concept they came up with was culinary creativity, tasking five players to design specialty concession items for that weekend at Camden Yards. Right-hander Miguel Castro chose Dominican-style chicken and rice, in honor of his home country. John Means went with BBQ for his native Kansas City. Anthony Santander with arepas, popular in his native Venezuela.

For Mancini, the choice was easiest. He’s always identified as Italian-American, a third-generation member of an immigrant family that grew into a mainstay on kitchen shelves across the country. It was something of a culmination when Mancini peppers lined the specialty dish at Oriole Park’s Roma Sausage concession that weekend, 98 years after Trey’s great-grandfather, Antonio, began roasting them out of a small neighborhood cannery.

“They are -- unbiased -- my favorite peppers in the world,” Trey said.

Consider it the kind of rise-from-your-bootstraps story that can be found all across the Orioles clubhouse, not the mention society writ large. Orioles Rule 5 Draft pick Brandon Bailey’s Chickasaw native ancestors walked the Trail of Tears. Outfield prospect Yusniel Diaz defected from Cuba as a teenager. Dean Kremer is an Israeli citizen, the first drafted into MLB.

Today, Mancini’s family story is so common that the hardships immigrants like his relatives faced are often lost to history. Trey’s great grandfather, Antonio, immigrated in 1904 at age 21, from the small city of Turi, near Italy’s Adriatic coast. Southern Italians faced difficult conditions in America at the turn of the 20th century, where they were less than welcome in most communities and faced discrimination and slurs in both the North and the South. Just 13 years earlier, in 1891, 11 Italian-Americans -- acquitted in the killing of the local police chief -- were hanged in New Orleans in one of the largest mass lynchings in U.S. history.

Antonio married Margherita, another Turi immigrant, in 1910. The couple settled in New Britain, Conn., where they opened a small grocery store, a macaroni factory and eventually, the pepper cannery in nearby Southington. The Mancini Packing Company was founded in 1922 and, before long, Antonio, Margherita and their six children worked together to operate it.

Trey’s grandfather, Joseph Anthony Mancini, found the Zolfo Springs site when demand grew and returned to Florida with another brother, Frank, after serving in World War II.

All five Mancini brothers -- Anthony, Frank, Joseph, Daniel and Patrick -- served in and survived the war. Antonio and their sister Lillian handled day-to-day operations while they were away.

“That’s crazy to think about,” Trey Mancini said. “You can never imagine five brothers all serving in a war together now.”

Joseph and Frank managed the factory for 50 years, implementing innovative automation techniques along the way. Joseph had three sons: Daniel, Trey’s father Joseph “Tony” Jr., and Rick, who eventually took the reins. Daniel and Tony became doctors. Trey, Tony Jr.’s son, blossomed into one of the American League’s best hitters.

“When they first came down they were roasting peppers in charcoal in a 55-gallon drum and they would hold the pepper on a stick over the coals, like a marshmallow,” Rick said.

Things are different now, as Trey is starting to see. He straps on a hairnet and follows Rick to the head of the assembly line, the first stop in a labyrinth of conveyor belts, stainless steel pipes and electrical wires. Peppers are pushed onto the belt and inspected by hand, then discarded if they show significant signs of deficiency. The ones that pass are sent up a vertical belt to a roofed enclosure outside the factory walls and into one of seven cylindrical barrel roasters, which scorch the peppers with 1,500-degree Fahrenheit flames. Trey watches intently as the sound of charring fills the space.

“That’s the coolest part, definitely,” he says. “Especially since roasted is my favorite kind of peppers.”

From there, the peppers head back inside to be de-cored, then de-seeded, winding through various posts on the assembly line.

“It’s so cool as it just starts as the whole pepper in the beginning, and after about 10 minutes it’s in the jar and ready to be packed,” Mancini says. “It’s really cool seeing how it goes down the entire assembly line and how it works.”

Trey’s mother, Beth, is mostly of Irish ancestry, and as a Notre Dame alum himself, Trey always will root hard for the Irish. But Mancini always has considered himself Italian -- after all, the vowel at the end of his last name stuck out growing up in central Florida. It also marks him as the latest in a rich history of Italians making their mark in MLB, which scholars date back to Tony Lazzeri’s emergence with the Yankees in 1926.

First-and-second generation Italian-American stars became commonplace in the game over the next three-plus decades, largely the products of blue-collar communities on the East and West coasts: Ernie Lombardi, Joe DiMaggio, Yogi Berra, Phil Rizzuto, Roy Campanella, et al. Between 1947-57, eight of the 22 MVP Awards went to players of Italian descent, per author and historian Larry Baldassaro.

The landscape changed as Italians rose toward the middle class and baseball’s popularity shifted into more rural areas of the South and West, and then grew internationally. By Mancini’s formative years, Paul Konerko, Jason Giambi, Craig Biggio and Mike Piazza were the game’s biggest Italian-American stars. It’s impossible to determine how many big leaguers today feature Italian ancestry, but Mancini ranks with Anthony Rizzo and Francisco Cervelli among the game’s most prominent. He hopes to play for Team Italy in next spring’s World Baseball Classic.

“I’m thinking about going to go back to visit this offseason,” Mancini said. “Might even get Rosetta Stone on my phone to learn some of the language.”

The Orioles hope he’ll do so as one of the game’s top performers of any heritage, after pacing the team with career highs in homers (35), OPS (.899), total bases (322) and several other major offensive categories last summer. That was never guaranteed for a former seventh-round Draft pick who battled defensive questions as a prospect, was blocked positionally by several big-money stars, and who, despite those obstacles, has worked to rise beyond his relatively humble baseball origin station.

Sound familiar?

“I didn’t know Trey going into the season last year, and he might be one of the easiest people to coach I’ve ever been around at the big-league level,” O’s manager Brandon Hyde said. “He’s extremely team-oriented. He wants to do what’s best. He has off-the-charts makeup. His mentality is phenomenal. He does everything you ask him to do and he does it well. He gives unbelievable effort day in and day out, and he’s first-class all the way.”

Like he does with the process for making peppers, Mancini has been steadfast about his stance on the Orioles rebuild: He wants to see it through. He does not want to go, though as an elite, cost-controllable player approaching his prime, he will qualify as the Orioles’ top trade chip for the foreseeable future. The front office speaks glowingly of Mancini, but has not approached him about an extension and remains open the possibility of trade.

He speaks glowingly of Baltimore, the fans that have welcomed him, and of the organization that drafted and developed him. He wants to be part of the next winning team at Camden Yards. He said it last summer, this past winter, and this spring when camp opened just down the road. He is headed back there tonight, ready to trade in his hairnet for a batting helmet.

But first …

… but first he is greeted near the warehouse exit by a parting gift. Each box contains a six-pack of 12-oz jars filled with sweet roasted Mancini peppers. They are arranged in a cube that stretches from the floor up past his bellybutton.

Rick hands one to Trey, who palms it, cradles it like a football, and offers it to the crowd.

“We can throw them in the team cafeteria,” Mancini says, beaming. “You guys want to take any home?”