Marcus Stroman is going to bat for two Bronx teens.
The 33-year-old Yankees pitcher awarded $25,000 scholarships to a pair of deserving Bronx high school graduates to cover their freshman year of college expenses.
The winners — Elani Wyatt, 18, who graduated from Equality Charter High School, and Geurys Florentino, 18, of Monsignor Scanlan High School — were set to be honored at Tuesday’s game against the Cleveland Guardians at Yankee Stadium.
“I was so overwhelmed with happiness. I never expected this for myself. Me and my family were basically all crying together,” Wyatt, who will study architecture at The New York Institute of Technology this fall, told The Post.
Stroman said he saw in Wyatt and Florentino the same striver’s sensibility that drove him while growing up in Medford, NY.
“When you put in the hours around something you’re passionate about, you end up chasing a goal that will be able to give back to you for your whole life and doing something you love,” Stroman told The Post.
“I really don’t believe in overnight success. You truly have to find what you’re passionate about and put in the work and the hours in order to be successful,” he said, attributing his work ethic to his father, a police detective in Suffolk County. “My dad had me working way more than any other kids. My confidence comes from the work.”
Stroman’s hard work and talent landed him a scholarship to Duke University in 2009 — which he took even though it meant turning down an offer to play with the Washington Nationals.
“Having a Duke scholarship played a major role in my life being able to give back,” he said. “Helping kids attend their dream schools to help further their development in their life is something I’m grateful to be in the position to do.”
The Marcus Stroman Height Doesn’t Measure Heart (HDMH) Foundation committed $200,000 in scholarship money over the next five years and collaborated with the financial aid education platform Bold.org, which donated another $50,000.
Bronx high-school seniors with a minimum 3.0 GPA were invited to submit an essay and video describing their college dream.
Wyatt, the daughter of an electrician and medical biller, told The Post she went from barely passing her classes and being a “class clown” in elementary and middle school, to achieving a 3.6 GPA her senior year of high school.
Like Stroman, she had parents willing to push her.
“In elementary school I was barely passing — I just made it by a thread,” she told The Post. “My mom made me realize [the longterm consequence of] my actions and I said, ‘Oh my gosh. Colleges and high schools are going to be looking at my academic records and I need to really step it up to show I want to be successful.”
With tutoring and after-school help from her father, Wyatt went from a 2.6 to a 3.6 and made the National Honor Society her senior year — all while helping kids read and write at PS 095 Sheila Mencher in The Bronx and volunteering at Acacia Network, the largest Hispanic-led human services non-profit in New York.
Florentino, meanwhile, grew up in Edenwald Projects in Eastchester, which he described in his essay as “a dangerous environment.”
Rather than get caught up in it, he played varsity basketball, baseball and volleyball throughout high school.
“Coming from a single-parent household, the ability to pursue my education and take a little bit of hardship off my family is a blessing that I do not take for granted,” said Florentino, who will attend Merrimack College in North Andover, Mass., studying business administration and sports management.
For his part, Stroman said pushing himself as a kid has made him who he is today.
“There’s never a moment where I feel like I should have done more in my pre-game work than I’ve done — whether its in the weight room, mentally, physically or emotionally,” the told The Post. “When I’m on the mound, I’m pretty free knowing that there’s nothing [more] I could have done at that point.”
He also understands the importance of life not just being about work. He recalled how, when he finally was drafted into the MLB in 2012, he celebrate with season tickets for the Knicks.
“I would take the train, the LIRR, in every night,” he said.
But that doesn’t mean he’ll push his own son, 2-year-old Kai, to follow in his footsteps.
“I don’t see him playing baseball. I won’t push sports on him. I don’t know if athletics are going to be his thing,” Stroman said. “He gravitates towards painting, towards piano, towards music. He’s going to be what I was meant to be.”
