From the Front Office to the Mural Wall

Adrian Lorenzo’s two worlds collided last October when Jazz Chisholm Jr. jogged onto the Yankee Stadium grass. It was Game 4 of the 2024 World Series, and even though a year had passed since Lorenzo, C’11, had worked in Major League Baseball, he was there in his own way. Chisholm, New York’s third baseman, wore a custom pair of Nike Jordan 11 cleats Lorenzo had designed.

When Lorenzo walked away from baseball in 2023, he carried so much. The sport had taken him all over Latin America—from Venezuela to Panama to Colombia—as he scouted and signed teenage prospects. He owns two World Series rings from his time in the Boston Red Sox front office. While with the Miami Marlins, he ascended to senior director of international operations.

Then he quit to pursue an art career.


Lorenzo’s work—whether on a canvas, a mural, or a pair of sneakers—often features his abstract set of symbols. It all started with idle sketches in his Moleskine notebooks during scouting trips and percolated when Lorenzo’s wife, Amanda, purchased him an iPad with a pen in 2021. Lorenzo’s grandmother painted in her later years, even did some showings, and it always inspired Lorenzo, but he was never formally trained in art.

The more he drew, the more he considered the future. He weighed his priorities. It led him to a surprising career pivot, and what eventually emerged were a personal studio—Lorenzo is hesitant even to label it that—in Miami called Design by Adrian Lorenzo and a production company named Cultura Media House. About 10 artists make the space their day-to-day home. It’s an enterprise that has evolved over 15 months into a full-fledged creative agency.

“I needed all these creations to come out. I don’t know if I’d explode if I didn’t do it, but there was something compelling me to keep pushing in this direction,” he says. “We make art every day and it supports my family, so I can feel good about that.”

It’s going so well, in fact, that Lorenzo is searching for a larger space. But he had transformed the walls in his West Miami studio into floor-to-ceiling murals with his trademark symbols. He expected it to be a second home. The design company outgrew it—an affirmation of everything he envisioned—but leaving the current studio means losing the mural. “That,” Lorenzo says, “would be tough.”

A New Identity

It all speaks to how much of himself Lorenzo puts into this work.

For years, Lorenzo had devoted himself to baseball; he started 102 games in the outfield over four years at Penn. His focus was singular. He wanted to have a career in the sport somehow. He was a history major—he regrets not considering a fine arts degree—but he laughs when he realizes one detail: He took Drawing I during his senior year, “really the only formal training I’ve ever had.”

The idea of an art career stuck in Lorenzo’s mind, even as he broke into baseball through a job with the high-powered agency Wasserman Media Group, then progressed to a grueling internship with the Red Sox beginning in 2012. “Those programs weeded out whether you wanted to be doing this or not,” Lorenzo says. He wanted it. In 2015, he became a major-league staff assistant with Boston, handling various tasks including replay reviews, and spent the year traveling with the club.

In 2018, he joined the Marlins as a special assistant of baseball operations. He was rising fast in the team’s front office, but he quickly realized that a life in baseball comes with certain sacrifices. Lorenzo and his wife wanted to start a family. There wasn’t room to do everything—baseball, art, family—well. And though the sketches were nothing more than a hobby, Lorenzo always knew he could draw well; the gift from his wife opened everything. He told the Marlins the 2023 season would be his last in baseball. His department had provided paths for many Latin American players in the majors. He was content with his contributions to the game.

I needed all these creations to come out. I don’t know if I’d explode if I didn’t do it, but there was something compelling me to keep pushing in this direction. We make art every day and it supports my family, so I can feel good about that.

“It was a borderline year-and-a-half-long pull of the Band-Aid,” Lorenzo says, with many questions about why he had to pick between art and baseball. “That’s the part I tried out and realized I couldn’t do both,” he says. Baseball is no longer his identity, it’s just a large piece of it. “It doesn’t seem to want to let me go,” he adds. “But that’s OK. I don’t really want it to.”

Today, he’s grateful he can practice his craft, a style he describes as “abstract impressionism,” and do it successfully. He continues to hone the various forms it takes. “It’s two sides of the same coin,” Lorenzo says. “One style is more refined and symbol-laden. And then another style is more emotionally charged, Jackson Pollock-esque, throwing paint downward onto the canvas. That’s a little more raw and rough. I vacillate between those two styles, although the symbols one has more recently dominated. But that’ll flip at some point, and flip back again after that.”

And even after he formally stepped away from baseball, Lorenzo says it continues to give back; many of his private commissions have come from the network he formed during a decade working in the sport.

Now, for the first time in his life, he can devote the proper time to a blank canvas, and he can fill any baseball craving he might have through more creative methods. Within the production company, he and his wife started a branch called Seven8Six Sports, which creates Spanish-language podcasts and other South Florida–based sports content. Raised by Cuban parents, Lorenzo is now a father to an eight-month-old daughter. Art and family, he says, have put everything in perspective.


“The fundamental difference between now and then is that there weren’t many opportunities to sit down with a canvas and just finish out a whole art piece,” Lorenzo says. “Now I have hundreds of finished pieces. And once it started, it just kind of came out—and continues to.”