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Burton Rocks

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The Montoyo Rocks’ album cover. Image from Burton Rocks

When sports agent Burton Rocks got the idea to add Latin rhythms to a traditional baseball song, he called his friend and client Charlie Montoyo, bench coach for the Chicago White Sox.

Burton and Marlene Rocks at the studio. Photo from Burton Rocks

Rocks said he thought it would be interesting to record “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” using congas, which Montoyo plays in his spare time. Rocks said he didn’t think anyone had ever recorded such a version of the classic.

“I said, ‘Charlie, why don’t we do a brand new instrumental, like our own walk-up music, and it will be called ‘El Ritmo de Béisbol,’ and then why don’t we do a conga version of ‘Take Me Out to the Ball Game,’ and keep the English lyrics,” Rocks said.

Montoyo loved the idea. After the bench coach was on board, Rocks asked his friend, professional musician TD William, to join them on the project. The sports agent also wanted the woman who inspired his love for Latin music to collaborate with them — his mother Marlene Rocks.

The group decided to call themselves Montoyo Rocks, and soon the Stony Brook residents and William were in a studio in Massachusetts working on the songs. Montoyo, from his Arizona home, recorded his instrumental parts on his phone.

Joining in on Montoyo’s conga playing, Burton Rocks plays the bongos and cowbells on “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,’’ also contributing vocals while his mother sings during the chorus. William was lead vocalist and played the guitar, bass and drums.

During the instrumental single, with Montoyo on congas once again, Burton Rocks plays cowbells with William on cajon and percussion and Marlene Rocks on shakers.

The son said he has loved music since he was younger and remembers his mother playing piano. Burton said he always enjoyed Latin music such as salsa and samba, thanks to his mother.

“It’s one of my favorite genres of music,” he said.

Marlene Rocks, who was a Spanish teacher in New York City and a substitute teacher in Three Village school district, began appreciating Spanish-language music while visiting family in Mexico and studying in the country. The mother said she was glad she passed on the appreciation of the genre to her son. Growing up she would listen to Latin music artists such as ranchera singer and actor Pedro Infante and later would play the records as well as show her son bilingual children’s shows.

 “Burton, when he was little, I had him watch ‘Villa Alegre’ and ‘Carrascolendas’ so that he would get that Spanish and Latin flavor,” she said.

Marlene Rocks added it was nice that she was asked to join in with the Montoyo Rocks group.

“It was a thrill for somebody in my age group to play the shakers to Latin music that I had grown up listening to, but this was an original, so I really had a good time with it.”

Burton Rocks was happy she agreed to join them in the recording studio and hopes others will let their interests inspire them to create music.

“I think music is one of the universal languages of love,” he said. “You can spread a lot of love in this world through music.”

The Montoyo Rocks singles are available on Spotify, Amazon Music, Apple Music and YouTube.

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Baseball cards feating Lawrence Rocks and baseball player Paul DeJong; DeJong and Burton Rocks and DeJong

By Leah Chiappino

Three Village’s Lawrence Rocks and his son Burton Rocks have both made history in the world of baseball.

The son, a sports agent and attorney, negotiated a record-breaking $26 million contract for St. Louis Cardinals’ shortstop Paul DeJong in 2018.  Soon after, his father, a world-renowned chemist and a professor emeritus at Long Island University in Brookville, worked with DeJong, who was a biochemistry major at Illinois State University, experimenting on the best temperature to throw a baseball. They found due to its elasticity, 75 degrees is the best.

Last year, Topps card company issued official cards for both father and son as part of their Allen and Ginter series, making it the first time in the company’s history that a scientist appeared on the back of a card.

This year, as part of their Topps of the Class Program, the company is partnering with various hobby shops issuing a free baseball card, featuring the Rocks to any child that shows their  report card. Three different cards will be included in the program, each highlighting a different subject.

One card features Lawrence Rocks and DeJong in lab coats, but the senior Rocks isn’t stopping his mission to promote education there. At 86, he is working on producing a TV show for children about science with DeYoung and has launched the hashtag, #WeatherStationMoon, a grassroots initiative he created and debuted to MLB network radio July 20 last year. This is to advocate for the U.S. to have an unmanned weather station on the moon to accurately measure climate change, something he says will have a heavy impact on baseball and sports analytics.

“I don’t want to be political,” he said. “I want to be scientific. I want kids to think. All you need to understand science is imagination and curiosity. We want kids to make their own experiments like Benjamin Franklin did when he discovered electricity.”

Another card has Burton Rocks and DeJong, with the caption “DeJong Rocks Reading” to promote literacy.

Burton Rocks said  the mission of the initiative is to have kids idolize education same way some
idolize sports.

“With the salaries so high in baseball today, I wanted to make kids think scientists are cool, teachers are cool and people around them are cool,” he said. “We want athletes to appreciate those that educated them.”

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, DeJong had original planned to visit local hospitals during spring training to gift children cards. Instead, he participated in Topps 2020 virtual tour via social media.

The plan was something that is personal to Burton Rocks. Growing up, he suffered from life-threatening asthma that proved to be stubborn and difficult to cure, causing many code-blue scares.

“Being a kid 40 years ago, the world was so different in approaching anyone with a disability,” he said. “As a kid, one of the earliest things I remember was doctors telling my father if he could invent something, they would use it. The research wasn’t there and there was no cure for what I had. It was uncharted territory.”

Lawrence Rocks, who was influential in creating the U.S. Department of Energy and received his doctorate from Vienna University of Technology, worked with his son’s pediatrician on figuring how drugs interact to  create the best possible result, before deciding that a specific combination of low-dose, long-term antibiotics, worked the best. The father said it was one of the worst cases the doctors had ever seen.

Burton Rocks, who now resides in Manhattan, said he is shocked when he comes to the area to visit his parents by the strides the community has made in medicine and embracing those with disabilities.

“When you look at the Ronald McDonald House at Stony Brook, it’s unbelievable to see,” he said. “When I was growing up, you had to go to St. Charles because they were the only ones that were even equipped to deal with kids, let alone open a children’s hospital or resources for their families.”

He recalled moments from when he was as young as 3 or 4, having to spend a night alone in the hospital when parents were not allowed to stay. However, his mother, Marlene, who quit her job as a Spanish teacher in New York City to care for him, protested and became a makeshift nurse, administering his IVs and medications.

Describing growing up in the area as “extremely trying,” the younger Rocks said he was badly bullied in school for his disability.

“It was a lot of painful memories,” he said. “I’ve tried myself to block out most of my life after kindergarten until high school, because if I didn’t, I would have to remember some of the most horrific things. Can you imagine somebody beating a kid down on the ground, and taking their inhaler away during an asthma attack and getting away with it today? To me it was relentless and happened repeatedly. The joke was hiding my inhaler during recess.”

He recalled another incident of a teacher being annoyed by him wheezing during an asthma attack, and then forcing him to sit by an open window as punishment, making it significantly worse.

“Despite all that I try to have a sense of humor and bring the positivity of my parents with me,” he said.

Burton Rocks said he never let those obstacles hold him back, graduating from Stony Brook University Phi Beta Kappa in 1994 with a bachelor’s degree in history and Hofstra University School of Law in 1997 with a juris doctor. In Law School, he went on scouting missions with Clyde King, a special advisor to George Steinbrenner and a friend of his father. He subsequently co-wrote books with King and former baseball player Paul O’Neill, before he founded the C.L. Rocks Corporation, his sports agency.

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Sports agent Burton Rocks, right, a former Three Village Central School District student, recently negotiated a six-year $26 million contract for St. Louis Cardinals’ shortstop Paul DeJong. Photo by Scott Rovak

By Anthony Petriello

A Ward Melville High School grad recently scored a home run in the world of sports.

A success story in the making, Burton Rocks, 46, has overcome great adversity to make history in Major League Baseball as a sports agent. Having worked a historic six-year, $26 million deal for St. Louis Cardinals’ shortstop Paul DeJong in the spring, Burton has now reached the upper echelon of sports agents. DeJong’s contract may be worth more than $51 million due to an option to earn more money in the last two years of the contract, which makes it the largest ever awarded to a first-year player in MLB history.

To garner the tremendous success he has achieved, Rocks has overcome a debilitating illness — life-threatening asthma — which he has suffered with since he was a young child. As a student at Ward Melville High School, Rocks said he missed many days in class due to his constant battle with the most extreme form of asthma. He had a passion for band — having played the clarinet and the saxophone — but was rarely able to play at concerts due to his illness, which continued throughout his school years.

As a middle school student at R.C. Murphy Junior High School, Rocks said he felt like an outsider due to his absences and had an issue with bullying when he was present.

“I was the outsider kid with the inhaler,” he said. “But you have to accept what God gives you and move on, and I don’t hold any grudges.”

Rocks said his parents, who still live in the Three Village area, sacrificed a lot for him. His father, world-renowned chemist and author Lawrence Rocks, spent much of his time caring for his son, in and out of the hospital, during his childhood. Rocks said his father always made sure he came back home each night, even when he was away on business.

“My dad used to bring me up food from the coffee shop as a treat when he would come visit me late at night after a business trip,” he said. “My dad might’ve been Dr. Rocks to the world, but to me he was Dad. He was there in the morning every day to wake me up, and at night every night to tuck me in.”

“I was the outsider kid with the inhaler. But you have to accept what God gives you and move on, and I don’t hold any grudges.”

— Burton Rocks

Burton Rocks’ mother, Marlene, a former substitute teacher at Ward Melville, spent just as much, if not more time by his bedside. Rocks said his mother quit her job as a Spanish teacher in New York City to spend more time with him.

When Rocks was able to attend school, he did his best to overcome the difficulty of missing so much class time. He had a special connection with his eighth-grade social studies teacher, Dan Comerford, with whom he still keeps in touch. Comerford worked at Ward Melville as a teacher from 1968–2001 and now lives in Jupiter Inlet Colony, Florida, where he is the mayor and the police commissioner. Comerford had fond memories of meeting Rocks in the mid-1980s, when he helped the junior high school student overcome a bullying problem.

“Because he wasn’t there a lot, there was a lot of work to be made up,” Comerford said. “My goal always [with Rocks] was to tell him to relax and take it easy. He was and is a worrier, but that’s what makes him a fantastic agent, he’s a detail man. I made it my mission back then to take care of him and make sure he wasn’t being picked on by anyone.”

Even during high school, Rocks said he frequently visited St. Charles Hospital due to his condition, but was still able to complete multiple Advanced Placement classes including AP Chemistry, AP Calculus and AP Spanish. Rocks graduated in 1990 and attended Stony Book University, where he graduated with a degree in history in 1994. Rocks continued his education at Maurice A. Deane School of Law at Hofstra University and graduated with a juris doctor degree in 1997.

During law school, Rocks said he had the unique opportunity to go on scouting missions with the late Clyde King, who was a close friend of Rocks’ father and was special adviser to George Steinbrenner, the late owner of the New York Yankees. Rocks was given the chance to read through the original handwritten scouting reports from Steinbrenner, information that was and still is undisclosed to the public. Rocks also had the opportunity to have an informal pitching tryout at King’s home in North Carolina in 1995, but while he was a great pitcher on his own accord, King did not feel he was ready for the major leagues due to his health issues.

Burton Rocks as a child with his mother Marlene Rocks, a former Ward Melville substitute teacher. Photo from Burton Rocks

The late Norma King, Clyde’s wife, once spoke about Rocks, as recalled by the sports agent: “Clyde always said ‘When one door closes another door opens.’ Burton is living proof of that expression. He threw for Clyde here [in North Carolina] but his health precluded him from playing professionally. When that door closed, he turned to writing.”

After the realization that his option to play professional baseball would not come to fruition, Rocks focused on his writing. He said he worked with King on his memoir “A King’s Legacy: The Clyde King Story” which was released in 1999. Not long after he graduated college, Rocks worked on his second memoir and co-authored the 2003 New York Times best-selling book “Me and My Dad: A Baseball Memoir” with Yankees outfielder Paul O’Neill.

After writing several books, Rocks said he founded the C.L. Rocks Corporation, a sports agency, in 2008. Rocks implemented what he called “the quantified intangibles metric” in his evaluation of MLB players. This metric measured a player’s life experiences and adversities prior to becoming a professional baseball player and took those into account when measuring a player’s value to a team. Rocks looked back at his own adversities as a child and young adult and saw that those life experiences hold value when drafting a player or coach who will be performing in front of millions of people.

“As a kid, you search for answers to feel normal, and this is what I bring to the table,” Rocks said. “That was, for me, a cathartic product of my search. I realized I could apply it to business. I said to myself, ‘Can I find coaches or players that coach or play well because they’ve overcome adversity and know how to channel it into wins?’”

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