How the Dodgers’ Justin Turner was sold on the future of the NFTs – Orange County Register

LOS ANGELES ― An unclaimed locker stands next to Justin Turner’s in the Dodgers’ home clubhouse. It’s a corner cornucopia of random stuff, home to whatever Turner sees fit to keep closest to his workstation before and after the game.

Lately, it’s been filled with clear plastic cubes containing VeeFriends – collectibles for kids based on non-fungible tokens, or NFTs. The idea of ​​a physical collectible based on a digital collectible is enough to bend the mind, to say nothing of NFTs themselves.

Turner, unusual for a major leaguer, has managed to dip into the NFT collection and emerge with a degree of fluidity usually reserved for a rich guy with too much time on his hands.

“I know a little about them,” Turner said, smiling.

Gary Vaynerchuk, the digital marketing entrepreneur who owns Turner’s agency, counts NFT sales among the core components of his business empire. (VeeFriends is another, more recent entry.) As a VaynerSports client, Turner was recently announced as the first athlete to partner with Splash! NFTs, which are part of an exclusive collection available to the VaynerSports Pass NFT community.

Turner is not the first baseball player to be converted to an NFT. Major League Baseball and the Players’ Association already have an “official NFT ecosystem” through Candy Digital. These are the NFT equivalent of baseball cards – officially licensed digital products that enable collectors to buy, sell and trade in an online marketplace. (Coincidentally, Vaynerchuk is one of Candy Digital’s founding investors.)

Turner said Vaynerchuk tried to involve him in non-professional NFT projects starting in the spring of 2020. Like others, he was skeptical at first.

“He had tried to get me to do some things with baseball cards, trading cards, buy certain things that he said were good investments. … Three, four months later they’re worth over a million dollars,” Turner recalled. “So when he came to me with the NFT stuff, I said, ‘OK, I’ll jump on board.’ It’s been enlightening and fun and kind of cool at the same time.”

If the world of blockchain-based digital collectibles were a nine-inning game, supporters will tell you that 2022 is the peak of the first inning. More than digital trading cards and children’s toys, Turner said he was drawn to the promise of future applications of NFT technology.

He recalled a recent road trip in which Scott Akasaki, the Dodgers’ travel secretary, dropped a rather large pile of ticket stubs at Turner’s locker the day after he reached a significant career milestone. (Neither Turner nor Akasaki could recall the specific milestone, but Akasaki said this is a common practice.) The idea was that Turner could distribute the tickets to friends, family, fans — all with a vested interest in saying they were part of a big day in Turner’s baseball career.

“It doesn’t mean they were at the game,” Turner said, “but they could say, ‘look, I was at this game, I have a ticket stub.’ Through the blockchain, NFTs — hopefully sports decide to go that way — now there’s a way to prove you were actually there. Come to the game Friday night, Albert (Pujols) hits two homers, on your way out of the park you scan your ticket, it’s on the blockchain, and it’s validated. It can never be changed or tampered with.”