Before Game 2 of the 2023 American League Championship Series, Michael Brantley took swings on the field with the rest of the Houston Astros. His father, former big leaguer Mickey Brantley, watched from the stands. At one point, the son stepped back from the cage and looked into the seats. His father motioned that the hitter was drifting and told him to turn more aggressively, using hand signals from a couple hundred yards away. No big deal, really, just a dad and his kid.
“He’s not only my father — he’s been a pro hitting coach and he’s played,” Brantley said in an interview after the game. “He knows my swing better than anybody.”
But in that moment by the cage, next to that veteran taking advice from the first coach he ever had, were many other professional advice-givers. Two hitting coaches were on hand, as well as a quality assurance coach and a game-planning coach. One masthead for the Astros lists 14 major league coaches, 14 potential sources of inspiration, but also 14 different personalities whom a player like Brantley could interact with on game day alone. The San Francisco Giants had 15 coaches, by one count. In 2014, the last time San Francisco won the World Series, they had eight coaches — including Bruce Bochy.
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Changes in staffing at the major-league level are being met with similar ones on the minor-league level, as teams make an effort to ensure that players are used to the game-planning process throughout their development. One executive rattled off all the staff they had in Triple A as they tried to replicate the major-league process: a manager, a bench coach, a dietician, two strength coaches, two trainers, two hitting coaches, two pitching coaches, two advance scouts that travel with the team, and even a manager of minor-league advance scouting. Coaches upon coaches upon coaches, and we haven’t even gotten to the offseason, full of dads and outside training facilities with their own opinions about how the player should try to improve.
This explosion in coaching has led to a cacophony in the modern player’s head.
“No matter what, someone’s talking to you, no matter where you go — social media, the ballpark, the training fields — everyone has the thing they want to communicate to you,” said the Giants’ two-way prospect Reggie Crawford, who as a pitcher and hitter has twice as many coaches to deal with than the average player. “You have to figure out what you want to put your time and energy into. There are a lot of voices.”
For veterans, the solution is somewhat simple. You end up being your own coach, or maybe something like the CEO of all the coaches you employ.
“This year is the first year I’m my own hitting coach,” said Cleveland Guardians outfielder Ramón Laureano about his offseason, in which he bought weighted bats on Amazon and went through his own coaching process with them (which has already led to the hardest-hit ball of his career this spring). “It takes time, it can take seven, eight years, to be really good and really bad and know yourself enough to be your own coach.”
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But there’s still a trick to it. You have to be ready to hear new things but also retain some cynicism to sort through all the things you might hear.
“It’s always good to improve, I’m always open to new ideas,” said San Diego Padres infielder Xander Bogaerts of trying some new ideas this past offseason. “If they say something, I don’t have to do it necessarily, but if it is something that might help, I’d like to hear about it.”
Veterans have the money and gravitas to hire their own coaches and follow their own plans, though. It can be tougher for a kid coming through a minor-league system, talking to coach after coach after coach at every new level. What happens when they run into a coach telling them something that doesn’t seem right for their game?
“Just stop listening to them,” thought Seattle Mariners outfielder Mitch Haniger. “You have to know yourself, and (if) someone is trying to get you to do something that doesn’t work for you, you have to make that decision. Guys can fall victim to that when they’re younger because they are people-pleasing and trying to be coachable. I learned that pretty early on in pro ball, you have a different hitting coach every year and some of them, for me, I couldn’t get anywhere with them so I wouldn’t talk to them about hitting anymore, I would just kind of come in and do my thing. They would ask me questions and I’d tell them what I was doing, but I wouldn’t ask them what they think. You have to put a filter on.”
Maybe the modern youngster feels what Haniger is saying. Even ones that have been coached by their dads forever.
“My dad is the one that coached me all the way up, up until college,” said Guardians prospect Kyle Manzardo on the Rates & Barrels podcast at the Arizona Fall League. “At the end of the day, I know what it should feel like when everything is working the way it’s supposed to. You have to find a balance between hearing constructive criticism and using that but also trusting that I know what’s going on with my swing.”
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“The Rays were a little more analytically driven than the Cardinals are, but the Cards have guys that are a little more numbers-oriented, so there’s always someone you can go to,” said pitcher Matthew Liberatore shortly after his trade to St. Louis. “You have to take your career into your own hands, you have your own best interest at heart.”
How do you not listen to your coaches and also not be labeled uncoachable? Unfortunately, players have an answer for this one.
“Create real personal relationships so there’s something other than baseball to talk about,” said one minor leaguer who didn’t feel like his current coaches could help him. “With the old guys, especially, just getting them to tell their glory day stories. Feeds their egos and keeps me in good spirits. If you come with a thought-out plan and show effort they usually don’t say anything.”
OK, so flip the switch now. Imagine being in a front office and hearing these quotes. Imagine how frustrating it would be to try to assemble the best coaches and technology money can buy, create a streamlined process that improves your players and prepares them for all the coaches they will interact with at the major-league level, and then hear that they’ve all got their own coaches and are tuning out your voices.
“Everyone’s got a hitting coach, a strength coach, a grandfather, a brother, a dad, telling them what to do, how to do it, and that the organization is wrong,” laughed one executive.
“I have an interesting perspective given that I’ve worked in both the private space at Driveline and in an organization as a hitting coordinator,” said Boston Red Sox director of hitting Jason Ochart. “I don’t take it personally at all since the players are just trying to be their best. I try to cultivate a culture where guys are comfortable sharing who else they work with during the offseason, given that we all have the same goal of making the player as good as possible.”
So it looks like one answer to the riddle is to be inclusive to all of the voices, inside or out. An executive told a story about having one of their coaches take the online course of an outside coach to better understand what the player was hearing and to better tailor their internal advice to match what that player was hearing in the offseason. Teams have even invited outside coaches to spring training to be a part of the conversation. The goal is still to align the voices, but the player often appreciates when the team has gone outside of their normal sphere to find answers for them.
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“We think about it a lot,” said John Baker, the director of player development for the Pittsburgh Pirates. “We think about messaging. We’re trying to create an environment for the player where they can execute a convicted action. What are the requirements for a convicted action? In a pitcher-catcher relationship, if the pitcher believes the catcher is invested in his success, he’s more likely to believe that he’s calling the right pitch, and he can throw that pitch with conviction. The first part of it is messaging. Is your messaging simple enough, is it clear enough, is it in their own language? We need to show we care, too. They don’t care what you know until they know that you care.”
Another way is considering the timing of the message.
“We always give players a chance to showcase what they’ve been working on but we often just wait until the hitter is 1-for-27 with 15 punchies and they come asking for help,” said Ochart. “Happens every year in every org. There are plenty of amazing private coaches but a lot of these offseason coaches are chasing swing aesthetics and love making the guy feel good in the safety of the cage with underhand flips, easy BP, etc. They’ll make some swing changes that might look pretty in the cage, but it’s a lot different when a pitcher is throwing 95 with a slider and trying to get you out.”
However, creating an environment where learning and honesty are encouraged seems to be a big part of the trick. Former Cardinals hitting coach Jeff Albert got a lot of love, from Tommy Pham and Lars Nootbaar alike, for his knowledge base but also his approach, which is meaningful since both players have gone outside of their orgs to find answers, even with Albert as a resource.
“He’s pretty open and we can have open conversations about that, which is really great because I can just talk to him honestly,” Nootbaar said about Albert after a hitting session at Driveline Baseball.
And Albert’s influence remains even as he’s now moved on to the New York Mets, as the Cardinals — at least when it comes to hitting — seem to be good at giving clear external objectives to their players and getting out of the way.
“At the beginning, the Cardinals did a lot,” said center field prospect Victor Scott II. “But now they gave me homework and tell me to do it on my own, and be your own kind of guy. I went to two camps last offseason, and they gave me a Blast Motion (swing sensor) and said we need these numbers in these categories and that’s going to help refine your swing, keep you on plane a little more, in the zone for longer, attack angles, that sort of thing. But you devise your own plan to get there.”
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This sort of empowerment — along with external goals — is a strong approach for a couple of reasons.
One has to do with something called Reinvestment Theory, which has to do with your mind’s propensity to consider certain cues when under pressure. A batter at the plate might think of all those different pieces of advice they’ve gotten when struggling at the plate — keep your elbow up, stay grounded, squash the bug, whatever it is — and that’s not ideal for performance. Athletes who spend too much time thinking about these sorts of cues at the plate have been shown to perform worse.
“Internal cueing will become the most prominent thought when you’re under pressure,” said Baker. “Your dad is yelling at you to get your back elbow up, and your intention is to focus your attention on the release — any distraction can pull that attention away and make it more difficult to be a hitter. Now some of that vision is clouded by thinking for the same reason you’re not supposed to drive and talk on the cell phone at the same time.”
“I’m trying to think as little as possible on the field,” said Scott, who trained to hit those numerical goals but can forget about them at the plate.
Giving players the keys to their future is also good for both the organization and the outside coach — even when they come into conflict with each other.
“If you can prove what you’re saying to the player and the team says no, the player is going to come back and say, ‘Can you provide me the information to show it to the team?'” said Driveline Baseball’s director of pitching Chris Langin. “But if you can’t get the player to commit, they won’t show it to the team. You try to empower the player, by telling them what you think they should do and providing evidence.”
Empower the player in an open and honest environment. If they care, just having that intention to gather information will almost always be a good thing for their career. Even for a veteran like Shane Bieber, who tried new voices this offseason and was surprised to hear (from Langin) that his curveball grip had somehow changed over the year, without the pitcher noticing.
Driveline Trainee @ShaneBieber19 looking great in his recent start striking out 8 in 5 2/3 innings 🔥 pic.twitter.com/YSQhhU2YYJ
— Driveline Baseball (@DrivelineBB) March 18, 2024
“It was unintentional. It was amazing, but it was also a relief,” thought Bieber this spring. “But there’s value in trying something new and committing to a new process and knowing you worked your ass off all offseason and put your head down and tried a new program. There’s some sort of innate value in it, maybe it flows into some sort of confidence bucket.”
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As a player, the trick is to assimilate all that new knowledge into what you already knew, take the good, not the irrelevant, and do so while not pissing off all the coaches around you (especially if you’re a prospect). And for the front-office executive, the plan is to create an environment where all of this is encouraged, and the player can learn and be open and honest — but also somehow ends up with the coaching you want for them, from the mouth of one of your org’s hundreds of coaches. Probably best to keep the message tight (and externally focused) for lots of reasons.
Simple? Doesn’t sound like it, but somehow it has to feel that way. That was one of the things one of the game’s best coaches nailed early on, anyway.
“Do simple better,” was one of the main tenets of a speech Joe Maddon gave to the Chicago Cubs in 2016, and it’s probably the key to this rapidly expanding and complicated coaching process.
(Top photo of Mickey and Michael Brantley before Cleveland played the Mariners in 2015: Rod Mar / Sports Illustrated via Getty Images)
