AT 27, BRAINY BRDAR GUIDES FRIARS’ BATS
There will come a time when Michael Brdar’s age is not a big deal.
An argument can be made it isn’t all that significant now. The Padres, who hired Brdar in November, are one of many MLB teams shifting toward younger, inexperienced hitting coaches with a different understanding of the skill and how to teach it.
But the reality is five years ago Saturday, Brdar was playing shortstop for the University of Michigan and going 0-for-4 in a game against the USD at Dodger Stadium. Three years ago, he was serving as a volunteer assistant coach at his alma mater.
Brdar will turn 28 in April, making him the secondyoungest hitting coach in the majors behind only Jarret
DeHart, the Mariners’ hitting coach and director of hitting strategy.
Of the players on the Padres’ 40-man roster who figure to be with the team on opening day, just three are younger than Brdar. (Jake Cronenworth, who left Michigan after his junior season one year before Brdar arrived as a junior transfer, was born 21⁄2 months before Brdar.)
Brdar, who has a degree in economics and says his “mind works in numbers,” sees his age as simply another one.
“I just coach,” he said Sunday afternoon at the beginning of a lunch near the Padres’ spring training complex.
An hour later, he had said a lot to explain he is about more than the numbers and why Padres manager Bob Melvin was so impressed by their first meeting.
“I knew 20 minutes into his interview that I had a pretty good sense I was gonna hire him,” Melvin said earlier this offseason. “He blew me away. And if you’d told me three or four years ago, I’d have a 27-year-old hitting coach, I probably would have said, ‘No.’ But he is that good, that knowledgeable.”
That Brdar is young is hardly debatable. But it is relative. He’s been at this a while, at least in his thinking.
Coaching is the only vocation he can recall aspiring to — ever since that time when he was 10 years old and his youth coach, Ron Anderson, kicked him out of practice for getting a little too “competitive” about some calls made during a scrimmage.
“It was kind like a light
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bulb … even then I knew I needed that,” Brdar said. “As time went on, I just looked at coaches and saw how they were impacting lives. I’ve always thought this was going to be my path. I had a passion for it. And I had a why for why I wanted to do it. I knew (how coaches) impacted me.”
Brdar didn’t have a specific plan, but he knew immediately when the opportunity presented itself.
He was preparing for his second spring training as a professional player in January 2017, having participated in rookie ball after being drafted in the 36th round by the Cardinals the previous year, when he got a call from Michigan head coach Erik Bakich offering him a job as a program assistant.
“Before he finished his sentence I was like, ‘I’m in,’ ” Brdar recounted.
Bakich told him to think about it for a few days. Brdar called him back that night to reiterate his acceptance.
The job was not a coaching position. Brdar instead was charged with essentially building an analytics department for the program with help from students recruited from Michigan’s statistics department.
He did become the program’s volunteer coach in 2019 and in 2020 interviewed with the Giants and Reds before becoming the Giants’ assistant minor league hitting instructor. In ’21, he was promoted to minor league hitting instructor.
It was probably only a matter of time before the Padres called. Needing a new hitting coach has been a nearly annual occurrence for the club.
The Padres have gone through 13 hitting coaches since 2000. Brdar is the sixth since 2015. The Diamondbacks and Marlins are the only teams to have cycled through as many in the past eight years, though change at the spot is becoming somewhat ubiquitous.
Only the Atlanta Braves have had the same hitting coach since 2015. More than half (17) of the 30 MLB teams made a change this offseason. Just nine teams have had the same hitting coach (es) since even 2019.
A.J. Preller is the only general manager to have hired six hitting coaches since ’15, a span in which the Padres have had the major leagues’ lowest batting average and on-base percentage, second-lowest OPS, scored the second-fewest runs and had the third-lowest slugging percentage.
What they did the past two seasons under Damion Easley arguably comprised their most successful run under any of the franchise’s hitting coaches this century, as they ranked in the top 12 in most major offensive categories in that span.
But they couldn’t turn improved plate discipline and contact into success.
Part of the charge for Brdar this year will be helping effect change in an area often cited by Easley and former manager Jayce Tingler as an imperative — a sort of selective aggressiveness.
Brdar will be attempting to effect this change at the highest level.
“It will be a lot different,” he acknowledged. “I don’t know why. I don’t know how it will be different yet. But the foundation of it is getting to know people and understanding their why and trying to get the best out of them. Whether it’s Little League or the big leagues, the goal is for them to be the best version of themselves.”
Preller has over the years made a number of self-deprecating remarks about his inability to discern the right fit at hitting coach. The turnover around MLB would seem to suggest he isn’t the only one trying to get it right.
Here is how Brdar sums up the position:
“I think of it like being Amazon,” he said. “We’re in a service industry. We’re serving the players. We have to do it a lot of different ways. You go on Amazon, you can get toilet paper, you can get a book, you can get whatever you need. As you get on Amazon, there is always the best seller and they’re always nudging you to click on that one. For soap, it’s Softsoap. Then you find yourself always buying Softsoap. When I look at the role of a hitting coach, it’s that. You’re not telling them they need to buy this one; you’re just saying this might be a really good idea. You’re making it really convenient and easy for them. You’re making it accessible.”
For all his devotion to and fascination with numbers, that is clearly just a tool for Brdar. The foundation of his coaching is relationship and communication. He charts (actually writes down) how often players ask him questions and what they are asking about.
“I think it shows a level of engagement and ... what they’re curious about,” he said. “If a player goes a month without asking a question I’ll be like, ‘Hey, is there anyone in there?’ And if that happens, that’s on me. If I haven’t challenged a player enough in terms of their curiosity, what do I need to do better?”
All this while fluently speaking, in Melvin’s words, “the language” of today’s game in regard to analytics.
One of Brdar’s former pupils recently explained the traits Preller and Melvin said they valued in Brdar’s style.
“His whole thought process, I can’t even explain it, it’s so advanced on the side of hitting,” said Donovan McIntyre, the Giants’ 11thround pick in last year’s draft. “Most of the information he gave me, it helped. And it’s the fact that everything he says, he chops down all the sports science stuff to simple-to-understand information.”