From cleaning dog butts to the World Series: Meet MLB’s oldest — and most interesting — pitching coach
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Jesse Rogers, ESPN Staff Writer
LESS THAN FOUR months after the Arizona Diamondbacks‘ postseason run ended with a World Series loss to the Texas Rangers, baseball’s oldest pitching coach is back in his comfort zone, instructing his pitching staff as he walks the backfields of spring training.
His body might someday tell him it has had enough, but that time hasn’t yet arrived for 75-year-old Brent Strom, and with a freshly signed two-year contract, his entire focus is on getting the D-backs one step further than the team went in November.
“I’ve been conditioned to lose the World Series,” Strom said between Brandon Pfaadt pitches during live batting practice one recent morning. “I’ve lost three of them. All three on our home field. Watching the other team celebrate on our home field is doubly painful.
“I’m like the Buffalo Bills.”
Though Strom is now 1-3 in World Series appearances — having previously made three trips with the Houston Astros — there is little doubt that Arizona’s playoff magic would have run out earlier than it did without his deft touch in handling such an inexperienced group.
The Diamondbacks were powered by stellar performances from starters Pfaadt, Merrill Kelly and Zac Gallen, along with a parade of unheralded relievers, including Ryan Thompson, Kevin Ginkel and Andrew Saalfrank, silencing the powerful bats of the Los Angeles Dodgers and Philadelphia Phillies on their way to the National League pennant. But the pain of falling short on the sport’s biggest stage yet again kept Strom from reveling in his fourth World Series in seven years.
“It’s imperative that we realize there was some luck involved last year and we got hot at the right time,” he said. “I don’t want this to be a one-and-out type of thing.”
Using that as motivation, Strom immediately turned his focus to 2024, skipping his annual offseason trip to Europe in favor of working at a baseball clinic in Cuba and setting up Zoom calls with his pitchers to find new ways to come back even better this season.
“I’ve always gone with the idea of trial and error,” Strom said. “If it doesn’t work, we try something different. You need an open mindset and a highly competitive nature. Heard that from Tom Brady. You have to keep evolving.”
Aside from a rare mound visit gone wrong — like the one that saw Corey Seager hit a World Series Game 3 home run that helped Texas take control of the series — nowhere is Strom’s mentality on display more than when he strides out to the mound to calm a pitcher in the most anxious moments of a game, regular or postseason.
“He’s very direct,” Pfaadt said. “He’s very firm. Sometimes he’ll come out there and give you a nice squeeze on the arm, let you know it’s not a dream. He’ll say ‘I want you to do this’ and usually if you execute then you have success.”
FOUR DECADES BEFORE he was making World Series mound visits, Strom was coaching in the Dodgers system when conversations with Sandy Koufax helped crystallize the overriding principle that has shaped his career: A rising fastball is better than any sinker, even as the latter pitch was spreading across the sport.
“Koufax made me realize all we are, are controlled throwers,” Strom said. “We’re not pitchers. The best way to ruin a pitcher is to make him a pitcher. … If I get an 18-year-old Koufax, an 18-year-old [Dwight] Gooden and an 18-year-old Bob Feller, you want me to teach them sinkers? They’re born doing f—ing this.” He shot his hand out to indicate a fastball.
“As Koufax once said, do you know who throws sinkers? People that can’t throw fastballs.”
But not everyone was ready for Strom’s forward-thinking philosophy. Between 1996 and 2005, he made stops with the Astros, Kansas City Royals, San Diego Padres and Montreal Expos before finding himself completely out of the game.
Without a baseball job, Strom helped his wife open a dog grooming business in Tucson, Arizona — he had gone from discussing pitching with the best left-hander in MLB history to caring for pets.
“I was cleaning dingleberries. … That was my job,” Strom said. “I was washing dogs.”
But soon after, then-St. Louis Cardinals executive Jeff Luhnow gave Strom a chance to work with the Cardinals’ minor league pitchers — but only their minor leaguers, according to the coach. Tony La Russa and Dave Duncan had all of the say when it came to pitchers already playing in St. Louis, and they weren’t looking for differing philosophies. Duncan preached sinkers — Strom believed in rising four-seamers.
“I was not received very well by La Russa or Duncan,” Strom said. “If it was up to them, I would have been fired after a year. In fact, they told me I was only allowed to work with the kids in the Dominican or Low-A, no one higher.”
“[In one meeting] they asked if anyone knows the batting average on ground balls compared to fly balls,” he said. “The comment was made that ground balls are .233 and fly balls are .407. So I raised my hand and said, ‘Is a line drive considered a fly ball?’ They said yes. I said, ‘That’s bulls—.’ A line drive is .700. A real fly ball is .233 and a ground ball is .231.
“I got over my skis a little bit on that one.”
Though the Cardinals went in another direction after run-ins like that, Luhnow continued to believe in Strom’s message — and upon getting the GM job in Houston, he hired the then 64-year-old as the Astros’ pitching coach.
With Strom guiding one of MLB’s top pitching staffs, the Astros won the World Series in 2017 and became a perennial playoff team. But after losing in the World Series in 2021, he decided it was time to move on.
“I put a lot of pressure on myself,” Strom said. “Heaviest is the head that wears the crown. Winning in Houston became expected. I was living and dying by the whole thing.”
That’s when the Diamondbacks called, offering an appealing opportunity: a new challenge, closer to home and a chance to bring his philosophy to a new group of pitchers.
“Brent Strom brought a new glossary, a new pitching glossary,” manager Torey Lovullo said. “And he’s the architect of what we do every single day on the mound.
“There’s a fire in his belly, at 70-plus years old, that I hope we all have. The language changed immediately. The focus as to what we needed to do, pitch to pitch, batter to batter and game to game changed instantly.”
Asked what Lovullo meant by a language change, Strom reeled off a few of his favorite terms: “Top-shelf cutters. Elevated fastballs. Stay out of the honey hole.”
These were more than just buzzwords; Strom brought a philosophy that resonated with a younger group of pitchers eager to experience big league success.
“Three things impact the outcome of the game most,” Strom explained. “Win the battle of three: Throw two of the first three pitches for strikes. Secondly, eliminate or shut down the amount of hard-hit balls. And create chases. Get hitters to chase at balls.”
His pitchers nod their heads when reminded of Strom’s intense but caring attitude and point to his tireless work ethic as key to gaining their trust. Strom is seemingly always thinking about pitching, sending a middle-of-the-night message to reliever Joe Mantiply while vacationing in Europe and a Christmas Eve note to Merrill Kelly with some holiday reading material about hitters’ numbers against him on a certain pitch.
“I haven’t been around a pitching coach that works as hard as he does,” Mantiply said. “It’s nothing to get a text or email at 3 in the morning. He’s always looking for ways to get better. I don’t know if he sleeps.”
THE OCTOBER SUCCESS of Arizona and Houston under Strom has been a victory for the style he has spent so much of his career spreading. The D-backs, like the Astros before them, dominated the top of the zone last postseason.
“For my whole career, I was told [because] I don’t have velocity … make sure you throw the ball down and away, and then we realized that if you throw the ball up in the zone it’s going to work a lot better,” Arizona closer Paul Sewald said. “He’s a huge proponent of rising fastballs and sweeping sliders.”
Strom’s guidance isn’t without hiccups — Madison Bumgarner was released last year after posting a 10.26 ERA. And there’s the occasional salty moment, according to Diamondbacks pitching strategist and former major league pitcher Dan Haren.
“I can sense how things are going during a game to whether I’m going to get a text or call afterwards,” Haren said. “He’s really emotional. I’m OK with being the punching bag and then giving back info in a way we can all get better and grow from it.
“And he can be funny.”
That sense of humor perhaps was never more apparent than in Strom’s most memorable mound visit. In a game at Yankee Stadium while working for the Royals, he went to the mound to talk with pitcher Dan Reichert.
“He walked two guys in a row on eight pitches,” Strom recalled. “I didn’t know what to say to him, we need to get [Jorge] Posada out. I said, ‘Dan, you have to get him out fast.’ And he said, ‘Why?’ I said, ‘Because I have to take a s—.’ He started laughing. The catcher started laughing. I knew I had him right there. He said three or less pitches. I said make it two or less. I turned around and in front of 50,000 fans … I waddled off the mound.
“And the SOB threw a sinker for a double play. Probably my greatest mound visit ever.”
The master of mound visits, indeed. Preparing for another season of them isn’t easy but Strom is committed to 2024 and he’s still happy doing what he’s doing.
“The body will accommodate the goal that’s required,” Strom said, seemingly referring to himself as much as his pitchers. “I don’t know how much further I want to do this but there is some unfinished business here. That’s why I came back.”
On the day Alex Bregman met Roman Anthony and Marcelo Mayer this spring, the two Boston Red Sox uber-prospects greeted him with a proposition: Let us play student to your teacher. Bregman, who joined the Red Sox days earlier on a three-year, $120 million contract, has cultivated a reputation as perhaps the smartest baseball mind in the game, a combination of film hound, analytics dork, eagle-eyed scout and pure knower of ball gleaned from a wildly successful big league career. As Mayer put it in his unique verbiage: “Hey, bro, do you just want to marinate in the clubhouse and talk shop?'”
“It made me laugh,” Bregman said, “because, like, ‘marinate in the clubhouse and talk shop’ — it sounds like me when I was 21. All I wanted to do is just sit in the clubhouse for four hours after a game and talk about baseball.”
All these years later — having played more than 1,000 games, whacked 200 home runs and worn the countless slings and arrows of those who can’t bring themselves to look past his role on the Houston Astros team that cheated amid its championship run in 2017 — Bregman is still in love with the game. When his wife, Reagan, was about to give birth to their second child in mid-April, Bregman told teammates he didn’t plan to take full advantage of Major League Baseball’s three-game paternity leave. That day in Tampa, Florida, he went 5-for-5 with two home runs, flew to Boston, saw the birth of Bennett Matthew Bregman, and returned to the team. He missed one game.
At 31, Bregman is scarcely different from the baseball obsessive who brute-forced his way to the big leagues within a year of being drafted and has logged the second most postseason plate appearances since. Even as others seek his wisdom, he still fancies himself an apprentice, an explorer with an endless font of curiosity– someone who watches closely and studies ceaselessly, capable of making adjustments from pitch to pitch, at-bat to at-bat, game to game. Bregman converses in English and Spanish, with hitters and pitchers, finding himself at the intersection of the Venn diagrams that illustrate divisions in plenty of clubhouses.
“It’s consistent ball talk,” said Garrett Crochet, the Red Sox ace also acquired over the winter. “When I’m not starting, in between innings, he’ll come over on the bench and pull out the iPad and be like, ‘I was looking for this right here. He’s going to give it to me the next at-bat,’ and then [the pitcher] does, and it’s a single or double.”
Bregman’s instincts come from a place of necessity. His biographical details don’t scream big leaguer. In a game increasingly inhabited by physically imposing athletes, he stands a couple of inches shy of 6 feet. He grew up in New Mexico, nobody’s idea of a baseball hotbed. Bregman’s love of the game has fueled him every step of the way, from starring at SEC powerhouse LSU as a freshman to being selected No. 2 in the 2015 MLB draft and becoming a mainstay in a loaded Astros lineup since his debut as a 22-year-old.
“His energy is very contagious,” said Red Sox first baseman Abraham Toro, who also spent parts of three seasons as Bregman’s teammate in Houston. “He’s always talking about baseball. Even when the game’s over, he’s talking about baseball. And it makes you want to get better.”
Bregman started his career picking the brains of veteran teammates such as Justin Verlander, Martin Maldonado, Brian McCann and Carlos Correa in his quest for improvement. Now, a decade later, he is relishing the opportunity to foster those discussions with the next generation of players in his new home.
“Baseball talk is the key,” Bregman said. “Just talking the game with your teammates, coaches, talking about the pitcher you’re facing or the hitters that our pitchers are facing, how you see it and how they see it. And then if you see anything in their game or they see anything in your game, you go back and forth on how guys can improve.
“It’s energizing, to be honest with you. Especially it being a bunch of younger guys who are trying to improve the same way I am. I feel like I’m young and want to get a lot better. And I feel like my best baseball’s ahead of me.”
As the offseason languished on, it became increasingly clear that Bregman would have to find a different home than the only clubhouse he’d ever known. When Bregman’s primary suitors finally came into focus, the favorites were the Detroit Tigers — managed by A.J. Hinch, with whom he spent four seasons in Houston — and the Red Sox.
In the final hours, Bregman asked Boston for its best offer — one the Red Sox had loaded up with annual salary and opt-outs after each of the first two seasons in hopes of proving sufficiently alluring.
It was a staggering deal for someone who over the previous five seasons was plenty good (.261/.350/.445 with 92 home runs) but objectively not a $40 million-a-year player. But Bregman and the Red Sox both believed he could get himself back to the version of himself from 2018 and 2019 — the one who posted more than 16 wins above replacement and ranked among the game’s elite.
Bregman accepted. And that’s when Boston’s hitting machine went to work. Red Sox coaches already had put together a presentation to explain how and why he needed to fix his swing. Over time, Bregman had developed almost imperceptible bad habits. The timing of Bregman loading his hands was too late and too fast. Moving his hands as the ball left the pitcher’s hand left him vulnerable, and never did Bregman possess the sort of bat velocity to make up for it.
“After those [successful] years, it was like, I wanna be better, I wanna be better, I wanna be better, I wanna be better,” Bregman said. “So I started trying to change things and improve, improve, improve instead of doing what made me who I am and just refining what I was already doing at the time.”
Red Sox hitting coach Peter Fatse and assistants Dillon Lawson and Ben Rosenthal loved the simplicity of Bregman’s move in the batter’s box, but they saw more potential and knew swing adjustments would be necessary. Change doesn’t exactly suit Bregman. He is the guy who eats the same meal every day and never deviates from his hitting schedule. But he is also the son of two lawyers and at least open to practical solutions, so he was willing to hear out his new coaching staff.
The Red Sox worked with Bregman to address the flaw in the swing: It all started, they agreed, with a poor setup and load. Rather than exclusively focus on bat-speed training, Bregman committed to loading earlier and rebuilt his swing in a place that’s heaven to baseball rats like him: the batting cage.
“Get back to doing what I did in my best years, which was to focus on being the best in the cage that day,” Bregman said. “Not worrying about if I’m hitting well on the field; more like, can I master the f—ing cage today? Can I square the ball up? Can I execute the drill in the cage and then go play in the game? As opposed to, I need to go 4-for-4 tonight with two doubles and a homer. I’m gonna be the best hitter before the game in the cage, and then I’m gonna go out and just try and repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat.”
Bregman had found his greatest success when he followed a few cues: load slowly, take the bat’s knob past the ball in front of the plate and strike the inside part of the ball. Finding that simplicity in his purpose and swing would be the goals. He did not need to set specific production expectations, instead trusting process over outcome. He would fix the swing in time for the numbers to reflect it. When the ball started jumping off Bregman’s bat again, he knew he had hacked himself successfully. His average exit velocity over the first seven regular-season weeks with the Red Sox jumped by 3 mph. His hard-hit rate spiked to 48.5% — up eight percentage points over his previous career high. He is hitting .304./381/.567 with 10 home runs and 32 RBIs in 43 games.
“Honestly,” Bregman said, “I feel like this has been the best I’ve hit in my career.”
Bregman’s desire for improvement does not begin and end with himself. When he recently overheard Fatse and Ceddanne Rafaela, the Red Sox’s talented 24-year-old super-utility man, talking about ways to improve Rafaela’s poor swing decisions, he couldn’t help but chime in.
“We were talking about simplicity of the load, and [Bregman] just goes, ‘One, two,'” Fatse said. “One, be ready to hit. Two, be in a position to get your swing off. And it was amazing. It just clicked. In the dugout, we’ll scream: ‘one, two.’ Rafa’s walking up plate: ‘one, two, one, two.’ [Bregman] will be screaming it from the dugout, and it’s simple, but it’s his ability to connect with everybody that makes him a unicorn in that regard. He cares so much about his teammates. He wants to win.
“It’s just the urgency behind it,” Fatse continued. “If he has something, he’s going to go right to you and give it to you. And whether it’s something with his swing or if we’re talking about somebody else’s approach or swing or matchup-related stuff, he’s ready to engage in the conversation immediately. There’s no waiting around. When you have that level of urgency, everybody responds to it.”
In much the same way that his advice has rejuvenated Rafaela — who has four two-hit games in his past eight and has struck out only twice — Bregman’s arrival has changed the Boston clubhouse by bringing to it an edge that left with the 2019 retirement of Dustin Pedroia, the second baseman who was every bit the heart of the Red Sox’s three most recent championships as David Ortiz. Bregman grew up idolizing Pedroia for his outsized production from an undersized body. He was unaware of the other qualities they share: the encyclopedic knowledge of the game, the capacity to evoke fits of uproarious laughter at team dinners, the desire to help others find the best version of themselves the same way he did.
“Everyone understands [Bregman’s] process is just to win that game and he’ll do whatever it takes that day or night to win,” Red Sox outfielder Rob Refsnyder said. “He’ll adjust his swing, his setup, his thoughts, his scouting, everything. It’s all about just winning that game. I think guys are a lot more receptive to him, and obviously he’s a winner and he works so hard. It’s easy to take advice from somebody like that because you know it’s from a genuine, we’re-just-trying-to-win-this-game [perspective].”
Winning comes in plenty of forms, be it a 5-for-5, two-homer day or an 0-for-4 bummer in which Bregman does the work with his glove or legs. By now, his teammates know that no matter how early they show up to the ballpark, Bregman will be there first, his white pants already on, ready to attack the day. He’s always happy to pore over information and develop a detailed scouting report, Crochet said, “based off of analytics, video, prior at-bats. For him, it’s really a happy medium of all three. I feel like he’s able to get on TruMedia — that’s our site with all the pitch-usage breakdown by count and pitch-frequency maps — and window a guy or sit on a specific pitch, specific spot. It’s incredibly impressive.”
The Red Sox aren’t taking for granted the time they get with Bregman. As much as they’ve loved the knowledge and production, they recognize that a seasonlong jag almost certainly will precipitate him opting out of his contract. Bregman now knows he can replicate for other teams what he developed in Houston, where he was lionized by local fans amid the festering fallout of the cheating scandal in 29 other stadiums.
If this does wind up as a Boston gap year, a la Adrian Beltre, Bregman’s influence will continue to reverberate. He did spend time marinating with Anthony and Mayer — and also bought them, and a host of other top Red Sox prospects, tailored suits to help them feel comfortable in a major league setting. By Bregman’s second week with the Red Sox, the kids were already giving him grief, wondering aloud if he had gray pants in his spring training locker — an implication that he’s too big-time to travel for a Grapefruit League road game. Never one to be told what he is or isn’t, Bregman went for a 90-minute bus ride with Anthony and Mayer from Fort Myers to Sarasota.
Bregman’s connection to the Red Sox is generational. His grandfather was the general counsel for the Washington Senators and helped hire Ted Williams, who spent the entirety of his 19-year Hall of Fame playing career with Boston, as their manager. His father, Sam — currently running for governor in New Mexico — grew up around the Senators and Williams. And it sparked a fondness for baseball he passed on to his son.
The allure of Boston that helped guide Bregman to the Red Sox — familial and modern — has been substantiated in every way but their record, which, at 22-22, is good enough for second place in the American League East but would leave Bregman on the outside looking in at the postseason for the first time in a full season spent in the big leagues. Boston has plenty of time to right itself, which would be the final validation for Bregman on his stay in Boston, however long it lasts.
“I felt like it was a place I could win,” Bregman said. “I felt like it was a place where I could prove the caliber a player that I believe I am. And I wasn’t scared to go prove it.”
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The Boston Red Sox placed right-hander Tanner Houck on the 15-day injured list Wednesday because of a flexor pronator strain in his right forearm.
The move is retroactive to Tuesday. In a corresponding move, the Red Sox recalled right-hander Cooper Criswell from Triple-A Worcester.
Houck yielded 11 runs, nine hits (including two home runs) and three walks in 2 1/3 innings Monday night in a 14-2 loss at Detroit.
“This is definitely probably the most lost I’ve ever been,” Houck, 28, said after the game. “And just not getting the job done, which weighs on me heavily.”
Asked about his health, Houck said, “Physically, I feel good,” and added, “I just need to be better.”
Houck is 0-3 with an 8.04 ERA, 17 walks, 32 strikeouts, an America League-high 57 hits allowed and a major league-worst 39 earned runs in 43 2/3 innings over nine starts this season.
An All-Star in 2024, Houck owns a career 24-32 record with nine saves, a 3.97 ERA, 158 walks and 449 strikeouts in 474 1/3 innings over 113 regular-season games (80 starts) since 2020.
The Red Sox selected Houck 24th overall in the 2017 MLB draft out of the University of Missouri.
Criswell, 28, is 0-0 with one save, a 10.38 ERA, one walk and no strikeouts in 4 1/3 innings over three relief appearances this season. For his career, he is 7-7 with one save, a 4.78 ERA, 44 walks and 104 strikeouts in 141 1/3 innings over 41 games (20 starts) for the Los Angeles Angels (2021), Tampa Bay Rays (2022-23) and Red Sox (2024-present).
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