Ask former Michigan baseball coach Erik Bakich about Michael Brdar, and the conversation starts with a single word.
“Unicorn,” Bakich said. “That outlier of a person that just comes around once every so often.”
That description helps explain Brdar’s meteoric rise through the coaching ranks, an ascension that now has him as the most interesting name in the Tigers’ revamped hitting department.
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The story behind how Brdar got here, and got here so quickly, starts with a phone call and ends with fateful connections.
(1/2) The Tigers announced that Michael Brdar (Major League Hitting Coach), Keith Beauregard (Major League Hitting Coach), James Rowson (Assistant Major League Hitting Coach) and Robin Lund (Assistant Major League Pitching Coach) will all join the coaching staff in 2023.
— Tigers PR (@DetroitTigersPR) November 15, 2022
Back in 2015, Nick Schnabel was Michigan’s recruiting coordinator when an old acquaintance from De La Salle High School in Concord, Calif., called. Schnabel was an alumnus of the school, and De La Salle had a more recent alum looking for a place to play.
The guy’s name was Michael Brdar. He was a late-blooming shortstop who had battled the injury bug over two years at Diablo Valley College, a small junior college in northern California. But the coach pitched Brdar as an elite defensive player. More importantly, he was billed as an elite personality, a natural leader, the kind of guy who rubs off on everyone he is around. That caught Schnabel’s attention.
Schnabel flew to California, watched Brdar play, knew he was Michigan’s guy. The following fall, Brdar arrived in Ann Arbor. His mother, Marianne, made financial sacrifices to help pay the tuition. He quickly won the shortstop job as a junior. As a senior, he was team captain, an All-Big Ten selection and the team leader in hits. That was hardly all he was known for. Brdar, Bakich said, was an intuitive player, able to improvise on the field, able to see things and communicate in a way that made the entire team better.
“It was almost like the field became his playground,” said Bakich, who is now the coach at Clemson. “We still have, today, in our playbook, things that are called the ‘Brdar Play.’ He brought so much to the program. … He was a connector, a great conduit between the coaches and the players.”
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Brdar was drafted in the 36th round and played in the St. Louis Cardinals’ system in the summer of 2017. But by the next year, he knew his real calling was elsewhere. He returned to Michigan as a program assistant, accepting Bakich’s offer in an instant. And this is where Brdar’s uncanny talents really started to shine.
Brdar graduated from Michigan with an economics degree. He also took it upon himself to expand his knowledge. He dove into analytics, biomechanics and the latest in technology. He taught himself how to code.
“I’m not BSing you here,” Bakich said. “He taught himself to learn, write and program coding language.”
During his first year at Michigan, Brdar built an internal team website and helped the program implement a miniature analytics department.
Brdar was in his 20s, only one year removed from playing. But he was the one helping others master the game’s latest trends.
“He was one guy that challenged me to be a better coach,” Bakich said. “I realized I was teaching a lot of the same things all the way up to 2018 that I was teaching when I was an assistant coach at Vanderbilt 10 years before. He really helped coaches like myself unlock our brains, so to speak, to learn and grow and understand that there’s a lot of new information that’s extremely valuable that we need to understand. In particular, how the body moves and how unlocking the body’s potential can unlock a player’s performance.”
In 2019, Brdar moved to a volunteer assistant position. On a coaching staff that also featured now-Tigers pitching coach Chris Fetter — a powerhouse of a coach in his own right — the Wolverines staged a Cinderella run to the Men’s College World Series, something a cold-weather school is not supposed to do.
“We had truly an all-star staff,” Bakich said, “and our players were the benefactors.”
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In the CWS final, the Wolverines lost to Vanderbilt. But connections made there paid dividends.
The following winter, another transformative phone call came. This one was from the San Francisco Giants. They wanted Brdar to join the organization as a minor-league hitting coordinator. First-base coach Antoan Richardson, a Vanderbilt alum, was among those who put in a good word.
Brdar took the job. And even in a season cut short by COVID-19, he made a strong impression up and down the organization. A young general manager named Scott Harris surely took note.
In 2021, Brdar became the Giants’ lead minor-league hitting coordinator. In 2022, thanks in part to a recommendation from Ryan Flaherty, another Vandy alum, Brdar was hired at age 27 to be the hitting coach for the San Diego Padres.
Michael Brdar, center, speaks to players in the Padres’ dugout during an April game. (Rebecca Noble / Getty Images)He was the second-youngest hitting coach in the league, behind only Seattle’s Jarret DeHart.
“I knew 20 minutes into his interview that I had a pretty good sense I was gonna hire him,” Padres manager Bob Melvin told reporters last season. “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.”
In an up-and-down Padres season that ended in a playoff berth, San Diego ranked 13th in runs and had a slightly above-average offense with a 102 wRC+.
Tuesday, Brdar left San Diego and accepted an offer to be one of three hitting coaches tasked with bringing life to a Tigers lineup that was the worst in baseball last season.
Harris, now the Tigers’ president of baseball operations, and Fetter created natural ties that helped lure Brdar back to the state of Michigan. He very much fits the bill of what Harris and manager A.J. Hinch were looking for as they revamped the team’s hitting department — a creative, forward-thinking coach who can both relate to players and use every piece of information imaginable to help hitters succeed at the plate.
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“He has the unique ability to bring simplicity to the most complex tech, data and analytics of baseball,” Bakich said. “That’s where I think there’s a definite divide between people who understand advanced metrics and the players who actually need the information to perform. Michael, the unicorn nature of him, is the perfect conduit in being able to take advanced concepts and being able to simplify them down to where the players understand them. That’s his superpower.”
Hinch called the hitting coach position the “most volatile” job in the sport. Hitting is a difficult task, one based on reactivity. But the keys to improving the Tigers’ offense go far beyond swing mechanics. Along with new hitting coaches Keith Beauregard and James Rowson, Brdar will be tasked with helping a team that ranked first in chase rate and 29th in walk rate. Obviously, the Tigers must walk more and strike out less. The coaches will also have to help hitters better understand how their bodies move and how their swings function. Tigers hitters must improve their overall approach at the plate, better grasping which pitches they can drive and which they should lay off, better predicting how the opposing pitcher is likely to attack them.
“Now, 30 out of 30 (teams) are gonna talk about zone control, they’re gonna talk about swing decisions,” Hinch said in October. “We all use the same phrases. It’s the implementation that’s the secret sauce. And connecting with players is the No. 1 responsibility.”
At 28, Brdar is younger than many of the players he will be coaching. He played in a college game against Tigers infielder Ryan Kreidler. But if Brdar’s rapid ascension through the coaching ranks isn’t evidence enough, it sure seems like the Tigers got the right guy.
“If he was in Wall Street he’d be a billionaire because he’d be running a hedge fund,” Bakich said. “He just happens to be in baseball, and he’s in the big leagues at such a young age because he’s just got that unicorn, it-factor, savant-type mind.
“His capacity is so high that he can do anything. This is a guy that truly can do anything.”
(Top photo of Michael Brdar, Nick Schnable and Chris Fetter: Peter Aiken / Getty Images)
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