PHOENIX -- Longtime Brewers coach Jason Lane has logged enough time in baseball to remember when Major League hitting coach was a one-man job.
That era is long gone, replaced by big data and bigger staffs. Or, in Milwaukee's case, a three-man crew of hitting coaches under Lane, who has the sort of job title -- offense and strategy coordinator -- that takes him back to his days playing quarterback at EL Molino High School in Northern California’s Russian River Valley wine country. It’s not the job Lane envisioned when he joined the Brewers as an assistant hitting coach in 2015.
“I didn’t think there would ever be this role in baseball,” said Lane, between rounds of batting practice on Wednesday before the Brewers and Cubs met for the first time this spring. “But it makes sense for our club. ‘Murph’ [manager Pat Murphy] preaches offense, not hitting.”
It’s a subtle distinction, offense versus hitting, but one Murphy takes so seriously that the Brewers had a long, interactive “offense meeting” last weekend before players departed for the World Baseball Classic. Players went around the room and talked about hitting, baserunning, awareness and every other small nuance that helped a team that ranked 22nd last season in hitting homers score the third-most runs in the Majors.
“Offense, in my mind, is a mindset,” Murphy said. “It’s a collective mindset about, ‘How are we going to create chaos?’ I asked some of the people [in the offense meeting] who were our opponents in the past to speak, and they spoke about how you would look up and it was bases loaded. That was their perception. It was cool.”
In spite of that success, the Brewers made significant changes to the coaching staff during the offseason to maximize scoring. Lane moved from third-base coach to Milwaukee's version of offensive coordinator, Matt Erickson took over as third-base coach and Spencer Allen joined the staff as first-base and baserunning coach. Eric Theisen was promoted to lead hitting coach with staff newcomers Daniel Vogelbach and Guillermo Martinez, and Evan Martin and Daniel de Mondesert took the roles of game preparation specialists. Murphy also mentioned Major League field coordinator Nestor Corredor is also involved with the hitters.
What the Brewers don’t have is a bench coach. They eliminated that position after moving associate manager Rickie Weeks back up to the front office after two years in the dugout, preferring to spread around the duties traditionally assigned to bench coach.
“Some people can look at it as too many thoughts can get messy,” Lane said. “But when you have more eyes, you can cover more areas. I think we do a great job of looking through different lenses, but coming to the most important thing. You have to check your ego at the door and do what’s best for the players.”
Said Murphy: “Yeah, there’s a lot of people involved. There’s a navigation involved, a collaboration there, and that has to be kept in check.”
This spring is a chance for everyone to find their lane, so to speak, including the hitters, who loosely -- but not exclusively -- gravitate to one of the three hitting coaches for the bulk of their work. For Christian Yelich, it’s an easy fit with Vogelbach, a Brewers teammate in 2020 and ‘21 who broke into coaching last year as a special assistant for hitting with the Pirates and joined Milwaukee’s staff at the start of last offseason.
To find Vogelbach in Brewers camp you often just have to listen, because you’re likely to hear him before you see him. Part of his job, as he explained in a January Q&A, is making hitters feel good about themselves.
“He obviously gets the player aspect of it, but he understands the mechanics of a swing, too,” Yelich said before making his Cactus League debut against the Cubs as Milwaukee’s designated hitter. “He’s not just the hitting coach because he played. He’s the hitting coach because he understands the mechanics and blending all of the new information you get as a player. I think he’s going to be a very, very good coach.”
Martinez, who was Major League hitting coach for the Blue Jays from 2019-24, gives the Brewers a new resource for Spanish-speakers, something the club felt was missing. He and Vogelbach both report to Theisen, the analytically savvy organizational veteran who has been with the Brewers since 2021 and is going into his second season on the Major League staff.
Lane comes to his new position with a unique perspective. He found that, as third-base coach, he spent much of the game on an island with his own thoughts, laser-focused on small things related to pitch sequencing and pitcher mechanics he used to miss from the bench.
It changed his view on parts of the game, but the trouble was communicating what he saw in a way that could make a difference in-game. Now that he’s back in the dugout, he is eager to have a more immediate impact.
“A lot of times it’s just pecking away like a woodpecker, like Murph talks about all the time,” Lane said. “We kept pecking and pecking, and all of a sudden you punctured it and the thing would blow up. You could feel it in the other dugout, like, ‘Here they come.’”