MILWAUKEE -- The hitting guru was in the middle of a lesson when 12-year-old Eric Thames knocked on his door. Thames had run the three miles to Joe Bettencourt's San Jose, Calif., home with bat in hand, just as he would do the next day and the day after that, and for years after that, until Thames was old enough and strapping enough that Bettencourt suggested it might not be the best idea for a young man to be running city streets with a baseball bat.
The notion had never occurred to Thames. All he could think about was hitting.
"None of this is surprising me," Bettencourt said of Thames' stunning return to Major League Baseball.
Bettencourt has a virtual front-row seat, since he watches every Brewers game via MLB.TV and still charts all of Thames' at-bats 18 years after the two met. A former junior college player who found he had a knack for teaching, Bettencourt built a hitting facility in his backyard he called the Triple Crown Art of Hitting, and he picked up Thames as a student after seeing him strike out three times in a Pony League game.
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The bat speed and the physicality caught Bettencourt's eye, so he gave Thames' father a phone number. Soon after that, Eric was over for his first lesson.
"Afterward, I told him to give me a call again if you want to hit," Bettencourt said. "The very next day, I'm giving a lesson and there's a knock on my door, and lo and behold, there's Eric with a bat.
"The next day, there's another knock, and it's Eric again. It went on like that for years and years and years. He thirsted for instruction. He wanted to hit every day. He forfeited so many social events so we could hone his craft. Baseball was everything to him."
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Bettencourt had ideas about exit velocity and launch angle long before those concepts were mainstream, and how to teach hitting without taking away a player's individuality. For hours a day, they talked about hitting, and they took hundreds of swings per day, rain or shine, five to seven days per week for six years.
Thames became a part of the family. Bettencourt has a son, Trevor, eight years younger than Thames, and the two bonded like brothers despite their difference in age. Trevor is now a pitcher for the Phillies' Class A Lakewood club.
They all shared a mantra: Don't be afraid to take the long road around. And that's exactly what Thames would do.
Thames went from unknown out of high school to two small colleges in California to a big one, Pepperdine, where he generated some first-round Draft buzz in 2008 only to suffer a serious leg injury and fall to the Blue Jays in the seventh round. Then he went from hot prospect to big league bust to superstar in South Korea, where Thames embraced meditation, learned to lay off breaking balls out of the strike zone and stopped stressing about when he would hit his next home run.
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All along the way, he remained in touch with Bettencourt. The text messages and telephone conversations were less frequent -- weekly instead of daily -- during Thames' three years in the Korea Baseball Organization, but Bettencourt understood why when he visited in 2015, the year Thames won that league's Most Valuable Player Award.
"It was the craziest thing in the world," Bettencourt said. "I had no idea what it was like. As soon as I walked in the stadium, I'm on the scoreboard, right? Like I'm somebody. I'm just a dude who hits in the backyard.
"The way I explained [Thames' popularity] to people when I got back was that it was equivalent to Michael Jackson being in London. It was insanity when we left the stadium. We needed security to walk us to the car, because the Koreans had no personal space. They wanted to touch, grab. As soon as we got out of a car, there would be 300, 400 people crowding around us. It was almost to the point [that] it was scary."
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With Thames back in the U.S. on a three-year deal with the Brewers, the talks and texts are more frequent again. Thames has said he loves working with Brewers hitting coach Darnell Coles, crediting Coles' scouting reports and eye for mechanics as a big part of Thames' early-season success.
But Bettencourt is a resource, too. Every day, sometimes every other day, they dissect Thames' at-bats. When the inevitable cold streak comes, you can bet Bettencourt will have some ideas about escaping it.
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"He has that eye," Thames said. "It's so funny, there's some people in baseball that have no clue what they're talking about. But there's some coaches that have that special eye, they see little things that you don't even notice. Like on video, I'll go, 'You know what? You're right! I can see that.' And he goes, 'I told you.'"
A couple of other Bettencourt protégés have gone pro since Thames, including David Dahl of the Rockies. Thames, though, is "the most complete individual," Bettencourt said.
"This is the most resilient guy in the world," Bettencourt said. "In baseball, it is about talent, but it is also about mentality. It is about wanting to prove people wrong. Eric has been that way since he was 12 years old."