Brentzs share athletic bond
PawSox slugger can rely on Anne Marie for support
PAWTUCKET – Already beaming with pride, Anne Marie Brentz emptied her emotional vault when it became official on Monday night that her husband was going to take home the wrestling-style championship belt that signified winning the 2017 Triple-A All-Star Home Run Derby.
You can see Anne Marie wearing a red sweatshirt in a video clip that featured PawSox outfielder Bryce Brentz accepting congratulations from Tacoma first baseman Daniel Vogelbach at home plate. The camera was positioned at field level and the audio quality was perfect, as Anne Marie screamed for joy.
She did manage to compose herself just long enough to take out her cell phone for a picture of Bryce as he draped the belt over his left shoulder.
A baseball-themed road trip that for a change of pace featured the wife as the lone traveling companion, Anne Marie couldn’t have asked for a better way to start off Bryce’s three-day All-Star stay in Tacoma, Wash, which culminates Wednesday night (10 p.m. first pitch) when the best pitchers and hitters in the International League square off against their counterparts from the Pacific Coast League.
Originally, Mr. and Mrs. Brentz – married in November 2015 – were scheduled to spend baseball’s annual in-season reprieve in their native Tennessee. The idea of Bryce putting on a power-packed show at Cheney Stadium was pure fantasy until last week when he was officially added to the I.L. All-Star roster.
“In baseball, you can’t plan for anything. I don’t even know why you try to,” Anne Marie said prior to getting on a plane that would take her and Bryce three time zones away to the Pacific Northwest. “We were so confident that we were going home. Then Bryce called me and asked what I was doing. I said that I was sitting down. ‘Good,’ he said. I replied, ‘What are you about to tell me?’”
Finding out that Bryce was All-Star bound was not exactly a shocker. It was merely a fitting recognition for a phenomenal power surge over the last month and a half. Eleven of his PawSox-leading 18 home runs have come since June 1. Eighteen was also his final-round total during Monday’s Home Run Derby.
Even when the International League announced its original roster in late June, the feeling was that it was only a matter of time before a certain wrong would be righted.
“I knew it. I knew this was going to happen!” Anne Marie told Bryce upon finding out that Tennessee would have to wait for another time. “I told him I was excited and so happy for him. Normally I can’t stand packing, but I’m super excited.”
It’s not every day that a wife gets to accompany her baseball-playing husband on the road, let alone in the middle of the season and for an all-star recognition.
“I didn’t even have time to be upset that we weren’t going home, but this will be so much fun,” said Anne Marie, her enthusiasm undoubtedly in another stratosphere in the wake of the multitude of baseballs that her husband sent into the Tacoma sky on Monday night. (Bryce slugged 38 homers over the course of the three-round competition.)
Lending pointers or tricks to the hitting trade isn’t Anne Marie’s department. She was an athlete herself – specifically, a four-year guard for the women’s basketball team at Middle Tennessee State University – and the yearning for competition never completely leaves that kind of person.
All baseball wives share, to some extent, the excitement and tension of their husbands’ careers. For better or worse, Anne Marie has been there for the vast majority of her husband’s pro baseball foray. Bryce also attended MTSU – he met Anne Marie in 2007 but didn’t start to officially date his future bride until 2013.
For three straight years, Anne Marie watched as Bryce attempted to bounce back from one injury after another. This season brought a new host of challenges. A tough-to-swallow spring started when Bryce was taken off Boston’s 40-man roster, the result of being out of minor-league options. He cleared waivers and followed a familiar road back to Pawtucket for the beginning of his sixth season with the ballclub.
In Anne Marie’s world, 3-for10 means a bad shooting night on the hardwood. For Bryce, going 3-for-10 means you must be doing something right. She often made that correlation as she watched Bryce suffer through a 3for-47 slump that left him with a .162 batting average and a .286 slugging percentage on May 19.
“He was upset at the beginning of the season, but when he struggled before, it was a super downer,” Anne Marie said. “(Getting DFA’d) was a blow but he just kept on working through it. It was more of a ‘I know I can do this.’
“Being an ex-athlete helps a lot, but it’s frustrating for me when it was out of my control,” Anne Marie added. “I kept constantly saying, ‘Keep digging and going after it.’ I’ve tried to give advice, but I don’t know enough about the mechanics of a swing and stuff like that. I can say, ‘Keep your head up.’ You can’t carry a bad game to the next day because it’s going to eat you up, but it’s not always easy when you’re struggling.”
The bad games for Bryce have been few and far between since the implementation of a toe-tap hitting approach that has taken him from being a benchwarmer with the PawSox to a career revitalization.
“You hear the stories from the other wives and girlfriends about how their husbands or boyfriends come home and talk about the game. Even if Bryce has a bad game, he doesn’t bring it home. If he does, he quickly talks about it and moves on,” Anne Marie said.
Nowadays, Anne Marie wouldn’t fault her husband if he came home all excited and energetic about the latest International League pitcher he victimized.
“He’s more confident. Not along the lines of a boy to a man, but something clicked,” Anne Marie said. “He’s worked so hard to try and figure it out.”
Before the Brentzs flew out of Boston on Sunday night, Anne Marie dropped off the couple’s puppy, a Labradoodle named Bandit, to the local boarding kennel. Bandit becomes Anne Marie’s main companion while Bryce chases his baseball dream away from McCoy Stadium. Daily walks at a local dog park provide great therapy when two becomes one for anywhere between four to eight days at a clip.
“He’s filled a lot of my time,” Anne Marie said about Bandit.
There are group chats on the phone and get-togethers that Anne Marie and the other PawSox wives and girlfriends will rally around while the boys are in another International League city. Her husband’s status as a PawSox seasoned veteran has enabled Anne Marie to get close to several folks at McCoy Stadium, most notably Kathy Buffy, wife of PawSox team chaplain Mike. It’s not uncommon for Anne Marie to visit the Buffys for lunch while Bryce is on the road.
“It’s nice to have close friends who support you,” said Anne Marie, saying she received a congratulatory text message from Erin Bradley, wife of Red Sox center fielder Jackie Bradley Jr., upon finding out that Bryce had made the I.L. All-Star team.
As Anne Marie will attest, the term “baseball wife” doesn’t always lend itself to glitz and glamour. There are bad moods to soothe and reassurances that everything will work out, even if the wife doesn’t completely understand baseball’s vast complex nature.
This week, Anne Marie Brentz is by her husband’s side in Tacoma as Bryce takes a welldeserved bow for his first-half slugging efforts. For someone who’s been right there to witness all the peaks and valleys that have earmarked Bryce’s career the past few seasons, she’s been a leading lady in more ways than one.
“To see him right now and how everything has come to fruition … it’s really cool,” Anne Marie said.