Giants’ weekend series in Chicago offers Kris Bryant a chance at closure.
All-Star had links with S.F. before trade
CHICAGO — Kris Bryant’s baseball career is connected by so many threads, it’s a rich tapestry of names — many Giants-related, making his trade to the team July 30 all the more apropos.
Bryant’s favorite player growing up was Barry Bonds — that’s well known. But another formative influence was Giants third baseman Evan Longoria. As a teen, Bryant attended a baseball showcase at Moorpark College in Southern California — run by nowGiants manager Gabe Kapler. And while in the Boston organization, Bryant’s dad, Mike, worked out in the offseason with Carl Yastrzemski, whose grandson, Mike, is the Giants’ right fielder.
“It’s kind of like coming full circle,” Bryant said of now playing for the club that already seemed so woven into his life and the one to which he said he’d hoped he’d go at the deadline.
Even as he settles in with his new team, Bryant will get to say a proper goodbye to his old one this weekend. The Giants will play a three-game series against the Cubs starting Friday at Wrigley Field, and Bryant will be the focal point. He was a major figure in Chicago, earning Rookie of the Year in 2015 and MVP a year later as he helped the Cubs to their first World Series title since 1908. “It’ll be nice to get there and close that chapter of the book,” he said.
Bryant was traded when the Cubs were in Washington, so “I didn’t really get that closure, you could say. It’s nice to go back so quickly and see some of the people that I didn’t get a chance to say bye to: the workers and staff at the field, the security staff, people that just made my family’s lives and mine so much easier over the years. Those are probably the people that are more important to say thank you to, because they don’t get the recognition that they deserve.”
The fan reaction should be warm; Bryant was a popular figure with the Cubs even with a little controversy to start his career, when agent Scott Boras chided the team over Bryant’s service time.
“That six, seven years in Chicago are some of the best of my life,” Bryant said. “Definitely tons of ups and certainly some downs, too, in terms of some stories and things that are out there, But that will never change my opinion of what I feel about the city and the people in the organization. Even the people that some people thought have wronged me, I have a tremendous amount of respect for.”
Bryant comes into town with the Giants’ playoff spot all but assured as the majors’ first team to 90 wins.
“I just find it funny that this team was projected to win, whatever, 75 games — you know we have a chance to win 100,” Bryant said. “That just goes to show you that projections and things like that don’t matter. I don’t know if anybody else here is getting a kick out of that but me. Hearing that on the broadcast daily, I just get a little chuckle.”
Bryant has played four positions with the Giants, and he’s batting .265 with six homers, 14 RBIs and 17 runs in 31 games with them. The team is 26-11 since acquiring Bryant, and the experience has been even better than he’d imagined. Bryant said when he arrived in San Francisco that he could see it being a place he’d like to stay as he approaches free agency this winter, and the results have done nothing but reinforce that.
“I can’t say enough about the staff here, the city, too,” he said. “I love, love, love my time so far.” Among the delights: becoming teammates with Longoria. “The other day before the game, we were in the batting cage and I was tossing the ball with him and actually thinking, ‘This is funny. I had your walk-up music and glove model (throughout college) — this is cool; I’m playing on a big-league team with you.’ ”
Bryant also still has a giveaway white glove from the Moorpark College “Gabe Kapler
Games” when he was a sophomore in high school — Bryant’s mom, Susie, sent him a photo of the glove the day he was traded to the Giants. “I used that glove all through high school,” Bryant said.
When Bryant works out at his parents’ house in Las Vegas in the offseason, he’s greeted in his childhood bedroom by a Barry Bonds Fathead decal still stuck on the wall, along with a treasured mesh Bonds jersey. “It’s pretty crazy,” Bryant said.
Mike Bryant’s Yastrzemski connection is just as fun, especially for a young player from the Boston area playing in the Red Sox system. Mike Bryant’s offseason job was winterizing pools, something he did for Red Sox players such as Dwight Evans and Bob Stanley. And when he started working out at Tufts — a Boston college — during the winter, Evans tipped him off that the great Yaz would be there, too.
“He was my hero,” Mike Bryant said. “So when he showed up, I said, ‘Oh, Mr. Yastrzemski, it’s so good to meet you. And he said, ‘Kid, what’s your nickname?’ And I said, ‘Spike.’ He said, ‘Well, I’ll
call you Spike and you call me Yaz, because we’re on the same team now.’ I said, ‘Excuse me,’ and went and found a pay phone to call my mother and tell her Yaz had talked to me.”
Mike Bryant made an even more important connection while in Boston’s organization, though, one whose teachings runs straight through to Kris. Hall of Famer Ted Williams held hitting sessions with select prospects, and Bryant was informed he’d made the grade and to appear at 6 a.m. “I was speechless, like ‘Ted? Ted Williams?’ ” he said.
The first morning, he was on time. But Williams barked at him, informing him that if he wasn’t a half-hour early, he was late. He added, “Don’t waste my effing time!”
Bryant was extra early every day after, and when the others in his group missed sessions, he wound up with private tutorials with the man many consider to be the greatest hitter of all time.
Williams’ ideas about hitting ran counter to the norm, though, as Mike Bryant found as he was coaching Kris. Williams stressed hitting the bottom third of the ball, aiming the bat knob toward the pitcher’s hat and hitting the ball in the air, not on the ground. Mike Bryant found some of the other kids’ dads skeptical about what he was passing along. He noted that all of those kids quickly became pitchers, because they couldn’t hit. Kris, who was walloping balls in the air at the age of 5 and absorbed all the Williams hitting techniques, is a four-time All-Star.
Mike Bryant wasn’t a typical youth-league dad-coach in many ways. Many fathers who coach insist their kid must play shortstop every day. But Bryant went the other way. He accommodated the other parents’ requests, sending his son all over the diamond — a major reason Kris is comfortable playing everywhere now.
“I wasn’t sitting there saying, ‘Hey, this guy’s going be a bigleaguer someday, so he has to play this specific position,’ ” Mike Bryant said. “The parents are the hard ones to deal with; the kids are easy. You’re trying to take the path of least resistance, so I moved Kris around. So my feeling with Kris was that I just wanted him to lead the league in fun and passion.”
Unsurprisingly, Bryant said this week that one of the top items on his bucket list is to play all nine positions in one game, a la Campy Campaneris.
“Toward the end of my career, I think that’d be fun, either when you’ve totally clinched a playoff spot or are totally out of it,” he said. “I’m on board.”
There, again, is another Giants’ tie-in. One of Bryant’s current teammates, Buster Posey, played all nine positions at Florida State.