The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Esposito another UConn alum working on making ‘The Show’
PAWTUCKET, R.I. — Brian Esposito was a UConn baseball player before the program became a powerhouse that routinely churns out high draft picks and major-league players.
But to say Esposito, who is currently in his first season as manager of the Indianapolis Indians, helped lay the groundwork for the program’s success would be an exaggeration.
“I give them credit for a lot of the stuff that I have done in my career, but I can’t take any credit, whatsoever, for any of the success they’ve had in that program,” Esposito said. “I was just a guy that was blessed to get an opportunity to go play there.”
While Esposito was a standout catcher for the Huskies for three years before being drafted by the Red Sox in the fifth round of the 2000 MLB draft, he believes he got far more out of the program than the other way around.
“I couldn’t have picked a better place to go to school,” Esposito said from the visiting manager’s office at McCoy Stadium last week. “I couldn’t have been around two better people, Andy Baylock and Jim Penders — two guys who shaped me and taught me how to be a pro before I even knew what professionalism was.”
Esposito was a self-described “hard-nosed little punk from New York City” when he arrived at Storrs in 1997.
“And they taught me the value of being a good person and what it looked like, on a different scale,” Esposito said. “You can have an edge, but it doesn’t necessarily mean you have to be that person all the time. Keep your competitive edge, but learn how to be a good person. Baylock was outstanding with that. He really turned me into a different person.”
Baylock retired after the 2003 season and Penders made the move from assistant to head coach.
“Jimmy’s done an outstanding job with that program,” Esposito said. “A lot of people talk about bleeding blue, but there’s a man right there that bleeds it through and through. It’s unbelievable what he’s done up there. The amount of players that have come out and impacted it, it’s nationwide.”
Esposito played in the minors for 13 seasons, with seven different organizations. He logged 764 minorleague games and racked up 2,503 at-bats. He even tried his hand at pitching, making 22 overall appearances and posting a 5.30 ERA.
Through it all, Esposito got exactly two, extremely brief cups of coffee in the majors: with St. Louis in 2007 and Houston in 2010. He played in three games, got three at-bats and didn’t get a hit, striking out once.
In 2012, he hung up the spikes and got into managing in the Pirates’ organization, starting with Single-A Jamestown in 2014 and working his way up to Triple-A for the first time this season.
He believes he’s uniquely qualified to help out minorleague players.
“I may not have the experience of facing Mariano Rivera in the eighth inning and what to expect, what pitch I’m looking for,” he noted. “However, in terms of managing people, I think I’m well-equipped with the ups and downs of the minor leagues and how it can kick you in the face a little bit.”
Of course, Triple-A isn’t where Esposito wants his managerial career to end.
“At the end of the day, there’s only one real place to play and manage and coach or just be involved in this game, and that’s the major leagues. I mean, nobody grew up in their backyard playing a Wiffle ball game, saying, ‘Bottom of the ninth, I’m playing vs. the PawSox.’ Everybody dreams about being in the big leagues … So that’s on my radar.”
It might not be easy. The new trend among clubs has been to hire former bigleague players, with little or, more often, no prior managerial experience at any level. A quick look around the majors offers proof: Alex Cora, Aaron Boone, Dave Roberts, A.J. Hinch, Gabe Kapler, Craig Counsell. None of them toiled as minor-league managers for very long, if at all.
“Is there still a place for the grinders, that had to do it the hard way, that don’t have the notoriety of the experienced player? Yeah, of course there is,” Esposito said. “Because, at the end of the day, this is about being able to manage people and impact players and impact a staff and maximize a player’s potential. So, you don’t necessarily need 10 years of major league playing experience to be able to impact players and get the most out of them to drive them. I don’t lose sight of what I want to do, but I certainly know where my feet are, and I try to be there as best I can. Right now, my job is to make sure that I’m impacting our players here and our staff here, to help impact our major league club when the bell rings for these guys.”
“Everyone has an opportunity, everyone’s name can be put in a hat,” the loquacious Staten Islander continued. “Then, it’s a matter of when you go through the interview process and the organization sees if you’re the best fit. There are gonna be jobs I get down the road, there will be jobs I don’t get down the road. At the end of the day, I just love being in baseball, so I’ll just continue to be where my feet are in whatever job I’ve got.”