'Where did it start?': A Tigers coach inspires players by charting their baseball beginnings

New York Times

23-05-2025

Anthony Iapoce loves to read biographies, at least for a while.
'After the beginning or middle of the book, I'm good because I already know the rest of the story,' said Iapoce, the first-base coach for the Detroit Tigers. 'I want to know where did it start and how did they get there?'
Iapoce, a former minor-league outfielder, has spent two decades coaching, including stints in the majors with the Chicago Cubs, Texas Rangers and Tigers. Players, he finds, can always pinpoint the start: the precise location where they fell in love with baseball.
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All you need to do is ask — with help from Google Earth — and the stories flow. Players develop a better sense of self and teams grow closer.
'We all felt like the history of the player was a really important piece of it,' said Derek Johnson, the Cincinnati Reds pitching coach and a former colleague with the Cubs.
'You know what he does on a baseball field. But how did he get there? You try to get to know them as people, understand who taught them baseball, who was important to them in their life, what were their experiences that led them to this place? It's an attempt to figure out who this guy is — and to get the player to identify who he was as well.'
Iapoce joined the Cubs' organization in 2013, the year they drafted Kris Bryant second overall to be a pillar of their reconstruction. Bryant was an instant success: a Rookie of the Year, a Most Valuable Player, a World Series champion, a four-time All-Star, all by age 29.
Now 33, Bryant is on the 60-day injured list with a lumbar degenerative disc disease, meaning that the spinal discs in his lower back are deteriorating. His team, the Colorado Rockies, is the worst in the majors. His contract — he is approaching the halfway point of a seven-year, $182 million deal — is an albatross. His path to Cooperstown is now all nails and glass.
Fans, owners and historians could view Bryant with frustration, resignation or disappointment. But only Bryant himself can appreciate the full arc of his story, and how it felt at the very beginning, the way Iapoce, one of his favorite coaches, always told him to do.
'At times it's really hard, because I've built up a career and a lot of successes, but a lot of failures, too,' Bryant said back in March, at spring training in Scottsdale, Ariz. 'You kind of have to think back to when you were a kid playing in the cul-de-sac. If you told yourself you're gonna be in this position — 10 years in the big leagues, tons of awards, a lot of good times — it's gonna be OK. Your struggles, your injuries, your expectations, your failures, all that's part of the journey, and it's all worth it in the end.'
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Bryant continued. He would begin the season on the active roster, but the trend lines were already pointing to his start: 6-for-39 (.154) before going on the injured list. The days of launching Wiffle balls with his buddies in the cul-de-sac in Las Vegas — with the big tree in right field, a water meter, drainage cover and power box for bases — that's what Bryant tries to remember.
'Back then, there wasn't a care in the world,' he said. 'You're playing baseball with your friends, you get orange slices and Capri Sun after the game. It brings back that carefree feeling, like, 'Man, this is a pretty cool game we get to do.' It kind of helps shift the (mindset) from 'I'm such a loser, I'm the worst player in the world' to, like, 5 percent better.
'Because we all have those thoughts. And it's good to be thankful and laugh at yourself a little bit and realize, 'Yeah, I suck right now. And I am a little bit of a loser. But, hey, it's OK, because if you told me I was gonna be in this position 25 years ago when I was hitting balls in the street, I'll take that.''
It won't fix a degenerative spinal condition. But 5 percent better can be powerful. That's how Iapoce sees it, and that's what he tries to convey to the players he coaches.
A generation ago, teams hired coaches based partly, if not largely, on their playing background. The essential skill has shifted from what you did to what you can do. Can you make players better? If you can't earn their trust, you will fail.
'The only way you can reach into a player's heart to capture his mind is to know where he stands,' said Arizona Diamondbacks bench coach Jeff Banister, who managed the Rangers when Iapoce was their hitting coach from 2016-18. 'We don't always know the pathway they've been on. But if we can trace it back, they become vulnerable and allow you the trust that's necessary to connect.'
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Banister played one game in the major leagues. Iapoce played none. A 33rd-round draft pick by the Milwaukee Brewers in 1994, he spent nine seasons in the minors, stalling out in Triple A, where he hit .210.
His struggles at that level drove him from the game in 2001. He was tired of fighting with himself, searching for the right swing, wondering what it was all for if he wasn't ever going to find it. After a year giving lessons, Iapoce played four more seasons, two for an independent team, shifting his attitude. He'd seen the other side — life as a non-player — and realized he could be OK.
Several years into his coaching career, when Iapoce was coordinating the Cubs' minor-league hitting program, the Queens native took an offseason run through his old neighborhood in Astoria. He stopped at 42nd Street and 25th Avenue and drifted back in time to all-day stickball games: parked cars for first and third base, a marker in the middle of the asphalt for second. The trees were in play, the buildings were foul. Smash the tennis ball past the light pole, and you could trot around the bases to the manhole cover where you started.
'That was home plate,' Iapoce said. 'Bam! You touched that, you were free.'
Iapoce snapped a photo that day and keeps it with him at all times. He tucks it in the journal he takes to the ballpark, folded with notes from his wife and a poem from his daughter. It is also on his phone, the device with all the answers.
Players know that all of their moves are measured, every hitch and twitch a data point they can study whenever they want. They can readily access a theory for every flaw, and ever-expanding coaching staffs are always poised to help. It's progress, and Iapoce doesn't wish it away. Analytics are here to stay.
'He can go as deep as you want on the coach's side,' said Tim Cousins, the Baltimore Orioles' field coordinator, who worked with Iapoce in Chicago. 'He can go toe-to-toe with anybody who's current with hitting, but he chooses not to. He pulls back and lets it breathe and finds the right windows.'
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For Iapoce, those windows open up to each player's past. In hitters' meetings with the Rangers and Cubs, he would ask players to go to Google Earth and find the precise spot where they first embraced the game. Once a week, before the daily hitters' meeting, the player would make a presentation for his teammates, detailing their childhood field of dreams.
'Sometimes you were shocked, sometimes it fit the person, but it was always really cool to hear their thought process, see their imaginations get going,' said Kyle Schwarber, now with the Philadelphia Phillies. 'Some people had to get really creative.'
Schwarber's spot was his backyard in Middletown, Ohio, somewhere between the two ballparks he pretended to be playing. The above-ground pool in right field? That was McCovey Cove in San Francisco. The short wall in the left field corner was the Pesky Pole. The siding of the house was another Boston landmark, the Green Monster.
In 2016, Schwarber helped the Cubs win a long-awaited championship. He and his teammates were the toast of the sport the next season, when Ian Happ joined the team. Happ looked up to them and could have been intimidated.
Sharing his background, showing the field in the Pittsburgh suburb where he'd take bad hops off his nose trying to make plays like Omar Vizquel, put Happ at ease. Origin stories, he found, are the great leveler. In baseball, they document the moment you fell in love with a sport designed not to love you back.
'Every day you're going to go to work ready to fail,' Happ said. 'You have to be pretty committed to be willing to make that a lifestyle choice, where you're going to give yourself failure on a daily basis and be happy with it. The longevity of the season, the everyday-ness, the constant failure — if you don't love it, it's going to really eat you alive.'
When Iapoce joined the Tigers' organization in 2023, as manager at Triple-A Toledo, he would meet players in his office for their where-did-it-start talks. At some point later, maybe while the team was stretching — a captive audience — he would call on the player and ask aloud about a background detail.
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Conversations and connections would spread from there, even among younger players who started early on the showcase circuit, the antithesis of stickball in the street with your buddies.
'I started probably super young, age 10, playing on an 11-U team,' said Justyn-Henry Malloy, 25, a Tigers outfielder who played for Iapoce in Toledo. 'Things obviously got hectic there, but even with the team that I was on, we still were able to have those fun games and play wall ball. But nothing was as genuine and pure as the backyard, because there was zero structure. There were no rules. It was just legit having fun.'
There's so much at stake in the majors, so many barriers to fun. When you care a lot, how can you be carefree? Iapoce said that a struggling hitter always wants to go back — to what he did in Triple A, to a hot stretch in the majors, to some point when he was great.
Invariably, he said, they are not far off in their mechanics. But the way they feel about themselves, that expectation of dominance, is gone. Work ethic is rarely the problem, or the solution.
'It's hard for players to not self-sabotage, because you worked so hard to get there, you outworked everybody,' Iapoce said. 'So when you struggle, you want to fix everything and overwork and it becomes a snowball. Maybe take them to that place mentally and then let's add the stuff we need to work on.'
Every major leaguer is absurdly talented, a feeling that crystallizes for those whose climb stopped one rung short. Iapoce likes to remind players of their number, the one on Baseball Reference that signifies their entry into the MLB brotherhood: Bryant was the 20,829th big leaguer, for example, and Malloy was No. 23,218.
The best coaches help maximize what players do after they earn their number. One simple fact would make their younger selves overjoyed, and the perspective that comes from it could go a long way.
'It's like, 'You made it, man,'' Iapoce said. 'Let's keep going forward, keep working on things, but don't lose your strengths. Don't lose your 'where did it start?''
(Illustration: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic; Junfu Han / USA Today Network)