Kevin Bruggeman has seen it all in his four years from behind the plate. Through a pandemic that cut off his first season as a D1 athlete, a difficult sophomore year and a complete coaching staff change, he’s learned to persevere.
“I think the biggest thing for me was the confidence; [the new coaches] had a lot of confidence in me from day one,” Bruggeman said. “I think that’s a huge thing as a player, if you believe in yourself, you’re gonna do good things, and having them believe in me as well made it a lot easier for me to believe in myself.”
Confidence didn’t come easy to the catcher. He reflected on his sophomore year as his most difficult because of a vicious cycle where a string of poor hits caused him to lose more faith in himself every day.
“My sophomore year I came in expecting to be really good, and I struggled a bunch and didn’t have a great year,” Bruggeman said. “I would come home from games asking myself why you got out and all that stuff instead of just kind of realizing it’s baseball. I just lost confidence in myself in that year, and it just led to a not-so-great year.”
In junior year, Bruggeman knew he needed to change something. He always had a strong work ethic. He practiced his fundamentals, hit in the batting cages every day and spent hours lifting weights in the gym. But now it was no longer a matter of hard work, it was about working smarter.
Bruggeman started to meticulously study opposing pitchers, combing through stats and spray charts in search of any edge he could use in an at-bat.
“In the dugout, there’s scouting reports and spray charts and percentages and all that stuff but you watch at-bats, you know like the hitter you are,” Bruggeman explained. “I know my strengths, I know my weaknesses and I think that’s very important as a hitter, to understand what you can and can’t hit well. So all of [those] percentages and my strengths all those go into how I think they’re going to pitch me.”
Everyone has pages and pages of analytics and data, but not everyone has a former major leaguer who posted a career .291 batting average across 13 years as their head coach.
“Before every at-bat, he asks me what his approach should be and what he should look for,” said Hofstra head coach Frank Catalanotto. “He’ll come up to me and say, ‘Coach, I think I’ll look for a curveball,’ and I’ll say, ‘No,’ because of this, or I’ll say, ‘Yeah, great idea.’ He wants to go up there so he has that confidence in what he should look for.”
“I think ‘Why wouldn’t you?’ For me, just understanding where [Catalanotto’s] head is at about the at-bat and how it relates to where I’m at [is important], and he’s just such a good source. I don’t know why you wouldn’t ask him,” Bruggeman said. “It started a little bit last year; I’ve learned to get my own approach, and it’s just nice hearing from somebody who’s such a good hitter and has so much knowledge of the game whether he agrees with me or not.”
Both Bruggeman and Catalanotto concluded that this kind of process before a plate appearance is what works best.
“Some people don’t like going up [to bat] thinking about what pitch to look for, a lot of guys are just reaction-based hitters,” Bruggeman said. “I’m not very good at that but some people are great at it.”
“He’s a cerebral-type player,” Catalanotto said. “When I was in the majors, we would do it all the time, whether it was with the hitting coach, or with the head coach, or even another player. I think it’s really smart to do that, to gain information just to know what to look for.”
Just like Catalanotto talked strategy before going to bat with Alex Rodriguez during their shared time on the Texas Rangers, Bruggeman explained how he and his teammates work together in hopes of bettering themselves.
“Me and [Jake Liberatore] talk hitting all the time,” Bruggeman added. “Once you’re around the guys and you watch them swing every single day you understand what their weaknesses are and what they’re very good at and you kind of just try to pick their brains too because you can always get better at hitting. Nobody’s perfect, and you’re never going to be perfect so it’s a constant battle.”
With four years under his belt, the catcher’s main takeaway is that being super critical of himself can only do so much before it starts to harm him.
“I’m very hard on myself when I don’t do well and it can be tough to have a bad game and immediately let it go but you have to,” Bruggeman said. “If you bring bad games into each other, you start to stack them together and then you end up in a place you don’t want to be, and I think that’s one thing I’ve done well this year: have a bad game [and then] move on. There’s another game coming and a lot more at-bats coming.”
While working out daily and working on a cleaner swing is vital to being a good batsman, at the core of it all stood the question of his self-confidence. It took some serious reflection to realize that he’s more than the results he gets or doesn’t get in the game he plays, and that failure is a natural part of life.
“You kind of start to realize that the more you play the game, especially with baseball, you’re gonna get out. It’s part of it, it’s gonna happen,” Bruggeman said. “You’re gonna do bad more than you do good, and that’s okay. Accepting that fact was tough, but once you do, you’ll be better off. It’s hard to stay even-keeled and level-headed but the more you can do that, the better off you’ll be.”
With that in mind, Bruggeman has one final message, something he wished he learned earlier in his collegiate career:
“Don’t put too much pressure on yourself,” Bruggeman said. “I think a lot of young players, including myself, come in and they put this expectation on themselves that they have to perform at such a high level as soon as they get there. Looking back on it now as a senior, you look at the freshmen [and] these guys are so young. If they do half of what they’re expecting, it’s a great thing, and they have so much time to gain experience. So just don’t put too much pressure on [yourself].”
Photo courtesy of Hofstra Athletics
