Meet Branden Becker, the Orioles' minor league hitting coach seeking to give their prospects instruction that wasn't available to him

As an Orioles minor leaguer, Branden Becker had to go to Driveline Baseball on his own in the winter to get the progressive training that's now commonplace in their hitting program.

Branden Becker believed back in 2015 when he was a third-day Orioles draft pick that he ended up in the right organization. 

He’d grown up a fan of shortstop J.J. Hardy, and enjoyed how the Orioles’ star shortstop in that era produced at a high level offensively and won Gold Glove Awards without being the most athletically gifted.  More importantly, he appreciated that the Orioles valued a player like that. 

It wasn’t as an apprentice that Becker got to meet Hardy, though. They crossed paths at spring training in 2020 after Becker had retired and become a coach in the Orioles’ minor league system.

As a player, he had to go outside the organization and train at Driveline outside Seattle for the kind of forward-thinking, challenging regimens to help him improve. Now the 25-year-old Becker, who will be the hitting coach at Double-A Bowie this summer after filling that role in the Florida Complex League last year, is part of a player development department that has adopted so many of the progressive methods he believes helped him as a hitter.

“I really think me being within the organization and knowing how it used to operate, and my success/failure, being able to relate to guys and assist them in any way [is important], just so that they don’t necessarily have to go through struggles that maybe i went through as a player,” Becker said.

Becker, an 18th-round pick in the 2015 Orioles draft class that also produced Ryan Mountcastle and DJ Stewart, chose pro ball over a commitment to Oregon that summer and immediately learned the challenge ahead of him. Going from three games every week in high school to leaving home and living across the country to play every day proved a challenge, and Becker admits he had his “butt beat a little down there.”

He was back in the complex league for a second season in 2016 when he knew it was time to make a change. Becker went to train at Driveline Baseball, a progressive and data-driven facility outside Seattle, ahead of the 2017 season. It was known then for its work with star pitchers like Trevor Bauer and Tyler Glasnow, but had a burgeoning hitting program. Becker and the hitters got to face them all and improve through daily repetitions against live pitching. 

“My main goal was to get stronger, more athletic,” he said. “I always thought I had a decent swing. I just didn’t have enough power behind it. The whole goal was to just increase bat speed, limit my ground ball percentage and get the ball in the air a little more frequently, just so I can get a shot at progressing in the org at each level.”

Doing that by using data-gathering devices and technology was helpful for Becker, who left that winter thinking coaching could be a possible future path. He missed most of 2017 with a torn labrum and was back at Driveline for a second year of that challenging and progressive work before his full-season bow in 2018 at Low-A Delmarva. He hit .273 with a .680 OPS, and was back there in 2019 when he decided to retire.

The previous winter, though, the methods that he needed to go outside the organization for began to find their way into it with the front office makeover that brought in Mike Elias and Sig Mejdal from the Houston Astros. Mejdal, the assistant general manager for analytics, was involved in building out and rolling out the technology on the farm and spent some time at minor league camp in the spring of 2019.

Becker found an opening to chat with him during batting practice about the new Blast Motion sensors that attached to the knob and tracked bat speed and movement.

“I just tried to ask intelligent questions, try to pick his brain, because of how smart he is,” Becker said. “When it was time to hang it up, one of our coaches advised me, ‘Give him a call so if things transition, your name is in his head.’ I was like, why not? Worst case, he’s going to say hey, thanks for the communication but it’s not going to work out. So I said, I’m going to go out of my way, reintroduce myself and say, “I’ve been part of the org for a few years, I really think I can be a valuable asset and help get this org back trending the right way.”

Mejdal was receptive to that, and Becker said he heard from Mejdal throughout that summer. When the Orioles handed the farm system over to director of player development Matt Blood that fall, Becker’s name was still in the mix. He was going to be a fundamentals coach at Low-A Aberdeen in the 2020 minor league season that was canceled by the COVID-19 pandemic, and got his first true coaching experience last year in the complex league.

Between the influx of talented Latin American players who came stateside and the domestic draftees who spent time down there, Becker said it was “definitely an eye opener for how much talent we had compared to what we used to.”

“It’s pretty amazing to see,” Becker said.

This coming spring, he’ll be overseeing a talented group of prospects at Bowie, where last year’s hitting coach Ryan Fuller was promoted to the major league staff. He’s looking forward to the game-planning aspect that’s not as easy to do in the complex league, as there’s much more information available on Double-A pitchers to help players formulate strategies before and in the game.

Much of the work he’ll do with players will come from a foundation of what he had to seek outside the organization at Driveline to learn himself as a player. Becker believes the Orioles are “early adopters” of such work as an organization, but he was too – and it’s helped chart his course as a young coach. His strength, he believes, is that he can speak to them from a perspective he can relate to.

“Anyone who has played this game at a high level understands how difficult it is, so having young guys at the complex league struggling on a daily basis and understanding, ‘Wow, this game is really hard,’ I think it just builds trust within the clubhouse,” Becker said. “I think having that and being able to relate to the guys that this game is difficult and we understand that, but we firmly believe in the hitting department that this is why we should go about this way because of our past experience and how the game is trending.”