The Pride of Duke City: How Alex Bregman became New Mexicos biggest baseball star

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — New Mexico’s most prominent youth baseball academy started in the back of an engine shop.

The founders of the Albuquerque Baseball Academy rented out the space, which was dark, unheated and without a bathroom, and converted it into two batting cages, one large enough for only tee work and side tosses, and a pitching lane. The carpet was nasty even before the ABA coaches, a collection of local former college and pro players, stained it with chewing tobacco juice.

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The operation exemplified blue-collar New Mexico. Players learned how to hit and pitch with the roar of car engines as a backdrop. One mother wore a mask as protection from the fumes when she accompanied her son to his lessons. The owner of the shop used the area to hang his elk after hunting excursions.

Still, kids flocked in for lessons, and none more so than a 10-year-old with a nonstop motor and an unquantifiable edge. He was small and wasn’t the fastest or strongest kid. But he was so adept at the fundamentals of the game and advanced with his swing that it wasn’t long before a couple of the coaches referred to him not as Alex Bregman but as “first rounder.”

The ABA upgraded from its modest beginnings a year later and formed the area’s first travel team for boys age 12 and under. They were called the Rattlers, and Bregman starred as an 11-year-old. “No matter where you took him, no matter who you were playing against or who was on the same field, he was always the best player on the field,” recalled Justin Galvan, one of the team’s coaches.

The Rattlers took their lumps early, but it wasn’t long before they started beating the Arizona travel ball programs that had existed for years. Arriving at the fields for the games, the New Mexico players routinely felt underestimated. The coaches, too, remember the smirks from the opposition. The doubters fueled the ultra-confident Bregman and his teammates.

“I think people would always overlook us,” Bregman said, “and then we’d come in and be scrappy, dirtbag grinders and find a way to win.”

No one would confuse New Mexico, a state of just more than 2 million people, for a baseball hotbed. According to records that date to 1908, only 30 players born in the state have played in the major leagues.

The best of them, by Baseball Reference’s version of Wins Above Replacement, didn’t even attend high school in New Mexico. Ralph Kiner, a six-time All-Star in the 1940s and ’50s and baseball’s lone New Mexico-born Hall of Famer, grew up in Southern California. So did Vern Stephens, an eight-time All-Star of the same era.

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Bregman, only 25 and in his third full season, has already put together a better playing career than the other 28. On Tuesday night at Progressive Field in Cleveland, the Astros third baseman will be the first New Mexico-born All-Star Game starter since Kiner in 1950.

That Bregman has established himself as one of the best players in baseball comes as no surprise to those in Albuquerque, where he first combined his obsession with the game with a relentless work ethic and an innate baseball IQ.

At age 10, he was stealing signs as a batboy for the University of New Mexico baseball team. By 11, he was angering opposing travel ball coaches by relaying incoming pitches to his teammates from second base. When, as a teenager, his pitcher was struggling early, he took the reins and called most of the game from shortstop, signaling pitches to the catcher.

Throughout his youth, he spent so much time in the Albuquerque Baseball Academy’s batting cages the coaches practically had to beg him to go home for dinner. And his link to that era is so enduring that his hitting guru since he was 14 has become like family, staying with him in Houston when the Astros are home and strategizing over the phone when they’re on the road.

At his core, Bregman is a baseball junkie from a baseball family. His late grandfather, Stan, was the general counsel for the Washington Senators in the late ’60s and negotiated the hire of Ted Williams as their manager. He passed on his love of the game to his sons, Ben and Sam.

Ben was the family’s first link to Albuquerque, earning a scholarship to play second base at the University of New Mexico. Sam followed his older brother there from their hometown of Bethesda, Md., in 1981, walked on and played briefly as a first baseman.

Sam’s collegiate career lasted a fall season and only a couple months of the spring of his freshman season, when he made a decision he still regards as the biggest mistake of his life. He quit because he wasn’t making the travel roster, a regret he many times lamented to a young Alex.

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But while in school Sam fell in love with Albuquerque, its outdoorsy qualities and how you can seemingly see forever across the sprawling city, which is bordered to the east by the beautiful Sandia Mountains. He left for Touro Law Center in New York for his first year of law school, where he met his wife, Jackie, in torts class, and returned to UNM to finish his degree. They ultimately settled in Albuquerque, co-founding a law firm.

Alex, the first of their three children, was born in 1994. As a young boy playing in the cul-de-sac outside their home, he would dive on the blacktop to make catches. He threw a ball against a wall in their backyard so many times that he broke through it.

From his earliest days playing baseball, Bregman couldn’t get enough of it. As a Little Leaguer, he would go to the ABA to hit before his games as if he were a big-leaguer taking pregame BP. After practices, he would ask coaches to hit him ground balls until it was dark outside. When he wasn’t playing, he was watching, be it on television, at a Lobos game or at the Triple A ballpark in town.

When he was 11, Bregman’s parents invited a couple of his travel ball coaches over for Passover Seder. Bregman grew up playing catcher in addition to shortstop, and after dinner that night all he wanted to do was work on his blocking. Galvan, one of the coaches, recalls sitting outside in the backyard for an hour throwing dirt ball after dirt ball to Bregman, who wore full catcher’s gear.

“You can’t even really call it ‘grinding.’ It’s fun to him,” Galvan said. “That’s just what he wants to do. That’s how he’s going to spend his time.”

Bregman always played up in travel ball. As a sixth-grader, he would hang on the chain-link fence that enclosed his school’s baseball field. Albuquerque Academy, a private school unaffiliated with the baseball academy, didn’t allow middle-schoolers to play on the baseball team until they were in seventh grade, a rule that Bregman found incomprehensible.

“Why can’t I play on this team?” Bregman asked Josue Ayala, the middle school coach, through the fence.

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Because those are the rules, Ayala responded.

“Who made that rule?” Bregman retorted.

“The athletic director,” Ayala said.

Ten minutes later, Ayala’s phone rang. It was the athletic director, who received a visit from Bregman. Sitting in a chair in her office, his feet didn’t even reach the floor. Yet there he was, lobbying for a rule change so he could play more baseball.

“That was the first day I met Alex Bregman,” Ayala recalled fondly.

When Bregman was in high school, the coaches at the ABA routinely had to send him home for dinner. He would leave reluctantly, go home to eat and come back to hit some more, even if the facility was about to close. “I went home,” was a common refrain. “You didn’t say I couldn’t come back.”

Of his work ethic, Bregman said, “My parents told me if I wanted to be successful at something I had to go and do it myself and that no one in my family is going to be like, ‘Hey, you need to go get some swings in the cage.’ It’s, ‘If you want to get swings in and you want to be better at this game and you want to reach your dream of playing in the big leagues and being great at this game, then you’d better work at it.’

“That’s kind of the mindset. There’s something inside, there’s a switch that just turns on every day and makes me want to come to the yard and get better.”

Bregman developed his competitiveness at a young age, not only through baseball but also through chess.

His mom played chess with him all the time but never let him win. When he finally beat her, he thought he was a chess master. So, on a family trip to Boston to see a Red Sox-Devil Rays game when he was 5, his parents paid a few bucks for him to play an actual chess master in Harvard Square, photo evidence of which Jackie discovered recently. The chess master dealt Bregman a loss. It was his only defeat, if you ask him.

By the time he was a teenager, Bregman’s baseball coaches considered him an extension of the coach on the field. The one place they never wanted him was in the dugout.

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In the early ABA days, he picked up the nickname “Ferret” for his constant chatter when he wasn’t playing. One time in travel ball a coach couldn’t take it anymore and sent him to sit by the right-field foul pole for a few innings. Ayala, by then his high school coach, got plenty of it during Bregman’s senior season, when he missed all but a handful of games because of a broken middle finger on his throwing hand.

“But the thing is you want to listen to him,” Ayala said, “because he has a baseball IQ that you’ve never been around in your whole life.”

Bregman takes a lot of pride in representing New Mexico, where he continually raises the bar for baseball players from the state. Though not quite as synonymous with his hometown as Walter White of “Breaking Bad,” Bregman is nonetheless a local hero.

“Growing up it was always, ‘I’m from New Mexico. I’m going to show you I can play with anybody in the country,'” said Ryan Brewer, a founder and co-owner of the ABA, now housed in a facility that has 14 full-sized batting cages and two outdoor fields. “But it wasn’t just (about) Alex. He was going to prove that whatever team he was on in New Mexico was as good as anybody else.”

Twins catcher Mitch Garver, a fellow ABA product, and Blue Jays closer Ken Giles, a former teammate of Bregman with the Astros, are the only active New Mexico-born players aside from Bregman. Blake Swihart of the Diamondbacks played on some of the same ABA teams as Bregman and attended high school in New Mexico but was born in Texas.

So how is a player so early in his career already his home state’s most accomplished homegrown baseball star? Bregman’s rapid ascent from undersized high-schooler to 2017 World Series hero and 2018 All-Star Game MVP isn’t all that difficult to fathom for those who have known him longest.

“You start with a kid that’s so singularly focused and so motivated that he’s going to make it no matter what. Nobody can tell him otherwise,” said Bregman’s father, Sam. “I think he’ll tell you he made a decision at some point that he was going to go do that, and he’s doing it.”

Jason Columbus was a new instructor at the ABA when Alex Bregman entered his life. Fourteen at the time, Bregman came in that day with a sole purpose: He was set to face a sidearm pitcher in his next game and needed to know how to hit him.

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Columbus, who had played at LSU and in the minors and coached at the junior college level, was taken aback. How many kids get a lesson just to face a pitcher he will see merely two or three times? But as soon as they got in the cage, they hit it off.

Weekly lessons turned into daily hitting sessions, and Bregman routinely impressed Columbus with his body awareness and by how quickly he put new ideas into practice. Something that might take another teenager a month or two took Bregman two swings to figure out.

Bregman wanted to be pushed, and Columbus, 14 years his elder, wanted to push him. Columbus introduced Bregman to a drill they call “angles,” in which they would station a pitching machine about 35 feet from the plate to one side of the mound or the other, and jack up the velocity to about 80 mph.

The drill teaches hitters how their hands have to work through the ball, Columbus said, to hit the ball on a line with true backspin. “Your swing has to be right to execute at that high velocity,” Columbus explained. For Bregman, staying inside the baseball is key. His simple and compact swing works because of his lightning-quick hands.

“Our thought processes, our brains kind of linked up,” Bregman said. “The way he teaches hitting, that’s how I like to think about hitting. We think about hitting with the knob of the bat, not the barrel. Like, we never try and hit the ball on the barrel of the bat. We think if we put the knob in the right place, the barrel will get there.”

The relationship between Columbus and Bregman is akin to an older brother-little brother dynamic. Bregman is the godfather of Columbus’ 6-year-old son, Brady, who is the inspiration for Bregman’s work with autism awareness and his foundation, AB for Autism. Columbus’ 4-year-old son, Bryant Alexander, is named after Alex.

Before every game at Minute Maid Park, Columbus watches batting practice from the family and friends area in front of the home dugout. He and Bregman also study video and go over scouting reports of opposing pitchers on a daily basis. Aside from Bregman, nobody knows his swing better than Columbus.

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Bregman, listed at 6 feet but in reality 5-foot-10, has never claimed to be the best athlete around. He makes up for it with his preparation and baseball instincts. Because of the gaudy numbers he has put up at every level, Bregman’s cerebral side might be underrated.

Since Bregman was young, coaches say he has always asked the right questions. He has also had a knack for picking signs or discerning tendencies since he was a preteen. Even in travel ball or high school when an opposing pitcher set lower or broke his hands differently on a certain pitch, he would notice it.

“He sees the game differently,” said another former ABA coach, Ryan Kellner. “Even to this day I’m not sure how much was learned, or how much when Stan or Sam told him how many outs there were in an inning and where the foul lines were and what direction you run, it was almost like the whole game just downloaded.”

Bregman traces his ability to pick signs so young to being a catcher, a position he played through high school. He also has keen vision — 20/10, he said.

When Bregman would overthink or get too mechanical with his swing, Columbus would pull out a bucket of brand-new baseballs and draw a nickel-sized dot on each with different color markers. He’d drop a ball into the pitching machine and Bregman would have to call out the color as he swung.

He would get the color right every time.

“You couldn’t throw him the same pitch twice,” Columbus said. “You pretty much can’t do it still to this day unless you’ve got just a wipeout pitch. Because once he sees it, he’s learned it. Now he’s already figured out, ‘OK, this is what I have to do to hit it.’ His mind is like a massive computer.”

When he was young, Bregman badly wanted to play at the University of New Mexico like his father and uncle, and he wanted to play for Lobos coach Ray Birmingham. Bregman attended Birmingham’s New Mexico baseball camps as a teenager, and a speech Birmingham made about the 10,000-hour rule — to be really good at something, you must put in 10,000 hours of work, the speech goes — resonated with him.

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Their relationship and his family’s connection to the program made for an emotional conversation when Bregman committed to LSU during his sophomore year of high school. Bregman cried as he apologized to Birmingham, who reassured him he understood. Bregman said his college decision came down to LSU and UNM, but he and his parents decided that for him to grow up he needed to leave home.

The family’s ties to the UNM program remain strong. Bregman’s younger brother, A.J., is on the team and will pitch for the Lobos next season. Even though he didn’t play for the school, Alex Bregman is represented in the UNM baseball offices, in a photo displayed from his bat boy days.

Because New Mexico doesn’t have a Major League Baseball team, allegiances are split among baseball fans in Albuquerque. A lot of residents are Dodgers fans because the Dukes were Los Angeles’ Triple A affiliate for so many years. Some kids root for the Rockies or Diamondbacks because those are the closest MLB teams. But in the last few years there’s been a lot more Astros gear spotted around town.

Bregman mania has even infiltrated local cuisine. Sadie’s of New Mexico, an Albuquerque institution for New Mexican food, is in the early stages of developing a Bregman-themed salsa it hopes to jar and sell in stores all over the Southwest. The restaurant even sent representatives to West Palm Beach, Fla., during spring training to have Bregman taste-test samples and experiment with different recipes.

At the ABA, several kids a night show up to hit in Bregman shirts. When the academy made available the same model of Wilson glove Bregman used to wear, it sold around 100 of them. He’s the one the kids in Albuquerque strive to be.

Bregman appreciates his hometown’s adoration. He has the state flag as the background of his Twitter profile and still lists Albuquerque as his location even though he lives in Houston year-round. After Game 1 of last year’s ALDS against the Indians, he wore an Albuquerque Dukes jersey to his postgame press conference.

“Growing up there, not many people play in the big leagues. You definitely want to kind of blaze a trail for kids who grow up there. That way they think that they can be the same,” Bregman said. “That was something I’ve always wanted to do.”

(Top photo: Jennifer Stewart / Getty Images)

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