Why They Coach: Steve Bieser

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PM: What was your involvement in sports growing up?

SB: "I was, anything that involved a ball, even if it didn't involve a ball, I was always on the move. I was an athlete in all phases. And I was a seasonal guy. When it was football season, there was nothing better than football. When it came basketball season, there was nothing better than basketball. Same way when it came baseball season. Those were kind of the three sports for me that I just loved doing constantly. Then you've got all summer. Baseball was always probably, I think it was kind of forced on me because I was so small. Going through high school, at my size, it was a sport I could compete really well. I was a small tough kid and eventually I got weeded out of basketball and convinced to wrestle because in PE, I'd beat up on the guy that was going to state every year, but I was a basketball player. As I hit that varsity level and I was still 5-foot-2, they were like, 'It's going to be hard for you to continue to start on varsity.' That's kind of when my junior year I moved over to wrestling. I don't know why because my dad wasn't an athlete. My mom, I guess, was somewhat of an athlete. It was just something that I caught on to really early and just enjoyed doing it all the time."

PM: So through high school, wrestling and baseball?

SB: "Through high school I played football. I played basketball until my junior year and then played baseball all the years. My junior and senior year I wrestled."

PM: And then how far did your playing career take you?

SB: "It was kind of funny, coming out of high school my only offers were in wrestling. I had a chance to move on and kind of do some things as a wrestler, but my passion was baseball. I had to walk on at Jefferson Junior College and really kind of earn my way there. That worked out for a year and then I transferred to Mineral Area College and had a really good year there and I had some options coming out of junior college at Southeast Missouri State and Arkansas. I had some opportunities and I took close to home and played there (SEMO) and got drafted and spent 13 years playing professionally.

I needed all those stops and those stages because I was a late bloomer. Kind of the same way I think I was a late bloomer to get to the big leagues. I was age 29, I was the oldest rookie the Mets had ever at that time at age 29. It didn't last real long because later in the year they brought up a guy that was just slightly older than me, but that was really a cool period of sports and athletics for me."

PM: Did you know while you were a player that you wanted to coach when it ended or was that something that came later?

SB: "I think my original plan coming out of high school was just let's go to Rolla because I wanted to be an engineer because of all my buddies. I had like five buddies that wanted to go there and probably my best subject was math, so I was like, okay, I can play baseball there. At that time it was pretty much show up on campus and make that team so I felt like I could play there. I pretty much decided to take a different route. Whenever it was kind of winding down, I had already had my degree. I had to change it. Originally I started in pre-engineering and was at junior college and was going to transfer to engineering school. I just got my degree in math education. When I got sent down in 1998 from the Pirates, I thought that I would be right back up and have a few more years before I got too old to compete at that level, but it never happened. So by about probably '99, end of '99, I knew that I already had at that time, I guess we had our third child already. It was kind of time of making a decision to spend more time with the family, not travel so much and I actually took a teaching job at Vianney High School while I was still playing in Memphis. Nobody knew that I had taken the job, but it was probably July. It was somewhere around late July that I took the job and knew that I had to make a decision. When school started, our season was still going there and I was going to have to go to them and tell them, 'Hey I'm going to retire right now because I've got to be in the classroom tomorrow.' But, it's amazing how things work out. I'm in an 0-2 count against Carlos Zambrano and he comes up and in with a fastball and he shatters my wrist and it's like 'Okay, well there's a good sign.' Because at that time, I was like, 'Man, I enjoy playing, I know I can play another two or three years at the Triple A level, but they're not bringing up a 33- or 34-year-old rookie.' Like in '99, I was with the Cardinals and I basically run through the season and had the best numbers and was hitting in the three hole in Memphis and we had a kid named Placido Palanco on our team and supposedly he was 21--obviously he was because he had a nice big league career--but he was playing well also and then in September they called him up. That was kind of, that's where the light came on and I said 'I know I can play for a while longer, but it's going to probably be in Triple A.' I had been asked to stay at that level and coach at the professional level. I always knew that I wanted to be a coach, but I knew that I didn't want to put my family through starting again in the minor leagues as a coach and trying to work through there. So that's why I took the job in 2001 and knew that I had to show up there in September or late August and basically be in the classroom and start my teaching career.

And I didn't really care about at what level I was going to coach. I took a teaching job, they treated me right, they paid me very well, it's a private school and they were recruiting and I'm sure they used my experience to recruit. And I was fine with coaching the JV. I coached JV for two years and taught in the classroom. I just love teaching kids, whether it's math or whether it's out on the field playing. I enjoy the teaching aspect of it. But then as you kind of get away from it, the juices start flowing again a little bit, you're like, man, I want to be more competitive. So you jump to the varsity level and you do that. That kind of got easy to some degree. We were really good and then you want to go and take that next step. If it wasn't for my wife, I'm surprised she's still with me, but going from there where we were doing very well and heading off to Southeast Missouri as an assistant, coaching pitching for two years there, but I went there for a salary of $25,000 with four kids. And that was a leap of faith. I felt like I could get in the college scene and I felt like I could work through there. When I was at Vianney, there were jobs that opened, whether it was at Maryville or something like that, 'Surely I can get that job.' Had no college experience, the
professional experience wasn't super attractive to ADs, and so I knew that I had to get college experience and making that jump there worked out. Then when this job opened, this was a job I was really interested in."

PM: What was kind of the break that led to SEMO? Obviously you had played there.

SB: "That's kind of a funny story. I think probably he asked me four different times to come and join his staff while I was at Vianney and there was no way I could do it. Financially it just wasn't going to work. And it got to the point where he told me, 'Look, I probably only have a couple years left.' So I started in my head adding it up, can I make this work for a couple years? Then no guarantee I was going to get the job, but knew that being an alum and if we could do some decent things down there, I had a good inside to get that job. That's where I kind of took that leap. Then he retired and I think he kind of helped me out by doing it strategically. He retired pretty late in the summer and it was kind of a hustle and it was a good, easy transition. They gave me a shot there as the interim and knew that we kind of had to rebuild there at that point."

PM: So you're there how long?

SB: "Six (years). Professionally I played 13 years, then I was at Vianney for nine years, then I went there for two years as the pitching coach and recruiting coordinator and then moved into the head coach and was there for four years."

PM: Then when the job comes open here was that a no-brainer or was there some hesitation?

SB: "I mean, for me, it was a no-brainer. I felt like my wife and I, we're childhood sweethearts, we've been together forever so she's had every step with me. And the fact that her family and my family are in the same hometown, it's two-and-a-half hours, maximum from here, their age, it was a no-brainer for us to stay in Missouri. At that time, the success we were having at SEMO, we were making some really good strides. I had some people in this area say 'You probably want to wait and not come here. This is a really tough place to win.' I've felt like you can win anywhere. It's not easy. It may take more work, it may take more time, but I wanted to give it a shot just because of everything about Missouri and being a Missouri guy and all those things. I'm glad I'm here."

PM: Had you had other opportunities to go elsewhere? How much of your path has been based on not going too far away?

SB: "I think that was always the case for me. When I got out of pro ball, we want to get roots somewhere and stay for a long time. Pro ball was a big part of our lives and we're very movable. We've done it. We've adapted very well every place we've been. Probably the smartest thing was me turning down a job a year earlier out on the West coast. I was thinking about taking it and the fact that my wife and kids would have had to stay home for a year, kind of I decided I'm not going to take this. The money was better, double what I was making at Southeast, but decided not to take that and I would have probably been locked in and not been able to jump and make the move here. So that was probably a good career decision to wait another year and when this opened, this was kind of really, as I'm looking, Missouri, in the SEC, this is a premier job."

PM: Spending so much time in pro ball around the best in the world, is there an adjustment when you go back to working with high school kids?

SB: "That was a tough adjustment, yes. I guess you're away from it so long and I didn't even start at the varsity level; I started at the JV level. That took a little bit of time. You know, you just expect, I guess, so many things because when you're around something every single day for so long, it's like, 'Everybody knows that.' And really as I got into it, I was smart enough to figure out, I can't trust that they know anything. We've got to start at ground zero and just teach every single aspect of it. And I still do that even here. When our new guys come in, we start back at zero. I know the guys that have been here two years or three years are like, 'Come on, let's go, let's get moving.' But that was something that (Tony) LaRussa did whenever I was in spring training, his speech to us was 'Boys, you better be ready, we're starting,' basically like you don't know a thing and we're going to start and this team will be very fundamental. That was one of the things that I drew from him."

PM: A couple of the other coaches I've talked to that played professionally, but maybe like you weren't stars, said a lot of times the people that are good coaches weren't the great players because those guys didn't understand how much work it took. Do you agree with that?

SB: "A hundred percent. In baseball, it's always like your best managers are catchers. That was me. I caught all the way from the time I was seven years old until I got to the big leagues and they decided I was going to be a utility player. But a hundred percent, there's no doubt that the best coaches were not the best players. There's very few. Because it comes so easy to those guys that I just don't think they really get into the smaller details and the intricacies of every little thing. It's easy for them. I've had Jack Clark as a hitting coach, I've seen Reggie Jackson behind the cage as a hitting coach, all those guys and it's just like, 'No, it's not as easy as you're trying to say it is.' There's more to it than that. But I think that those guys, they have a tough time. It's kind of the same analogy of me starting back in high school at the JV level. There's a lot of things that they just leave out, 'No, you should be able to do this here right now.' But I definitely agree with that. The players that have had to fight and claw and scratch and learn every little thing just to compete typically are your better coaches in my opinion."

PM: All these coaches that you were around and a lot of names a lot of people would know, is there anybody that you really drew from when you became a coach?

SB: "I think that we all have those guys. I think every guy that I played for has the qualities that I'm getting ready to tell you. I think there's always this personality, this connection. Hal Lowry at Mineral Area, him and I really connected. My high school coach, Mike Sherry, we really connected. And then in pro ball, South Atlantic league, my manager there Mel Roberts was a guy, just really connected with him and that's kind of what kept my pro career going was that this guy was an advocate for me, he fought for me. Every spring training he's fighting for me, 'You can't let this guy go, you can't let this guy go.' Then our field guy, Don Blasingame, really kind of takes me on and he's working with me every single spring training. That's the only reason I got through seven years of the Philadelphia Phillies organization in the minor leagues was because those two guys would fight for me. Del Unser at that time was the director of player development there and I've run into him several times since and he goes, 'You know Blasingame and Roberts kept you going every single year.' I'm like, 'Yeah, I know that.' But you have to have those guys that do that. Probably at the major league level, Bobby Valentine was a guy that, I was the oldest rookie on that team and I would say that not everybody connected with him, but he really did a good job with the new guys. I think he probably saw himself a little bit in me. He could play all the positions, he played hard, he was undersized. No matter where we showed up, he would always take me to the field early; me and Matt Franco, two of the young guys, I shouldn't say young guys, but two of the guys with less service time, but he would go out with us early and throw us batting practice and just seeing that, because he didn't have to do that, those are the things I've kind of taken away from pro ball. I wish I could connect with all 35 guys that way, but typically that's hard to do. But there are those guys that, if you can impact, I want to impact all 35, but if I can impact whatever percent that is, my goal is to get all 35, but whenever you make that impact, it doesn't just change their careers. Because now they get it is they mature and grow older, they start impacting (others). There were several guys like that as long as I played and coached that just kind of you draw to and you know that they've made a big difference in where you are at the current time."

PM: In the college game, everybody knows baseball, but now you've got to recruit. How much a part of the job is that and does it take a while to learn how to do it?

SB: "To me recruiting is all relationships. Can you communicate? Can you build those relationships? It's very time consuming. It takes a ton of work. There's days where you're like, 'Boy, if I just go back to pro ball, they throw these players on my lap and I've just got to coach baseball.' I'm a big player development guy. I want to take the guys that we have every single day and just make them better. Give me anybody and I'm going to make them better. But the recruiting is such a big thing in college. You've got to be able to recruit, you've got to be able to build those relationships and there's no tougher place to recruit than right here. Because we want the same players that LSU wants, we want the same players that Arkansas wants, the Kentuckys and Tennessees and it's a very tough thing to do that. I think it takes really special people to be really good recruiters because you invest all this time with the uncertainty. I don't even know what our number is, but it seemed like at Southeast that it's one out of a hundred that we would get that we would spend time with and it still feels the same way because we're looking at a different level of player. It just takes a special person and somebody that's truly committed and can sell the product that you have."

PM: And your sport has a special challenge where you want to recruit a good player, but not too good of a player because if he's too good he's going pro before he ever gets here.

SB: "No doubt. That's the tough thing in baseball because you hear about these people that are oversigning. You have to have a plan on how many is too many? The last thing you want to get caught with is not having enough. Because if you get caught at this time of the year after the draft and you don't have enough, that player's not out there. The player probably two or three years down the road that he's not showing up, that player's not out there right now for us to find and go patch a hole. That's the tough part about baseball. You've just got to plan three years ahead and then the draft hits you at the most crucial time. I think baseball is very unique in the fact that we don't know when our guys are going to sign professionally and we get hit before they get here and then we get hit when they're at the peak of their career. It's just trying to figure that out. But there's definitely a balance between when you're out there, you can see right away, 'Yeah, I want to go ahead and sign this guy' but you know he's not showing up on campus most likely. If we can get him, we're going to get him on campus. And we got very fortunate last year with Seth Halvorsen and Trae Robertson. If Trae's not injured at the time that he needed to go it was probably going to really be tough to keep him. So we've got a couple guys, Luke Mann being that borderline guy. A guy like him was probably going to show up on campus because he just wasn't going to be drafted high enough or get enough money, but you have to balance that and figure that out too and you get burned sometimes. Because those guys are going to tell you, 'Education is very important, I'm going to show up on campus' and as soon as you get picked, it's such an unbelievable feeling, like 'I can go professional in this sport right now' and the challenge of talking them out of 'Do you realize you're going to short season A ball and then probably next year as a high school kid, you're getting stuck in short season again?' I can paint that picture for you and show you what it's like because I've been through that. But it's just so hard to get them on campus."

PM: This job specifically, what are the challenges here that are unique to Missouri?

SB: "I think the biggest challenges for us is just we're a northern school in a southern conference in baseball. There's no secret that the best players are down in Texas and Florida and California. Well, there's a reason, because it's warm weather, they're playing year round. We've got to find, and I think we have a very good plan on where we recruit and how we recruit, but we're finding players that have a lot of upside to them, but in year one they're playing against guys that have probably played at least three times more games than what the guys we bring in here have played and there's always that learning curve. I think the geography part of where we're located in the conference we're in is definitely a challenge for us. The SEC is ridiculous and the arms race to the facilities. How do we keep up? Here we're selling player development. When you walk through this facility, it's a beautiful facility, you see our MATC and the training facility over there, it's a beautiful facility, but the guys that we're recruiting when they're 16 and 17 years old, they love this place when they come here, but also they're getting ready to go somewhere else in our conference more than likely and see those facilities as well and they may get caught up in the bling. We've had guys that say 'We really connected with your coaching staff' and I'm saying 'That's the most important thing,' but 'we're going to go to so and so.' There's always the challenges of just trying to compete with that part of it."

PM: Not specific to Missouri, what's the most challenging part of coaching?

SB: "You know, when you think about the challenges, at the college level, it comes down to the recruiting part. Getting the right players, that's the most challenging thing because we're looking, we have in mind that perfect player for us. It's the guy that's really good academically that we don't have to worry about whether he's going to class or he's passing class, finding that guy that matches with the athletic ability that it has to be in the SEC, that can be challenging just finding those players. The most challenging thing is just the recruiting side and getting the right players in your program. I think that coach (Lance) Rhodes and our staff, they understand what we want and they've done a really good job of finding those guys. And things, they haven't happened happened as quickly as I wanted them to happen, but I definitely feel like we're getting better every single day here and we're making steps in the right direction. I think we're a top 25 club in the country right now and this team is as good as anybody out there, but we've got to start proving that outside of these walls. We've got to change some people's mind about Missouri baseball because I think that's the challenging part here is just getting people to believe 'It is in Missouri but there's a good team there.' I think that's really challenging right now is getting people's minds to change."

PM: So on the opposite side, what's the most rewarding part of coaching?

SB: "I think the most rewarding part right now is whenever you've seen that player from the time he's a freshman to the point he graduates and just seeing the maturation process of where he was when he came in here. It could be from anything, whether he was struggling in the classroom to dominating by the time he's done or really having a tough time getting in the lineup to his senior year or his junior year he's playing every day. Those are very rewarding experiences to see that. Every guy that comes through our program, they tell you 'we're coming here to win championships,' but there's that personal element of they want to play professional baseball. And so when the draft comes and those guys get their names called and you can just see almost that relief, their shoulders kind of drop and they're relieved that 'Man it finally happened' and it worked out, that's a really cool thing to see. And it's a tough thing to see, because some guys you're like, 'That's really good, but you really need to come back here.' You're almost like shooting their dream down, like, 'Hey, it's going to happen again next year.' That's always good to see. But I think overall it's just to watch the development and to see how they continue to progress and knowing when they leave here that they're in good shape, that they're gonna be very productive people in society. That's what I enjoy. It always comes back to the player development side for me, just watching those guys grow."

PM: Down the road, whether it's ten years or 30 years, when you're done, what would you want guys who played for you to say about you as a coach?

SB: "I think the biggest thing is just that he gave me everything that he had. That there was that mutual respect between player and coach. There's some guys that will walk away, like right now, that aren't real happy with me, you know that are frustrated because they didn't play as much as they should have or, in their minds, as they should have, this didn't work out, that didn't work out. But I think the thing is that whenever you get removed from it and you're four or five years down the road, you're like, 'I get it now.' That's what I want them to understand. Each day, I only make nine out of the 35 guys happy and I understand that. But whenever they can take a step back and say that I was very fair, that I was honest with them and that they knew that they could trust me, I think that's the big thing. Just having them to say he really worked hard for me. Each guy. Not for the team, but each individual."