CLEVELAND — Stephen Vogt and Craig Albernaz — former teammates and forever pseudo-brothers — rested their elbows on the white tablecloth at Mastro’s Steakhouse in late April 2022, a Bay Area gust from Union Square.
After they polished off their ribeyes, Vogt sipped an espresso martini as Albernaz downed a glass of cabernet and tore through a mound of warm butter cake with a scoop of vanilla ice cream. Albernaz is an avowed sugar fiend and Vogt insisted he would gain weight if he even glanced at the dessert.
As is customary when the two converse, their baseball-centric conversation escalated. Back and forth they argued in the dimly lit restaurant, two proud baseball minds growing impatient with the other’s refusal to wilt as their voices gradually overtook the crooner’s vibrato in the corner of the room.
Vogt, in his final season catching for the Oakland Athletics, wouldn’t cave. Albernaz, the San Francisco Giants bullpen/catching coach, was jumping at the chance to play devil’s advocate, always at the ready with a rebuttal, regardless of whether he believes in the cause. Knowing that he’s exasperating his buddy is worth it.
“If I get to you, I keep going,” Albernaz said. “I don’t stop.”
Finally, the server approached to ask whether everything was OK. They assured him they were fine and shooed him away.
“We’re good,” Vogt remembers saying. “This is who we are.”
It’s who they are in a steakhouse with an upscale dress code, as if they had rented out the upstairs dining room. It’s who they are in Vogt’s office before and after games, when debating the next day’s batting order or assessing why they were cornered into demoting a player to Triple A. It’s who they are in the dugout, when Albernaz shields his mouth with a lineup card to stymie any expert lip-readers at Progressive Field who would otherwise deduce their pinch-hitting plans.
It’s who they were more than a decade ago, when both were catchers in big-league camp with the Tampa Bay Rays, who appreciated their work as extra bodies in spring training but didn’t have plans with either. Albernaz was an undrafted signee invited to catch extra bullpen sessions. Vogt was a third-stringer in A-ball itching to switch to coaching.
Stephen Vogt and Craig Albernaz have been friends for a decade. Their dynamic helps shape the way team operates. (Joe Robbins / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
They pushed each other to improve, to find their path to the big leagues, whether as a player, a coach or both. Those journeys included plenty of heated conversations that always came from a caring place, just as they did that evening in San Francisco 2 1/2 years ago.
“It’s how we always interact,” Albernaz said. “We’re talking s— to each other. We just get in the zone where it’s just us, like there’s no one around.”
During a game last week, Vogt sat on the bench in the third-base dugout in Cleveland. He leaned against the blue-padded railing in front of him. Albernaz stood to his right and supplied signs to the fielders. He turned to Vogt and muttered a few words in the manager’s ear.
Such is the standard scene in the Cleveland Guardians dugout. The two never stop gabbing during a game. They rose through the Rays ranks together, catchers competing for opportunities. They interviewed for the same managerial opening last winter but helped each other thrive through the process.
Now, as manager and bench coach, they continue to engage in contentious baseball debates. But those squabbles helped fuel the Guardians to the postseason.
“It’s really special,” catcher Austin Hedges said. “They love each other a lot. And they talk a lot of trash to each other.”
When Albernaz attended a pre-draft workout with the Rays in 2005, a scout assured him he would be a second-day draft pick. Albernaz returned home to Somerset, Mass., and told all his buddies to follow the draft to witness his moment of glory. After all, he dubbed himself a “cocky f—ing player” as an undersized catcher at Eckerd College, a private liberal arts school in St. Petersburg, Fla., with about 2,000 students.
He went undrafted.
“That was the most humbling moment I’ve ever had in my life,” he said. “I went home with my tail tucked between my legs.”
He played in a men’s league later that summer, then the Rays changed regimes and the scout who initially coveted his skills gained more authority. Tampa invited him to catch bullpen sessions in minor-league spring training in 2006. He threw out every runner who dared to dash to second base that spring, which garnered him attention and made him a favorite among coaches.
He knew his role, though. He was in camp to help the pitchers. He wasn’t a top prospect. He was a self-described “minor-league grinder.” He never hit enough to suggest he deserved daily playing time. But he left an impression a couple of years later on another young catcher new to the organization.
“This guy can freaking catch,” Vogt remembers thinking.
They first met in spring training in 2008. Three years later, they were in big-league camp together and were tied at the chest protector. They were technically competitors, trying to earn opportunities, but they decided the best way to approach the situation was to boost each other, not outmaneuver the other. Vogt’s bat eventually propelled him through the system, and Albernaz bounced between the upper levels of the minors.
One day at Double-A Montgomery, Tampa’s field coordinator, Jim Hoff, pulled aside Albernaz before batting practice and asked whether he had ever considered coaching. “I think you’d be really good at it,” Hoff told him.
“I was like, ‘Oh, s—,’” Albernaz said.
Craig Albernaz spent four years with the Giants as a bullpen/catching coach. (Andy Kuno / San Francisco Giants / Getty Images)
Late in his playing career, when Albernaz was reassigned to minor-league camp during spring training, Rays manager Joe Maddon predicted Albernaz would one day flourish as a coach or manager.
Those votes of confidence finally convinced Albernaz. “This is probably happening,” he thought.
For five years, he occupied a variety of coaching roles, including minor-league manager, in the Rays system. The Giants hired him after the 2019 season, and he spent four years as their bullpen/catching coach.
During the final week of the 2023 season, the Guardians called him. Albernaz reached out to Rays manager Kevin Cash, who previously coached in Cleveland and spoke highly of the environment. The Giants fired their skipper, Gabe Kapler, two days later. There would be turnover on San Francisco’s staff, and the club was particularly interested in Vogt.
Albernaz interviewed with the Guardians the Tuesday after the season ended. He met with club officials over video call and then visited their offices at Progressive Field. He supplied Vogt with insight into the Giants’ inner workings.
Then, the Guardians called Vogt about their vacancy. Vogt called Albernaz to keep him apprised.
Even while competing for the same managerial job, they worked together. No bit of insight was off-limits.
“It may not be the norm,” Vogt said, “but that’s our norm.”
The interview process confirmed everything Albernaz had heard from Cash.
He called Vogt and told him: “This place is it. This is the spot.”
On Sept. 16, after a walk-off win vaulted the Guardians to the brink of an AL Central title, Vogt’s eyes welled up as he reviewed his club’s late-inning heroics.
“I love these guys,” he said, his voice trembling.
Those moments, in a marathon season full of hurrahs and hurdles, tend to force his emotions to the forefront. It’s never more apparent than when one of his decisions dictates a player’s livelihood.
Earlier this year, as Vogt reflected on his first call to the big leagues, he started to cry. He was joining the Rays for Opening Day in 2012, and as his wife dropped him off at the Raleigh-Durham airport, he looked at his 6-month-old daughter and told her: “You have no idea what today means. It’ll change your life forever.”
The authenticity that Stephen Vogt operates with goes a long way with players. (Justin Edmonds / Getty Images)
As he retold that story in January in the dining room of his Olympia, Wash., home, he glanced at his daughter, now 13, and apologized for getting emotional. That authenticity, though, goes a long way with players when he welcomes them to the team, or when he has to deliver news they don’t want to hear.
“He’s so invested in each guy and he cares about them deeply,” Albernaz said. “It crushes him to send them back down.”
On each occasion, Vogt and Albernaz dissect how they arrived at the decision. Was it a coaching failure or a developmental misstep? Could this have been prevented, and can they prevent it from happening again? Where did it start to go downhill?
“I don’t ever want it to be easy,” Vogt said. “I want to feel the emotion, because I’ve been there. Having that empathy, I don’t ever want that to go away.”
That’s what made Vogt such a sensible managerial candidate. He has absorbed every curveball that baseball can sling at a player.
He made two All-Star teams, despite being a 12th-round pick from little-known Azusa Pacific University. He was never a prized prospect, and after an injury-riddled 2009 season, he was ready to fast forward to the coaching phase of his career.
He was designated for assignment, demoted, traded, overlooked and underappreciated. He spent an entire winter stuck on zero career hits in 25 at-bats, and woke up in a sweaty panic every night having tricked himself into thinking he had been cut by the Rays.
Eventually, he was.
Through it all, he knew he always wanted to manage. Those experiences allow him to commiserate with every player who has ever struggled in a game built on failure.
And it had the Guardians brass impressed, even though his only formal coaching experience was one season as Seattle’s bullpen coach, stationed 400-some feet from the dugout.
“Five minutes in,” said Cleveland general manager Mike Chernoff, “there was a feeling of, ‘Wow, this could be the guy.’”
The day Vogt got the job, after he took a break from shoveling horse manure to accept the Guardians’ offer, he and his wife video-called Albernaz and his wife. Within 24 hours, Vogt was recruiting Albernaz to his coaching staff. It made too much sense, given their ever-tangled baseball journeys.
“We’ve been the player who isn’t getting playing time and is fighting,” Vogt said. “We know where their brain is because ours went there. We had to scratch and claw for everything we ever earned in this game.”
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Two or three times a day, Hedges will walk past Vogt’s office, toward the end of a narrow hallway at Progressive Field, and notice Albernaz sitting beside the manager’s desk, often with a laptop resting on his legs. Sometimes, the two are discussing a game plan. Other times, they’re sitting in silence, waiting for the next challenge to surface.
The Guardians catchers, staples at every hitting and pitching meeting, have a front-row seat to the Vogt-Albernaz rapport. David Fry referred to them as “a married couple.” They debate everything from lineup construction to pitching matchups to which flavor Celsius they should consume in Vogt’s office before first pitch. During games, Vogt said, they’re “constantly talking crap.”
“A guy will check his swing,” Fry said, “and Vogt will be like, ‘Swing it, Albie. That looks like you, man.’ … For guys like me, who know they eventually want to coach, that’s your dream, to be a manager in the big leagues with one of your best friends as bench coach.”
In the dugout, Vogt and Albernaz carry on conversations resembling the ones they held as players in the Rays farm system, when they devised plans to help teammates improve and they fantasized about what buttons they would push if they were the manager. Albernaz spends his afternoons thinking up every possible scenario that might arise during a game so Vogt isn’t caught unprepared. Vogt dubbed him “the hardest-working person in baseball,” an “Energizer Bunny” who stays up “all hours of the night diving into one small thing if it can help one of our players get just a tick better.”
“Yes, he’s the manager, I’m the bench coach,” Albernaz said. “But also, that’s my good friend. I want to make sure he’s in the best spot to succeed.”
They’ll exchange ideas and counterproposals throughout the nine innings, with the intensity of the conversation often matching the heated dialogue they broadcast at Mastro’s Steakhouse.
“Albie will bring up something and Vogt’s like, ‘That’s dumb,’” Fry said. “Vogt will bring up something and Albie will be like, ‘Well, that’s dumb.’”
Ultimately, the decision lands with Vogt. The process has worked wonders in Year 1 as the Guardians embark on a postseason run.
“He’s killing it,” Albernaz said.
(Top photo: Jason Miller / Getty Images)
