Bianca Smith made headlines in January 2021 when she was hired as the first Black female coach in professional baseball history. Media outlets including CNN, the BBC and People Magazine have covered the story of the new Boston Red Sox minor league coach.
Smith quietly left the Red Sox after two years — leaving behind a multi-year contract because she said she didn’t feel challenged.
“They wanted to send me back to rookie ball, but I didn’t want to be there, so I decided to take a chance,” Smith said in a phone interview. Competitor. “Everyone I know who stays at a rookie club (for a long time) is because they have a family and like the lifestyle. I’m ready to travel more. My passion is (game) strategy, and Rookie ball is almost entirely player development.”
Smith has not given up on returning to the MLB. She is spinning. The 31-year-old moved to Japan last summer to coach elementary and junior high school baseball through the JET (Japanese Exchange and Teaching) program, which she calls a “bucket list” project. Smith has also recently accepted jobs with the GB Women’s National Baseball Team and the GB 23 and Under Baseball Team.
Smith’s goal in this part of his coaching career is to be a sponge, soaking up as much information and different experiences as possible. Smith was a fan of defensive strategies and baserunning, a style of baseball more popular in Japan.
By the end of the year, she will have coached in five countries on three continents. In addition to studying Japanese, Smith is also working hard to learn Chinese and Korean.
“Everyone in (Major League Baseball) speaks Spanish now, it almost feels like a requirement,” she said. “But how many coaches do we have who can speak these languages? There are a lot of players from here, and there will be more, and Asian players usually only have translators. Japan is very run-oriented and I want to bring that over. This is The idea of getting different experiences and adding tools that MLB doesn’t have.”
Smith’s decision to leave the Red Sox in late fall 2022 means most other teams will have limited openings next season. Smith wasn’t surprised she didn’t find another job right away: Rookie-level positions are usually the last ones to open.
This offseason, however, is a different story. Smith applied for several open positions but said she didn’t get an interview.
“It’s amazing,” said Smith, who publicly stated she had a bigger goal when she was hired by Boston: to become the first black female coach in the major leagues.
Smith, a Dartmouth graduate where she was the only woman on the school’s softball team, holds two graduate degrees — one in sports business and the other in sports law. Before the Red Sox hired her, she interned with the Cincinnati Reds, Texas Rangers and Major League Baseball and served as an assistant coach and hitting coordinator at Carroll University in Wisconsin.
“I don’t want to say anything bad about the Red Sox, I loved my time there, but I believed deep down that if I joined as a male of any race, I would advance,” Smith said. “I don’t like the attention and I try to stay humble, but I do realize that my resume is crazy. I had to go through a lot to get the rookie ball job, which is why I’m surprised that in what I’ve done After everything, I didn’t have a team interested in talking about a position.
“Looking back, I do believe that if I wasn’t a woman competing, I would have had a better chance of advancing. There might be things going on behind the scenes that I don’t know about. But every industry has politics to deal with. As far as the field is concerned, I No problems encountered.”
The Red Sox declined to comment on the specifics of Smith’s contract offer, but Red Sox director of player development Brian Abraham said: “Bianca ultimately decides to pursue other opportunities in baseball that we respect, and (we) certainly wish her the best. All the best. It’s been exciting to watch her grow as a staff member during her time with the Red Sox. It’s been a pleasure working with her.”
Even if Smith doesn’t receive an offer from a pro team, her contract in Japan runs through August 2026, giving her a chance to pick and choose what to do next.
Smith said she no longer dreams of being a major league manager and in a perfect world she would rather be a base coach. Less focus, more strategy. Smith eschewed the media blitz that accompanied her historic hiring and waited a month and a half before making her departure from the Red Sox public. She said she now regrets it.
“I don’t appreciate the opportunity for attention,” said Smith, who started a blog called “Go Be The First” to chronicle her adventures abroad. “I grew up believing that coaching should be in the background, but now I do hope I can do more with (the attention) and use it as a platform. It’s not just because I’m not playing professional ball, it’s because I’m The only black woman. There is no one left to look at black girls now.
“I had a chance to step back and think about what I was doing. When I got this job, I kept telling people, ‘I’m not done yet, we’ll talk about it later.’ Obviously, I wasn’t done yet, but I has done something that no one has done before. I’ve been interviewed by several different newspapers in Japan, and not only am I the first black woman in Major League Baseball, but now I’m coaching here in Japan. And now I’m suddenly Realizing, ‘Okay, I did something really amazing.’ I could see that and still want to do more.”
Smith said she misses the players she coached and she still keeps in touch with many of them as well as her former colleagues.
“Most of them understood and supported my decision. They knew what my goals were and how ambitious I was. Maybe (I was) a little impatient, but I didn’t mean any harm,” she said. “Returning to professional football was harder than I thought. But I don’t regret my decision (to leave). I think if I had been in a job where I didn’t grow, I would have been more frustrated.”
(Top photo of Smith in 2021: Billie Weiss/Boston Red Sox via Getty Images)
