Student, Athlete: Why Ben Williamson’s College Coaches Say He’ll Succeed
Mariners Ben Williamson’s unique drive for improvement will be the separator, say his former coaches
“Development in all sports, baseball in this case, is about who can keep getting better the longest who can keep that growth curve going...he’s continuing to get better. And I don’t think he’s done.” - Brian Murphy, former head coach at William and Mary
After a torrid start to his career as a Mariner, Ben Williamson cooled off sharply when the calendar flipped to May. Over the first half of the month (May 1st - 17th), Williamson was hitting below the Mendoza Line, with a wRC+ of just 28. Of more concern, he wasn’t walking at all and was striking out over 30% of the time—something that has never been part of the contact-oriented Williamson’s profile. Of note, Williamson was at the time working through a truly gnarly-looking blister on his right palm, right at the base of his ring and pinky fingers, which was slightly impacting his ability to grip a bat; that has since mostly healed. (Or, as Williamson put it dryly, “at least it doesn’t look like Mount Vesuvius anymore.”)
However, there’s reason for optimism at the hot corner. Over his last 12 games to finish out May (42 at-bats) Williamson batted .325 with a .357 OBP (a wRC+ of 111), with plate discipline numbers more in line with what he’s done in his career: he’s still walking just shy of 5%, but he’s cut his strikeouts down to a much more manageable 24%.
And those who know Williamson best—his college coaches who nurtured his talent over his time at William and Mary—are confident that Williamson’s foundational set of skills and dedication to getting better will see him over these early-career bumps and bruises. Specifically, they all point to a common separator for Williamson: his genuine love of the more rote aspects of the game, which drives his ability to improve.
“He practiced very hard,” says Brian Murphy, who was the head coach at William and Mary during Williamson’s first two years there and recruited Williamson out of high school. “Always ready to go, always giving full effort...it’s the stuff that you stress and expect from everybody, but there’s some guys who do it at a level that’s higher than most everybody else. It’s not that other guys aren’t doing it hard, it’s just that they don’t have quite the same motor. And he always had the motor to practice really well.”
“He’s one of the best practicers that I’ve ever seen,” agrees Pat McKenna, who was Murphy’s assistant coach at William and Mary. “His give-a-crap level, all the way through, nothing was more important that others. He would go about his base-running just as well as he would want to go about his hitting, which, hitting is obviously a lot more fun than base-running. He just cared about everything. Nothing was too small for him. He showed up to the park, whether it was doing early work or practice, and went about it the right way all the way through. And he was one of those guys who just got better and better because of what he put into it.”
McKenna, a former Tigers and Padres farmhand, was also involved in the recruitment process of Williamson when he attended Freedom High School outside of DC. He admits that while he was impressed overall, he also could see that Williamson didn’t have the kind of loud tools that generate attention at showcases.
“We saw him and we were like, all right. He’s got some tools. He can play good defense. He can hit a little bit. He doesn’t have crazy juice right now, but he was just a really solid player. But nothing that would have wowed you in a showcase standpoint. He was just steady. But it wasn’t like, oh man, that’s a no-doubter right off the bat.”
Murphy, currently the head coach at Merrimack College (where McKenna has since rejoined him), agrees that Williamson, while being on the “upper end” talent-wise, didn’t necessarily look like a surefire big-leaguer; however, he recalls the exact moment he was sold on Williamson as a player.
“I remember the specific game where I was like, yeah, that’s a guy we want to add to our program. It was a tournament down in Georgia and he was playing shortstop, and he dove for a ball in the six-hole, fully laid out, got up and threw an absolute laser to first. It’s one of those plays you just don’t see high school kids make that often, the anticipation, the arm strength, the accuracy. That was the one that sealed the deal for me.”
Williamson’s first year on campus was the COVID year, meaning he only had 13 games, during which he saw average production, hitting .255. His coaching staff appreciated Williamson’s steady presence, especially as he was able to fill in between third base and short with equal defensive aptitude. “It was only a handful of games,” says Murphy, who described Williamson’s ascent as a ‘slow burn’, “but you could tell he was something special. He was a great worker, a great kid, and he just continued to improve.”
McKenna, the former pro, is more blunt.
“He was doing okay,” says McKenna, “but it wasn’t like, oh man, this guy is going to be a dude.”
“But he ended up being a dude.”
When Williamson returned for his sophomore year, his coaches noted an immediate difference; Ben drove up his slugging percentage by almost 100 points, while maintaining his excellent plate discipline and elite defense, settling in at third base after jumping between third and short in his first year. “There was no more first-year, freshman guy,” says McKenna. “It was, I’m going to be comfortable, and I’m going to do my thing. He became an elite defender with an understanding of who he was offensively.”
The growth in maturity and also production twigged the former pro McKenna on to the fact that something special was developing in front of him. “My experience playing professionally helped me project that a little bit. I was like, all right, I think this dude’s got it, if he just keeps doing what he does and doesn’t change it. . .I think he’ll be in good shape.”
With Murphy’s departure in the fall of 2021 to take the coaching job at Merrimack, McKenna, who became the interim head coach, found himself leaning on the now-junior Williamson, at that time a team leader who epitomized doing things the right way. As McKenna leaned on Williamson to help him through the experience of running the show for the first time, Williamson in turn was able to become close with someone who’d been through the process of being scouted, drafted, and developed by an MLB organization: someone he could see himself being one day.
“When you go to William and Mary, honestly, you go there because you’re trying to get a great education that’s going to set you up for a lot of success outside baseball,” says McKenna. “And I think he went in that direction, but then he realized, ‘oh man, if I put as much into baseball as I do into my schoolwork, I can do both of these things, and I can do them both at a really high level.’ I think he didn’t recognize it until the fall of ‘21, I think this can be something that eventually down the road turns into something more than playing college baseball.”
“I realized baseball was a lot more fun than business finance,” joked Ben this spring when asked about the shift in career goals.
With a mid-school year coaching change at William and Mary, a new set of mentors were in charge of overseeing Williamson’s nascent big-league dreams. Paul Panik, now at ODU, was Williamson’s new hitting coach for the 2022 season.
“Everybody dreams big, but then the reality hits,” says Panik, who now recruits for ODU in addition to coaching. “2% of high school players go on to play collegiate baseball. The pyramid narrows. So I don’t want to say your dreams get squashed, but your expectations get tempered. But I don’t think Ben’s ever did. He knew what he wanted and he was going to go get it.”
Panik quickly realized that Williamson’s swing, like his plan for the future, was already clearly defined: a flat, contact-based swing from an upright stance that suited Williamson’s allergy to striking out and high on-base approach. “It’s not always the perfect cage-rat, lab-rat swing that you would teach. It was a little bit different, but it worked for him.” Panik told Williamson that rather than work on overhauling his swing, the two would work on maintenance in daily drills, correcting and tweaking as necessary. “It was never about teaching him to hit. It was about staying out of his way.”
Panik and new head coach Mike McRae did suggest a slight alteration, however, at McRae’s reluctant prodding. McRae, now coaching at Rutgers, remembers being impressed immediately by the way the junior carried himself.
“Physically he was a great-looking kid, strong, a really good mover. It didn’t take long to figure out that his work habits were outstanding. He was really quiet about his body of work. He didn’t need applause, he didn’t need attention, he just went about it with a little bit of a perfectionist mindset, nothing but a growth quality about the young man.”
In Williamson, McRae saw the ideal college hitter: an on-base, contact-oriented approach that used the whole field while doing all the little things right. If other teams wanted to pitch around him, Williamson would happily take his walk and run the bases hard rather than expand the zone; the prototypical team player. Like his hitting coach Panik, McRae was reluctant to interfere with what was working for Williamson, but he couldn’t help but envision bigger things for his third baseman.
“I told him, Benny, you’re a great college player, but I think you should be a pro player, and I don’t want your hitting approach to detract from that.”
In an end-of-season exit interview McRae advised Williamson to try to get some more loft in his swing and try to drive the ball more, but it’s important to note that it wasn’t a one-way conversation: it was Williamson who wanted to know what he needed to do in order to be a professional, ready to hear some tough feedback. “He was always extremely coachable,” said Panik. “He would take what you said to heart, digest it, think critically about it, and then he would come back and question you about it, add in his thoughts. He’s really sharp upstairs.”
McRae told Williamson the truth: in order to get looks from professional organizations, his power numbers, batted ball numbers, exit velocities, all needed to increase, and in order for them to increase, Williamson needed to get stronger.
Williamson took the feedback to heart. When he came back to campus in August of 2023—just two and a half months later—he had added 15-20 pounds of muscle, especially in his upper body. “He was completely cut up,” says Panik. “It was a huge transformation in the body.”
“And from there, his batted-ball data—he always hit the ball hard, but where he was hitting the ball at 100, now he was hitting them at 110, 112. That makes a big difference. So he goes from 11 doubles, one triple, three homers, to 11, 5, and 12. He really did what he needed to do.”
But what impressed Panik the most wasn’t just the eye-popping exit velos or power surge or newly-built body; it was Williamson’s willingness to ask for help.
“All those exit meetings I’ve done, you rarely see guys be that vulnerable and ask for real feedback. Especially when you’re an everyday starter, starting in the three hole. You never really get guys who are willing to be vulnerable and ask for real, hard feedback.”
“Like everything about him, he just worked his butt off, and he was able to grow and continue to get better and hit those metrics that some of the people in the front offices were looking for,” says McRae.
But despite these changes and increased attention from scouts, especially after he won CAA Conference Player of the Year at the end of the 2023 season, Williamson remained the same humble, team-first player he’d been.
“I had opposing coaches come up to me and tell me, ‘not only do I watch Ben during pregame, I want all of my players to watch him during pregame,’” says McRae. “He goes about his business like it is the College World Series on every rep. And they’d ask me, is that real? 100%, it is real. We see it day in and day out. It’s an absolute joy to watch him work his butt off and improve his craft on a daily basis. That’s a lot of self-motivation and drive that he deserves all the credit for.”
“He was never complacent,” echoes McKenna. “He was never like oh, I’m the best player on this team. You would have never thought that unless you were playing against him.”
All of Williamson’s former college coaches have been tracking his pro career closely, and all agree that big-league Ben is the same Ben they all knew.
“His swing didn’t change from ‘22 to ‘23,” says Panik, his former hitting coach. “That’s one thing that the Mariners have done well. Everyone wants to put their stamp on you, but they’ve really done a good job of not messing with it.”
Murphy, who along with McKenna came out to see Williamson play at Fenway this April, agrees. “He’s bigger, he’s thicker, but he looks the same, he moves the same. He looked like the same guy. His swing looks pretty similar to the guy we recruited when he was 17. The moving parts are the same. I’m sure some of the timing elements and some things are changed, but you can tell it’s the same guy.”
Beyond the swing, all his coaches can also see the same player they saw in college: the tireless worker who genuinely loves to practice even the most minute aspects of the game. And to a man, they all believe that is what will be the separator for Williamson at the big-league level.
“I think that’s what separates him,” says McKenna, who calls Williamson the “best practicer” he’s ever seen. “I know there’s a lot of guys out there who have a high level of that. I just think some of it guys can fake a little bit. I’ve seen it. I’ve seen plenty of guys who pretend they care about all of it, but they really only care about portions of it, and I think I can truly say that Ben cared about every single piece of it. And that shows up, because it’s so steady. There’s no crazy ups and downs.”
McRae agrees. “It separates him. You can go watch somebody and go, golly, this young man is just an unbelievable athlete and he does things differently than anyone else on the field. MLB shows all kinds of guys like that. And then there’s guys like Ben, where the body of work and the quality of work, time and time again, you come to appreciate that and realize that’s a huge separator, because no one else is doing that. No one else can replicate that day in and day out and sustain it. And then you realize that there are a few things that are different about him.”
“I think he just has an unbelievable motor to work,” concurs Murphy. “Being great in baseball is just really being good a lot, and he has that focus—whether it’s grit or toughness or just showing up—to be good a lot. And you could see how much he’s improved. He’s hit every benchmark along the way, from constantly improving during his college career to some of the summer ball experiences to his time in the minors...I’m proud of him. It’s a cool story. He’s a guy that’s made the most of every single opportunity, and that doesn’t happen by accident.”
“I know it’s cliche, but he’s the kind of guy I’d want my daughter to marry one day,” says Panik. “It’s cliche, but at the same time you don’t say that about too many people. That’s who he is. He’s humble. He has the ability to listen, to talk and have a conversation. He’s an awesome person. He doesn’t take his talent and the game for granted because he’s a tireless worker.”
“He’s an unbelievable young man,” says McRae.