MILWAUKEE — Brandin Podziemski’s first sports love didn’t revolve around the game many would expect.
At just two years old, the Golden State Warriors guard attended a “Sporties for Shorties” program near his Milwaukee-area home and picked up a Bamm Bamm Rubble-style baseball bat straight out of “The Flintstones” for the first time. He’d use the bat and a cushie ball to learn about the sport his father, John, played and loved growing up.
An instructor quickly noticed Brandin had the kind of hand-eye coordination and processing ability that sets top-tier athletes apart. His dad watched from a distance and knew it, too.
“He’s got it,” John remembers thinking.
Brandin’s baseball skill is still apparent 20 years later. When asked to throw out the ceremonial first pitch at a San Francisco Giants game after being drafted by the Warriors in 2023, Brandin, a left-hander, hit 86 miles per hour on the radar gun. He’s convinced that if he spent a spring and summer just working on pitching, he could still throw it in the low 90s.
At the mound, @brandinpodziem2 ⚾️💨@SFGiants || #BayAreaUnite pic.twitter.com/ftSR33tFAw
— Golden State Warriors (@warriors) August 3, 2023
The 22-year-old Warriors guard recently made a bold claim: If he had stuck with the game, he could have been on a similar path to baseball’s biggest star.
“I think I could be the white Shohei (Ohtani),” Brandin said inside a near-empty Chase Center earlier this month. “I think I could do both. Maybe not to the degree he can do it, but I think I could for sure do both. Pitch, play the field, hit, all those things.”
Growing up, Brandin caught the eyes of more than just his program instructor and father. John would watch other parents “freak out” because of how fast he was throwing the ball to his young son. But Brandin always had the same response as he caught the ball without issue.
“Dad, you can’t throw it any faster than that?” he would ask.
At four years old, John tried to sign Brandin up for different leagues. Kids weren’t supposed to be in a machine pitch league until they were six, but John was convinced Brandin was ready to skip T-ball. He still remembers putting the tokens in the batting cage machine so his son could get his chance to hit.
The first time through, Brandin hit four of the 15 pitches. John fed the machine more tokens so that Brandin could get 15 more chances. He promised the coaches he wasn’t wasting their time.
“He hit 12 of 15 the next time,” John recounted proudly in a phone interview with The Athletic.
Brandin’s baseball career blossomed from there. At St. John’s Northwestern Military Academy, he batted .469 while driving in 10 runs and hitting two triples. He could hit and was a talented left-handed pitcher and outfielder, but Brandin’s heart was in a different place.
John and Brandin remember the car ride that changed the trajectory of Brandin’s life.
Brandin was headed into his freshman year of high school. He had just started playing in a basketball league the year before because John thought it was important for his son to stay active outside of baseball season. The pair was on their way home from a baseball tournament at Vanderbilt University when Brandin dropped the news that would change everything.
“I told my dad, ‘I’m thinking I want to take basketball more serious, and just put baseball on the side,’” Brandin said.
John couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He knew his son had talent — but even more importantly, he didn’t want Brandin to walk away from the sport like he had.
More than two decades earlier, John was a promising young baseball player, on track to become the varsity second baseman at Milwaukee Trade and Technical High School. Right around that time, freestyle biking started to break into the national consciousness.
John felt the pull to try something else.
“I’m all into baseball, but I rode my bike everywhere,” John said. “I’m seeing this stuff called freestyling, and I’m like, ‘What is this?’ It’s like all these balancing tricks you do on flat land … and it came so easy.”
John saw the sponsorship deals some competitors were starting to earn. He figured he would give it a shot. His high school coach at the time wanted John to choose between one passion or the other.
“This coach is giving me crap,” John said. “‘OK bike boy, if you go, then you’re not gonna be on the team.’”
John decided to try his luck anyway and entered a bike contest. He finished 14th. When he returned to work out with the baseball team later that summer, in advance of the new season, John thought, at worst, the coach would put him back down on junior varsity as a punishment.
But when the pair finally talked, the decision was even harsher than that. The coach stuck to his word: He wouldn’t let John back on the team.
John recalled his coach telling him, “You’re done… I hope that was fun. You go continue riding your bike.”
Though John pursued his bike dreams throughout high school, even selling candy bars and riding a paper route to pay for flights to different competitions, he never broke through the way he hoped. He ended up ranking as high as 19th in the country, but the career didn’t provide the financial stability he was looking for. John stopped riding his bike after high school and would eventually play in some softball leagues in his free time, but he never got to see if his baseball dream would have paid off.
Now, years later, as he sat in the car with Brandin, he wondered if his son was making the same mistake.
“He was like, ‘No, there’s no way,’” Brandin recalled. “‘God gave you this gift to play, and you’re super talented at it. Why give it up for something that’s so uncertain?’”
At first, John thought Brandin was just upset that his team lost at the tournament. Even when people around Milwaukee would tell him how good Brandin looked on the basketball court, his message was always the same: He’s a baseball player, not a basketball player. But Brandin was serious. As John re-tells the moment, the intensity of what it meant to both men remains palpable.
“He rattled off three things to me,” John said. “He said, ‘I don’t love (baseball) like I used to.’ He says, ‘It’s boring.’ And, ‘it’s too easy.’”
At that moment, John didn’t want to hear it.
“I just lost it,” John said. “I lost it. I was like, ‘Are you serious? You’re going to throw this all away for something that we don’t even take serious?’”
As Brandin listened to his father, he had a message that would resonate — for both men.
“He said these words to me, and I’ll never forget it,” John said. “And he’s lived up to it every single day. He said, ‘Dad, if you let me play basketball, I will make you proud.’”
John speaks with pride now — not only about his son’s career and the work he’s poured in to make it happen, but how much he respects his son for telling him exactly how he felt at such a young age.
“I look at it now — end of seventh grade, 12 going 13 — to have enough courage to tell your dad while driving in the car,” John said. “I’m gonna tell my dad how I really feel … he’s going to freak out — but he did it. I look back, I could just imagine how terrified (he was). You’re going to tell your dad something that young?”
Brandin told his dad something else in that conversation: “If you let me play, I’m going to make the NBA.”
“Back then, I was just mad,” John said. “Fine. We’re gonna see, we’re gonna see. I tried everything. If he complained, I was like, ‘We can always go back to baseball.’ Because I just didn’t see it. And I couldn’t see it.”
“Fast forward seven years later, six years later, I’m here as a rookie,” Brandin said. “It all worked out.”
Brandin does not lack confidence. It oozes out of him. But when he originally told his dad about his desire to play basketball, he had to show everyone else what he felt about the game on the inside.
John arranged for Brandin to workout with Tyler Herro’s trainer, Drew Dunlop, another player from the Milwaukee area who made the leap to the NBA. John told Dunlop there was one caveat: If he didn’t think Brandin was good enough, he would tell him while John was there.
After the first workout, the trainer gave John the same message that the instructor from “Sporties for Shorties” delivered over a decade earlier.
“He’s got it,” the trainer told John. “He’s got something.”
John could see that his son loved the game, but now he also could see that the belief could take him to the kind of levels that he always thought baseball would. John knew the financial ramifications of the decision, but promised his son that he would find the money to pay for the training and help him make his basketball dream a reality.
“He was like ‘Dad, if we can’t afford it …’” John recalled. “I was like, ‘I’ll get the money somehow’ … If we’re gonna do this, we’re gonna do this. And he’s lived up to every part of it.”
It has all shaken out. Brandin became one of the top prospects in the state of Wisconsin, where he was named Wisconsin Mr. Basketball and Wisconsin Gatorade Player of the Year as a senior after averaging 35.1 points, 10.0 rebounds, 5.6 assists and 4.0 steals per game. He started his college career at the University of Illinois and then transferred to Santa Clara, where he became the West Coast Conference Co-Player of the Year for the 2022-2023 season. The Warriors selected him 19th that June.
“It was a blessing in a way,” Brandin said. “Because a lot of kids had dads that either played in the league, or played basketball, have a certain way of looking at the game … Where he looked at it from the perspective of just broad, not even X’s and O’s, just broad things that he saw, like this could help you get better.”
John puts it in a simpler way.
“I used to tell him so much — ‘B, I am like your cheat code,’” he said.
The decision has paid the type of dividends that seem like a dream, the ones Brandin predicted from the beginning. Brandin’s a key young figure on a Warriors team that is hoping he can take another step in his progression this season.
As John watched Brandin score nine points, grab five rebounds and dish out three assists in the Warriors 120-110 loss to the Milwaukee Bucks on Thursday night, he is reminded how much joy there is that everything worked out. His son earned his way into the NBA with hard work.
Brandin knows he’s living part of John’s dream every time he gets on the court.
“I think so,” Brandin said. “Just knowing that he gave up his dream to have me. And then to have me and see me succeed at a high level it almost feels like you’re a part of it. And he is, because he’s done so much for me. But I’m glad that I learned what I learned in baseball from him, and how accepting he was towards the end of letting me live out my passion and doing what I love to do.”
Baseball hasn’t left Brandin completely. Aside from his first pitch in San Francisco, he also made one before a Milwaukee Brewers game last summer — a special moment for the lifelong Brewers fan. He hit some batting practice home runs along the way as well. He still watches the Brewers whenever he can. but he knows his heart is in the right place — and he’s playing the right sport.
“If I could play both, I would,” Brandin said. “I love baseball. It’s my first passion, first love of any sport. It just happens I was gifted with it and really good at it. Always a special place. I love watching in the offseason. I love going to games in the offseason. Just special for sure.”
Like his son, John believes Brandin could have been the next Ohtani.
“Honest,” John said.
Not only has Brandin defied the odds and made it to the NBA, he has helped his dad live out his own kind of dream in the process. When Brandin threw out the first pitch at that Giants game, he was able to bring John on the field with him to warm up before he made his way to the mound. John admits that the whole sequence at Oracle Park prior to that Giants game felt like the scene from “Field of Dreams” when Kevin Costner’s character, Ray Kinsella, has a catch with his father, John. His dream for his son was to be at a major league park, wearing a major league uniform.
As Brandin made his way off the field that day, his father thought about that day in the car on the ride home from Nashville. He thought about the decision he made that pushed him out of his own baseball career. The proud father had a message for his son.
“You lived my dream, buddy,” John told Brandin. “Now go live yours.”