Once a Brewers top prospect, Corey Ray is coaching now, and he'll be back in Milwaukee this weekend

Corey Ray is 28 years old, and already he's feeling himself evolve as a coach.

The former Milwaukee Brewers top prospect, whose minor-league career included a number of accolades but whose major-league career was limited to just one game, spent the 2023 season as bench coach for the Class A Myrtle Beach Pelicans of the Carolina League. He hopes the Chicago Cubs organization will have him back next year, perhaps even higher up the coaching ladder.

Ray's offseason pursuits includes a visit Saturday to American Family Field, where he'll serve as one of the coaches of the Prep Baseball Report All-American Game, an opportunity that stemmed from his own days as a prep player from the south side of Chicago when he first encountered PBR founder Sean Duncan.

Ray never got to play on the home diamond as a big-leaguer, though he still has his jersey and lineup card from April 24, 2021, when he walked and scored in his big-league debut at Wrigley Field, home to the organization that now writes his checks.

"When I first started coaching, I was trying to tell (the players) everything, every lesson that I learned, everything I would have done different, what helped me," Ray said. "As the year progressed, I started to realize if you just give them the opportunity to ask or give them the opportunity to show you what they need, you'll find the place where you can input as much knowledge as you possibly can, as opposed to just throwing a bunch of information at guys."

When Ray discusses his playing career, he does so introspectively, acknowledging plenty of things he could have done differently but also noting the external factors that worked against him. One of those, perhaps ironically now as an aspiring manager himself, is listening to too many voices.

"You try to be coachable; the best players, the best people are always trying to grow, always trying to learn," he said. "My problem was I was trying to learn from too many people at once.

"I had a guy tell me later in my career, 'Mike Trout comes to the field, and he doesn't always feel good, but he's had the same swing since he was 18 years old. That's his A swing. … You're not Mike Trout, but you come to the field and you're trying to compete with your B, C and D swings, and you wonder why you're hitting .200.' That made so much sense. The best you that you can be that night is all you've got."

Ray isn't a typical case of a prospect who never reached his potential. He did have minor-league success, becoming the organization's player of the year in 2018, the same year he was Southern League player of the year. He appeared in the All-Star Futures Game, and in 2019, he was regarded as the No. 2 prospect in the organization behind Keston Hiura.

'Part of my career was me feeling entitled'

All the same, he's one of four position players in Brewers history to play in only one major-league game, and the other three were catchers who did play big-league games with other organizations.

"Part of my career was me feeling entitled," Ray said. "(I was thinking,) 'I've got all these accolades; you should just put me in the major leagues,' when in actuality, if you're playing for a team that's trying to win a World Series, you've got to earn it. You've got to be able to help them win a World Series when you're up there. I don't know that I forced their hand enough, through the injuries, through the ups and downs and through the inconsistencies, where they felt they needed me to help them win a World Series."

It's not lost on him that the Cubs and Brewers will clash in the final three games of the regular season at American Family Field, perhaps with a lot on the line.

"I've got to root for the Cubs," he confessed. "It's been a really fun year, watching the NL Central and watching the Cubs."

Myrtle Beach reached the Carolina League playoffs, falling in the semifinal to eventual champion Charleston, so Ray is temporarily out of a job until he learns if Chicago will give him another assignment. Though he wasn't able to reach the big leagues on a regular basis, he did sign for $4.125 million when he was selected with the No. 5 pick in the 2016 MLB draft.

"I'm able to live comfortably," he said. "I'm able to take a minor-league coaching job and not have to worry about how much I'm getting paid. I'm able to do what it is that I love, and that's giving back, pouring into others on the baseball field in a baseball setting and not have to work three, four, five jobs while working a 9-to-5. That money put me in a really good position."

What kept Corey Ray from a longer big-league career?

There were issues of timing that hurt Ray's career; he thinks there may have been a chance he was recalled as a fourth outfielder, but it didn't make sense for the team to promote a top prospect to mostly sit the bench. There were plenty of injuries, too. But Ray's biggest obstacle was that he played in the outfield at a time when the Brewers already had a triumvirate of top options.

"I think we forget, getting to the major leagues, everything has to line up," Ray said. "There has to be performance, you have to be an organziation that needs you. You have to be playing well when they need you. It's not just all about talent, it's about performance and need. Unfortunately, or fortunately because I got to learn from these guys, I was behind Ryan Braun, Christian Yelich and Lorenzo Cain. … Those guys didn't get hurt, and I didn't play well enough or I wasn't available enough where they said, 'We have to get this guy to the big leauges.'"

After a while, Ray said the injuries played a role in his retirement from playing.

"My baseball career wasn't focused on refining tools, it was focusing on my preparation, and all of that was focused on not getting hurt," he said. "I think when you get to a position in your career where it's not about you being better as a player, when it's not about playing a game you love and it's all about what I need to do to not get hurt, then the game's really not that fun."

He admitted that yes, he regrets not asking for a trade, but he doesn't say it with contempt.

"The Brewers are great, classy organization, but I just don't think there was a fit," he said. "And with other organizations, there might have been a fit."

Now comes the next chapter, in which Ray will stick around baseball in a different capacity. He's run camps and worked with a younger age group before at Myrtle Beach, but the players he'll oversee this weekend will be his youngest group of charges yet.

In addition to letting the players come to him with questions, and not necessarily the other way around, Ray said the biggest thing about sharing his wisdom is showing instead of telling.

"You can tell guys stuff till you're blue in the face, but until they see it, they won't understand it," he said.

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This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Former Brewers prospect Corey Ray looks back at star-crossed career