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DeutschTORONTO — Growing up in Blansko, Czechia, Petr Strbicky played hockey for one season, but it didn’t work for him and suddenly he was looking for another sport to play. His father, also named Petr, suggested trying a summer game in which the players wear a glove to catch with one hand while throwing with the other, which the then seven year old struggled to imagine.
“I didn’t believe him,” Strbicky recalled, “so he signed me up.”
Baseball clicked with him immediately, and a lifetime in the game has since followed for the now 40-year-old, whose eighth year of coaching in the Toronto Blue Jays organization is kicking off with a stint as third base coach for Czechia at the World Baseball Classic.
For Stribicky, representing his country at the best tournament in international baseball is the latest highlight in a career that’s taken him from pitching and playing the corner infield spots in Czechia’s Extraliga to coaching around the world and into the pro ranks.
“I reached my limit of the playing career, but I always wanted to help other players,” he said from Japan, where Czechia opens against South Korea on Thursday morning. Mantras he’s learned along the way are to “be patient and open. There are a lot of people who know more than you, so if you come in, maybe you might have the right idea or maybe you can help, but be open to what they have to say, where they’re coming from and learn and listen. Then start approaching and saying things. Patience and listening to understand how things are done was very, very important for me.”
Strbicky started out as a catcher, moved to the infield corners and then had most of his success as a pitcher during seven seasons in the Extraliga, when he’d watch VHS tapes of any Major League Baseball game he could find in search of ways to improve.
Greg Maddux outings were his favourite.
“I never threw hard, but he knew how to set up hitters and he could use the velocity and the movement,” said Strbicky. “I was trying to emulate that and it was working for me, at least at the European level.”
He began coaching at 18, eventually pursued a Master’s Degree in physical education from Masaryk University in Brno, and a student-exchange program eventually led to an eight-year stint as the director of the Portuguese Baseball Academy.
At a European Baseball Coaches Association event in Prague, Strbicky met Tim Leiper, then the Blue Jays’ first-base coach, who was impressed by the way “he loved the game and had a massive growth mindset.” Leiper connected him with the club’s player-development staff, which led to a 2013 invite to work as a guest coach at a fall camp.
More invites to fall camps followed, where Strbicky gravitated toward John Schneider, now the Blue Jays’ manager, and John Tamargo, now manager at double-A New Hampshire, who at the time were in the lower levels of the player-development system.
Schneider remembers their initial meeting and jokes that his first thought was, “That’s not how you spell Petr, like where’s the E?” More seriously, he was quickly taken by “how curious he was.”
“He wanted to talk to everybody, wanted to hear new ideas and whenever I’m around someone like that, I’m like, ‘Oh, maybe I should be doing the same to you?’” Schneider continued. “Got to know him a little bit and his background. Different vantage points are cool and whether it’s us taking something from him or him taking something from us, there’s more than one way to do this thing. So I was drawn to him because of his different background and felt like, you’re coming over here to learn, what can I learn from you?”
At the end of the 2018 season, the Blue Jays suggested Strbicky apply for one of the vacancies with their Dominican Summer League team. They hired him as the hitting coach there for the 2019 season and he’s been working his way up since, serving as a development coach with rookie-level Florida Complex League team in 2022 and with low-A Dunedin in 2023 and ’24.
In 2025, Strbicky moved up to high-A Vancouver as a position coach, a role he’s returning to this year, getting lots of questions about his backstory along the way.
“Oh yeah, a lot,” he said with a laugh. “‘How did I end up here? What got me to where I am right now?’ Because there’s not that many people from Europe, or especially from Czechia, in professional baseball.”
But Strbicky’s even more curious about his players than they are about him, believing that coaches must invest in each person under their watch to properly individualize their approach to specific needs.
“I try to be very approachable and hands-on,” he explained. “I crack jokes a lot and get to know them, their family, where they’re coming from and their story. … If you understand the player, then you can coach the player and get the best out of him.”
Before he resumes that process with the next wave of Blue Jays prospects in Vancouver, Strbicky is taking the same approach with Czechia, an opportunity he’s grateful the organization supported.
The Czechs are in the Classic for a second time, competing out of Pool C with host Japan, Australia and Taiwan, as well as South Korea. They 1‑3 in 2023 while producing one of the tournament’s most endearing moments, when Ondrej Satoria, an electrician by day, struck out Shohei Ohtani in a 10‑2 loss to Japan.
Satoria is back, alongside former Baltimore Orioles infielder Terrin Vavra and catcher Martin Cervenka, who reached triple-A in the Orioles and Mets systems.
“Our strength is the cohesiveness of the team and the spirit of guys who have been together for a long, long time,” said Strbicky, the only person with the Czech team tied to a major-league organization. “We can play as a team and cheer for each other and pull for each other. And it’s a challenge for us always to play against a better team, so we are ready for it.”
No matter how Czechia fares, Strbicky will return with yet another experience on a unique baseball path that started with a kid who couldn’t even imagine the game.
