Newly named San Francisco Giants hitting coach Pat Burrell knows well the impact a great big-league hitter can have on a young player. In 1997, while spending the holidays with his grandparents in Kansas City, Mo., Burrell opened the door on Christmas Eve to find Hall of Famer George Brett.

The usually chatty Burrell was speechless.

“The doorbell rang and we heard George say, ‘Hi Pat,’ and we didn’t hear anything from Patrick,” Burrell’s mother, Mary, said. “I thought, ‘Oh my God, he’s in shock. He can’t even speak.’ So we said, ‘Well, maybe we better come to the rescue’ and invited George in and he brought his young son — I mean how gracious and kind is this man to volunteer to come over on Christmas Eve? Patrick just had this wonderment in his eyes.”

The meeting was arranged by friends, knowing that Burrell, then a star at the University of Miami, idolized Brett, the legendary Kansas City Royals third baseman who won the 1980 American League MVP and a World Series title in 1985.

Burrell, who grew up in Boulder Creek (Santa Cruz County) and played at Bellarmine High School in San Jose, eventually was able to sit and talk with Brett about baseball, not that he remembers much about it except some discussion about the upcoming June draft. The Royals had the fourth pick in 1998 “and I remember thinking, ‘How great would that be? ’ ” Burrell said. “I was playing third base at the time and thought that would be so cool.”

Burrell, the Golden Spikes winner as the nation’s top college player, went first overall to the Philadelphia Phillies, but he kept running into his hero, first at a rookie development seminar in Florida. “I’m thinking, ‘Gosh, I wonder if he’s going to remember that Christmas Eve thing,’ ” Burrell said. “I got up to the front and I don’t even know if I can talk, and he said, ‘Hold on a second! ’ I think I started crying because I couldn’t believe he knew me; you’re kind of under the impression that maybe he does these kinds of things all the time.

“His wife, Leslie, was there and she stood up and said, ‘So you’re the guy that took my husband on Christmas Eve! ’ So she remembered, too, but as an adult, I’m like, ‘Of course she did! She was probably pissed! ’ ”

As a pro player, Burrell wore No. 5, the same one Brett donned for all but the first two of his 21 seasons in Kansas City. Before a spring training game in Clearwater, Fla., Burrell was in left field when a voice called out from behind him. “I heard somebody say, ‘God, you look good in that number,’ and it was George,” Burrell said.

A lifelong student of hitting couldn’t do much better than Brett as an idol, but Burrell was a right-handed power hitter with totally different mechanics from Brett’s level left-handed swing, which he honed under hitting coach Charley Lau. What Burrell learned from Brett are the same lessons Burrell would pass on to young Giants hitters as a minor-league instructor: the mental side, the preparation, the approach.

Not every great hitter can teach, though. Burrell was such a natural, former Miami assistant coach Turtle Thomas said, that after missing more than two months with a stress fracture in his back, Burrell returned for the regionals and hit five homers, including one ball that Thomas estimates “went 150 feet over the fence, and he hadn’t taken any swings for nine weeks.”

Burrell’s numbers at Miami are staggering — as a freshman, he hit .484 with a 1.557 on-base plus slugging percentage, or OPS. Over three years, he hit .442 with 61 homers in 162 games. It wasn’t just talent, though.

“Pat was the guy who was the first to practice every single day; he would hit for 45 minutes or an hour before anyone else got there,” Thomas said. “He was so team-oriented and such a mature hitter; I can remember having conversations about his two-strike approach, controlling his swing more.”

Infielder Jimmy Rollins played with Burrell on an elite AAU team, the Black Sox, when they were 15 and 16; the two and their families became fast friends. Rollins, who is from Alameda, then joined Burrell with the Phillies, a team that was in the doldrums when they first got there, losing 97 games in 2000. Burrell and Rollins went about trying to improve things. They’d pull a player aside or call team meetings after agreeing on what needed to be said.

“He had a group of guys who followed him and I had a group of guys that seemingly followed me around, so if we said something, everybody listened,” Rollins said. “This is a person I could really truly count on because I knew what Pat was made of and we’d done it before, and it was always the game plan to change the way the Phillies operated, to change a losing franchise.”

Good drafts ensured the Phillies had the personnel to move up the standings, but, as Burrell pointed out, “Philly is a tough town, and there was a lot of, ‘Are you guys ever going to win? ’ … We wound up with a team that was pretty loaded, but we had to be accountable to each other, that was the message that Jimmy and I always tried to pass along.”

The Phillies got better and better, culminating in a World Series title in 2008, but it was the rougher early years that most helped forge Burrell’s abilities to get through to younger players, including a future All-Star, Chase Utley, whom the Phillies drafted in 2000.

“My very first spring training, I was in big-league camp wearing number 78 or whatever and I kind of roamed around with Pat and watched his routine, which was pretty fantastic,” Utley said. “I wound up living with him in Arizona and training at a facility a couple of different years, like football players doing two-a-days.

“He was so well prepared with his workout routine, so intense with his focus. He was the same day in and day out. That’s something I took from him that I think was a big reason for my success.”

Utley went on to make the All-Star team five years in a row, and he enjoys seeing his mentor in a position where he can help other young big leaguers.

“Pat’s essentially been there, done that. He’s been the No. 1 pick, he’s had some really early success in the major leagues and then he had times where he really struggled, so he can have a conversation with just about anybody on the team,” Utley said. “That can go a long way with a young player.”

Burrell can make a point with humor, too. Once, when a Cape Cod summer league teammate loaded up Burrell’s glove and the inside of his cap with pine tar, Burrell played it off despite his discomfort. “It was like the stickiest molasses soup, I was in bad shape, but I wasn’t going to react,” he said. “The guys were wheezing in the dugout like they were going to explode, and I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction.”

Then Burrell filled the guilty teammate’s car with crickets. “I called him and told him I left my wallet in the car, and he said, ‘Yeah, I’ll run out and see if it’s there,’ and then I could hear him screaming,” Burrell said. “He said, ‘What is this? ’ and I said, ‘Well, they’re crickets and there’s 120 of them and they’re probably in all your AC vents and under the seats, and you’re going to have to suck on it.’ ”

When former Giants teammate Aubrey Huff belly flopped trying to make a catch in right at Dodger Stadium on Opening Day in 2011, Burrell asked the grounds crew for permission to do a tape outline of the play in the outfield grass. “Huff was just furious with me because some TV cameras picked it up, this crime scene with him silhouetted in short right field, the legs all splayed out,” Burrell said.

A good sense of humor can smooth the path with young hitters, but it’s Burrell’s empathy that really stands out. After winning another ring with the Giants in 2010, and then scouting, including for the 2012 and 2014 championship teams, he tried going the TV route as a studio analyst and realized he disliked criticizing players from afar. He’d rather speak in person and find ways to make them better. 

“Pat just has an innate ability to get in someone’s brain and understand who that player is as a person, then figure out how to navigate to help that player,” Utley said. “He’s really good at building confidence, pumping guys up.”

“I think a lot of the times people saw the funny guy, the wild guy, the ‘Machine’ or whatever it was, his alter ego, and think that’s all you get,” Rollins said. “But Pat’s an intelligent guy, especially when it comes to baseball. He knows what he’s talking about and he also listens. He’s not a guy who says it’s all his way, he’ll really try to dissect what you’re saying and understand things from your side. He’s very good with people.”

Burrell was one of the more high-profile members of a free-wheeling Phillies team that won the title in ’08. Even his late English bulldog, Elvis, was a big deal, leading the parade from atop a cart drawn by the Budweiser Clydesdales; Mary Burrell recalled fans recognizing Elvis while she walked him around the Rittenhouse neighborhood.

Living it up took its toll, though. Burrell realized after his post-playing career that he was uncomfortable with how much he was drinking, especially with some family history of alcoholism.

“I had a problem, there’s no doubt about it,” he said. “It’s fair to say I was always a pretty heavy drinker and after I retired, especially after I finished scouting, there was less for me to do and I didn’t do well with the time. I started getting scared.”

Burrell went to rehab on May 7, 2019, and he has been sober since. “I did a lot of outpatient therapy for months just to kind of peel the onion back and do the best I could figure out why I was drinking so much,” he said. “It was a big part of my life. I don’t usually talk about it very publicly, but the people close to me know all about it, and I’m coming up on five years now.”

He has settled down in Portola Valley with his high school girlfriend, Boo (short for Elizabeth), the second marriage for both. The couple have a bulldog named Babs (after Kramer’s mother in “Seinfeld”) and a Bernedoodle named Wally.

The two reconnected in 2015 when Burrell was in town to see a concert by former Giants third-base coach Tim Flannery, and Burell and Boo went for a hike and to dinner. 

The timing was superb: Burrell had been looking to move back to the Bay Area from Arizona, and the Giants happened to have an opening for a hitting coach at Class-A San Jose. 

That Burrell was willing to coach in A-ball after scouting impressed Rollins. 

“To go back into the jungle in the minor leagues and start from the bottom, I think that shows a hunger on his part to take all the right steps, and he’s the guy you want in the foxhole with you,” Rollins said. “He’ll bring in a winning attitude wherever he goes.”

Burrell moved on to become a roving hitting instructor, working closely with the team’s top prospects, including Casey Schmitt, Patrick Bailey and Luis Matos. Now on new manager Bob Melvin’s staff, Burrell gets to continue that work at the big-league level with the organization that gave him a hometown ring and then a new career. 

“I think a lot of growing up happened, I think a lot of maturity happened, and I’m very happy with where I am,” he said. “This opportunity with the Giants is another gift. To be in this position means a lot to me. I’ve been on about every side of it.”

Reach Susan Slusser: sslusser@sfchronicle.com; Twitter: @susanslusser