I thought this might be a good topic to discuss.
First, by contrast, we've had a spring-cleaning in the pitching department. There's been reporting that Breslow and Bailey have started a more interactive "Run Prevention Unit" (or something like that) and have gotten buy-in from many pitchers resulting in a different approach to common wisdom. IIRC, the recent reporting is that "throwing strikes" is now much more nuanced than just pounding the zone, as though that were a magic trick. We'll see if it bears fruit, but I'm excited for a change.
OTOH, our hitting coaches remain the same. Fatse is a local guy, and seems nice enough. He's been in the org as an assistant hitting coach since 2019 and has been the head hitting coach for 2022 and 2023. Luis Ortiz and Ben Rosenthal were his assistants in 2022 and 2023.
I'm not particularly pleased with the recent performance here. Mostly because I can't think of any surprise successes on the hitting front for quite some time. To qualify that, I'm not saying that the hitting coaches turn gold to shit or anything of that sort. They seem to have gotten out of the way of a 2022 Contract Push Boegarts and Devers for example.
But do they help guys up their game? Do they help hitters transition? And are they better than average at this or worse? For example, in 2023, Casas made a successful transition from hitting MiL pitching to hitting ML pitching. . .but it took him a fairly long time to do so. Not unusually long, but it wasn't quick. Or take Story; he came back from a long layoff and never really got it together with the bat, which is understandable, but he was absolutely awful. And he was green-lit at some level within the org. Meanwhile, guys like Reyes and Urias arrived relatively hot and cooled off. And then, as a sort of counter-example, there was Abreu, who arrived hot (not being coached by the MLB staff), and stayed so.
However, across the board in 2023 we had mediocre/underperforming/awful seasons from: Wong, Arroyo, Hernandez, Devers, Verdugo, Refsnyder, McGuire, and basically all of the short term SSS call-ups.
It was a similar story in 2022. (Dalbec, Hernandez, JBJ, Cordero, Pham, Plawecki, Arroyo, Verdugo, and all the SSS guys.)
The only real "success" I see, where the hitting coaches helped someone adapt or up their game might be 2023 Duran. He hit well in a call-up, cooled off, then started hitting again in July. https://www.baseball-reference.com/players/split.fcgi?id=duranja01&year=2023&t=b
Am I missing anyone?
The competency and effectiveness of the hitting coaches have again become a concern for me with this article on Yoshida at fangraphs: https://blogs.fangraphs.com/masataka-yoshida-lost-himself/ It seems like he was on a different and not-productive track for several months before a correction was made. It's light on what happened behind the scenes, but the numbers are pretty convincing.
***
I know there's variance and injury and all that, and I'm not arguing that there should only be successes, or that all players are fixable.
Is this the best we can do?
Might better staffing here not be smarter than trying to bring in the magic player that these guys can actualize?
Or is not the coaches but something else in the org? Meaning they're brilliant at what they do, but there's a different reason the results haven't been there on the field? I kind of doubt this, because if we start making excuses for every player it begins to look like "the worst luck in the world."
First, by contrast, we've had a spring-cleaning in the pitching department. There's been reporting that Breslow and Bailey have started a more interactive "Run Prevention Unit" (or something like that) and have gotten buy-in from many pitchers resulting in a different approach to common wisdom. IIRC, the recent reporting is that "throwing strikes" is now much more nuanced than just pounding the zone, as though that were a magic trick. We'll see if it bears fruit, but I'm excited for a change.
OTOH, our hitting coaches remain the same. Fatse is a local guy, and seems nice enough. He's been in the org as an assistant hitting coach since 2019 and has been the head hitting coach for 2022 and 2023. Luis Ortiz and Ben Rosenthal were his assistants in 2022 and 2023.
I'm not particularly pleased with the recent performance here. Mostly because I can't think of any surprise successes on the hitting front for quite some time. To qualify that, I'm not saying that the hitting coaches turn gold to shit or anything of that sort. They seem to have gotten out of the way of a 2022 Contract Push Boegarts and Devers for example.
But do they help guys up their game? Do they help hitters transition? And are they better than average at this or worse? For example, in 2023, Casas made a successful transition from hitting MiL pitching to hitting ML pitching. . .but it took him a fairly long time to do so. Not unusually long, but it wasn't quick. Or take Story; he came back from a long layoff and never really got it together with the bat, which is understandable, but he was absolutely awful. And he was green-lit at some level within the org. Meanwhile, guys like Reyes and Urias arrived relatively hot and cooled off. And then, as a sort of counter-example, there was Abreu, who arrived hot (not being coached by the MLB staff), and stayed so.
However, across the board in 2023 we had mediocre/underperforming/awful seasons from: Wong, Arroyo, Hernandez, Devers, Verdugo, Refsnyder, McGuire, and basically all of the short term SSS call-ups.
It was a similar story in 2022. (Dalbec, Hernandez, JBJ, Cordero, Pham, Plawecki, Arroyo, Verdugo, and all the SSS guys.)
The only real "success" I see, where the hitting coaches helped someone adapt or up their game might be 2023 Duran. He hit well in a call-up, cooled off, then started hitting again in July. https://www.baseball-reference.com/players/split.fcgi?id=duranja01&year=2023&t=b
Am I missing anyone?
The competency and effectiveness of the hitting coaches have again become a concern for me with this article on Yoshida at fangraphs: https://blogs.fangraphs.com/masataka-yoshida-lost-himself/ It seems like he was on a different and not-productive track for several months before a correction was made. It's light on what happened behind the scenes, but the numbers are pretty convincing.
***
I know there's variance and injury and all that, and I'm not arguing that there should only be successes, or that all players are fixable.
Is this the best we can do?
Might better staffing here not be smarter than trying to bring in the magic player that these guys can actualize?
Or is not the coaches but something else in the org? Meaning they're brilliant at what they do, but there's a different reason the results haven't been there on the field? I kind of doubt this, because if we start making excuses for every player it begins to look like "the worst luck in the world."