Coaches

This has been a thought of mine for a couple years now of how the first thing I would do if I ran a baseball team.  I mentioned it to Steven Goldman of BP at a book signing a couple months back, and he was really receptive to the idea, but had never heard of anyone else thinking about it.  Anyway, I have never understood why, after investing 10’s or 100’s of millions of dollars in baseball players, teams invest very little in coaching.  Each team has one pitching coach, one hitting coach, and maybe a bullpen coach who helps out relievers or something, but primarily that’s the pitching coach’s job.  Why have only one coach for hitters, and one for pitchers?  Why not have two or three for each?

 I trained for several years at a top conservatory to be a classical singer.  I’m not pursuing that right now, but I might at some day again in the future, although that doesn’t much matter for my point.  Anyway, singing has something very much in common with hitting and pitching.  Aside from having an innate talent that will help you succeed, it is very reliant on muscle memory, and some amount of performance psychology (the last being what I lack strength in.)  Same thing with pitching — almost totally muscle memory oriented.  Hitting as well.  Certainly there are other things involved — confidence, strength, endurance, great vision for hitting, but muscle memory forms the basis of the skill, so that you can have a repeatable baseline to build from as the specific situation changes.

 Other sports use this more or less as well.  Golf and tennis are again very much muscle-memory oriented, as is the quarterback position in football, (and placekicking, but who cares about that?)  Anyway, with all these other sports, players work with one coach, and one coach with one or two players.  Furthermore, players and coaches will, after a certain amount of time, leave each other.  Roger Federer just left Tony Roche, who had helped him out for a few years.  While surprising, that doesn’t mean that suddenly Roche is a terrible coach.  It means that a change was needed.  Tiger Woods rose to greatness with Butch Harmon, and then got rid of him several years ago, because he wanted to go a new direction.  Butch Harmon is still one of the most respected coaches in the sport, and is now working with Phil Mickelson.

 As a singer, I switched teachers because I had flatlined with my first teacher.  He was a great guy, I respected him tremendously, and he had helped several singers reach the pinnacle of music.  When I audition for operas or choirs or what-have-you, and put his name down, the conductor or director instantly recognizes his name, and takes me more seriously.  He was a great teacher.  But for me, he just didn’t work out after a while.  I switched to someone else (one of my original teachers pupils) and things worked out better.  This other man wasn’t any better, per se, but he just resonated more with me.

Other sports recognize this, as I noted with golf and tennis.  And yet, teams only have one pitching coach to work with the dozens of pitchers that will be on a team any year, and one hitting coach to work with a similar number of hitters.  While these are professional athletes at the top of their sport, they can still probably get something from coaching.  And it might mean that a single coach won’t work for everyone.  If a coach doesn’t work for the best golfer in the world (Woods) but does for the second-best (Mickelson), it doesn’t mean that he’s a bad coach, or that Woods in uncoachable.  It means that Harmon, right now, is a better fit for Mickelson.

 And yet, if Leo Mazzone can’t get through to a pitcher, the pitcher struggles, the Orioles, or before them Braves, lose millions of dollars in wasted performance, and the pitcher is likely regarded as uncoachable.  Jason Schmidt was a great pitcher for the Giants, starting a month after he got traded to San Francisco, after six years of mediocrity for the Braves under Mazzone and the Pirates under someone who I should look up but am too lazy to.  Why?  As soon as he arrived in the Bay, he started relying on his fastball much more (I remember reading this as he was on my keeper league fantasy team at the time).  That’s it.  He gained more confidence in the pitch, and started blowing it by everyone.  He probably should have won a Cy Young at some point from 2002-2005.  He was great.

 Doesn’t mean Mazzone isn’t a good coach.  He is.  He just can’t coach everyone, like Schmidt.  Same thing with Rudy Jaramillo in Texas.  He’s widely regarded as the best hitting coach in the majors.  He’s been with the Rangers for 13 years, which means he’s outlasted five, six managers?  He’s a mainstay.  He turned Juan Gonzalez into a great hitter.  Gary Matthews Jr. may have used HGH, but he also had Rudy as a coach offering an alternative explanation.  But is Rudy a miracle-worker?  No.  Alfonso Soriano had his two worst non-rookie seasons in Texas.  It probably just didn’t work between the two of them, and that shouldn’t be a mark against either.

Anyway, back to where I was going at the beginning of this: if I ran a baseball team, I would have two or three coaches for both hitting and pitching, and at the beginning of the year, they’d work out between them which players they were working with, based on some initial coaching sessions at spring training.  And at the end of the season, I would ask the players for a confidential assessment of the coaches, to see if what they thought as well.  I think coaching is incredibly important, and every other sport that resembles hitting and pitching (golf, tennis, quarterback coaching) places a premium on it.  Yet baseball doesn’t, and assumes that one size fits all.

BJ Ryan

Right, so my first real blog posting will be about the Toronto Blue Jays and a relief pitcher, two things in the baseball world that are not of terribly great importance to me.  At any rate, B.J. Ryan had Tommy John surgery this week, meaning he is out for at least the remainder of the season.  When he signed his five-year, $47 million contract, many heads inside and outside of baseball were turned, including my own. 

Whenever Ryan threw a pitch, everyone cringed.  Batters cringed because his pitches were among the nastiest in the game, especially to opposing left-handers.  But general observers cringed as well, because his delivery was so violent that you were waiting for his elbow to snap, which it finally did in the past two months.  Many questioned the rationale behind signing someone who was so likely to injure himself to a contract of five years.  Why not limit your liability to him with a three-year deal?

I agreed with this questioning for a long time — after watching how little the Dodgers got out of Darren Dreifort, how could any rational team want to expose themselves to a similar situation?  And to make it more surprising, a team such as the Blue Jays were involved, with J.P. Ricciardi, who is supposed to be of a strong analytical mindset, at the helm.   Joe Sheehan at Baseball Prospectus is one who comes prominently to mind, as I have been a regular reader of his for years, but many others were similarly puzzled.

 Now, one year in, and Ryan is hurt, just as everyone predicted would eventually happen.  The customary reaction is one of, “See, I told you so.”  And yet, I’m not certain that’s fair.  Suppose the Jays signed Ryan to a three-year deal worth $30 million.  (I know, that’s 10 million per season compared to the actual 9.4 per season that Ryan’s deal is, but a shorter deal certainly would have been for more per season, as Ryan was giving up a little more short-term for long-term security.)  Ryan is, at best, missing an entire season, but I think the Jays will be lucky to have him back at full strength until at least next July, so closer to a season-and-a-half.  Anyway, with this hypothetical three-year deal, the Jays are getting between 1.5 and 2 years of service, or $15-20 million per actual season of performance.

 In the real-life deal, the Jays got the season they expected of Ryan last year, nothing this year, and, they hope, three more seasons of what they expected from Ryan.  So that works out to 3.5-4 seasons of Ryan for $11.75-13.4 million per actual season of performance.  By increasing the length of the contract, the Jays increased the likelihood that there would be an injury at some point during his tenure with the team, but decreased the percentage of value lost in case of such an injury.  It’s a tradeoff, to be certain, but not one that necessarily should be ridiculed.

 There were certainly other arguments to be made against this deal, and this type of deal, at the time.  In my opinion, you should almost never pay $10 million per season to a relief pitcher, and I wasn’t (and am still not) convinced that Ryan was worth that kind of money for one season.  But if you are certain that he is worth it, then I think the Blue Jays did the right thing by signing him to the longer deal.  It requires a lot of faith in your training staff and coaching staff to make certain that Ryan returns to being the pitcher that he was pre-surgery, as any Mike Hampton fan will remind you.  But that’s a different portion of the analysis that a team needs to do before making such a deal.  We’ll give them the benefit of the doubt (and this might be the only time on this blog that JP gets such a benefit) that such analysis occurred in their meetings, and they feel incredibly comfortable that their staff will keep B.J. Ryan performing at a high level whenever he is healthy. 

 I think that’s enough about the Blue Jays for a while.

Why a blog?

My town didn’t have any baseball outlets for me past the age of twelve.  Combined with my complete lack of athletic prowess, I found myself riding the pine in regards to baseball.  This is unfortunate, as I love the sport more than all others.  My lack of experience also doesn’t mean I should lack any authority when musing on it, so I hope this blog gets me off the bench and onto the playing field of meaningful baseball discussion.