Fire Hatcher? Five Myths About MLB Hitting Coaches

those were the days.

And i’ve changed my mind about Hatcher. ;)

I think this team just needs a new fresh face. Sometimes bringing in a new guy with a new philosophy can help. IF he doesn’t leave I am fine with it, but a new fresh face can’t hurt.

It was because we were able to have a full season of Kendry + an actual leadoff hitter + a bunch of our players over performed (Torii, Hendrick, Aybar, Figgy).

Why do we suck now? No real leadoff hitter, no real clean up hitter (for most of the season), Matsui no longer hits in Yankees Stadium.

Mickey Hatcher shouldn’t be blamed for a bad season of hitting and shouldn’t get all the praise for a good season of hitting as well.

I know he already has a job, but I’d like to see his fire and intense style of play return to this gutless team.

Especially the part about the work order- too funny!

I think I follow you. You’re saying FIRE REAGINS!!! J/k. I’m not on the Fire Hatcher or Fire Reagins Bandwagon. I’m on the Fire Matsui and the Bullpen Bandwagon and the Heal Kendry Bandwagon.

there is also no wrong way to eat a Reese’s

KILLLLLLL

My problem w/Mickey is the prolonged slumps multiple players go thru multiple times a season. I’ve followed baseball for a long time and I can’t ever recall entire teams being so streaky. Is it a case of everyone getting too comfortable? Push a button! Pull a lever! Something!

Pretty much the same lineup. Sub Hideki this year for Vladdy last year and it’s about the same. Figgy’s not lighting the world on fire in Seattle…..

I’d like to say Mickey Hatcher because I truly believe he’s not a good hitting coach, but I just don’t know.

If he’s never to blame, or never given credit and he’s not effective a players overall performance, the WHY THE F DO WE HAVE A HITTING COACH?

- The fact is, he does play roll, and the offense has stunk for about 3/4 of the time he’s been here, despite bringing in veteran hitters. Hatcher should be shitcanned.

I just read the B-Wood mind Fucok and that was hilarious!

just saw Mickey, he had a big check written out to “Mr. Suboptimal.” I wonder why…

joking of course. good writeup. the inner workings of Wood’s brain was up there with WiHalo’s comics.

His signing disgusted me in the offseason while others were absolutely giddy about it. He is a “name” the Angels signed because they lost out on every other free agent worth a damn in the off season. How the Yankees not even attempting to sign their “World Series MVP” in the offseason didn’t raise some concern is a big mystery to me.

of Wood being dominated by Hatcher like Marcellus Wallace got worked over.

Don’t know why, don’t know where it came from. Most likely, my mind has rolled in too many gutters.

Just thought I would let others enjoy a mind picture as well.

You’re welcome.

Some manager’s like Bob Geren were paid as little as $500k. I suspect hitting coaches make even less, thus they are all likely earning less than the minimum a ballplayer makes.

This being the case, if hitting coaches were really SOOOO important, wouldn’t there be a huge bidding war for the best hitting coaches? Shouldn’t they be paid millions because they have so much influence over the success of a team’s offense?

But as Suboptimal has so excellently written, hitting coaches really don’t have any impact. This is reflected in the fact that they are paid relatively little.

Especially the B. Wood bit.

1. Abreu, B, DH
2. Kendrick, H, 2B
3. Callaspo, A, 3B
4. Hunter, T, RF
5. Rivera, J, LF
6. Napoli, M, C
7. Aybar, E, SS
8. Wood, B, 1B
9. Bourjos, P, CF

Wood has a 3-4 game 2 HR’s. And is benched for the season

LOVE, LOVE, LOVE the Brandon Wood brain activity dialogue!

….“Hitting instructors don’t really do anything anyway.” Or, in this case, “We probably don’t know enough to make a judgment.”

Seriously, if the best thing you can say about the guy is that his job isn’t really important or that you can’t really tell if he’s helping or hurting, isn’t it probably time to try something new?

After 11 seasons we don’t want to try something new? Really? We’re so happy with what we’re getting from Aybar and Kendrick that even TRYING someone new is a bad idea?

#1: Not only is it NOT a requirement that a hitting coach be a former MLB hitting star, I have little or no reason to believe that being a former MLB hitting star is enough value to be a hitting coach. I see a hitting coach as a teacher and advisor. If the coach cannot analyze and/or communicate you get FAIL. And if the former player cannot understand that the mechanics and approach to hitting that they personally used to become successful are not universal to all players in all times, then you get FAIL.

#2. I will not agree to this point unless Brandon Wood gets traded to some other organization, gets a fair shot at MLB playing time, and still fails. And even then, if he still uses the same approach that he uses now, I will not agree. I will look for another example. It is my understanding that when Wood showed up among the MLB coaching staff, they felt that his swing was too extended and that he would not be able to get around on the ball well enough to use the whole field. Lacking the ability to hit defensively, MLB pitching was going to chew him up. Therefore, the coaching staff did a lot of work to lower his hands and shorten his stroke and we have never seen the old Wood since. Even when he was shuffled back down to AAA he was not an offensive force any more. To me, this smacks of “taking what was good and making him bad”. Maybe leaving him alone would have been worse, I dunno. But I will be interested to follow Wood should he end up elsewhere, looking for any evidence concerning this point.

#3: Logically fallacious. Atrociously so. I don’t disagree with your point, just your method of arguing it. Start by leaving Abreu out of it altogether. You are trying to make the point that a coach cannot turn a bad hitter into a good hitter, so you cannot take an Abreu, who was never a bad hitter, and mark the tail end of Abreu’s career no less, and use that to make a point about a coach’s impact on an up and coming minor leaguer.

#4: This reads more like conjecture, and not any better or worse than my own. I could make the conjecture that the MLB hitting coach takes his cues from the MLB manager, meets regularly during the offseason with the hitting coaches at all the levels below and watches tape or monitors winter ball, and issues mandates for every level and most players. I ain’t an employee of the organization. I ain’t there. I don’t know the day to day of everybody’s job year round. Are you? Do you? So “swing-happy contactball” could be systemic precisely because Hatcher is preaching it up and down the organization, and precisely because that is the approach that Sosh wants to manage to. That is just as valid as the other way around. As to your comment that a player is pretty much a finished product when he comes to the organization, well, I cannot agree to that at all. I would submit that nobody is ever finished developing as a hitter. For practical reasons, as a player ages they grow into a peak level of athletic ability and then decline, those players who have long careers have managed to adjust accordingly, Their skills were not stagnant. They could not be, because mother nature was busy changing their raw tools. If this is true, then it is also possible that such change can occur through the minors, and rghan and Halowoods posts on player progress in the minor league teams seems to reflect just this sort of change. If players ARE capable of changing thoughout their minor league careers, and if we have direct evidence of that happening, why must it be assumed that a hitting coach cannot have any change impact or influence during that process? By the way, the sentence “But Mickey can preach all he want and he’s not going to turn an experienced hitter into something he’s not.” does not belong in this paragraph. The context is minor leaguers, with less or little experience.

#5. Pretty much the easiest position to take, precisely for the same reason it is too easy to take the alternate position. In real life, where we are stuck, there is no control process that allows for test and verification in order to determine the relative impact any coach has on a player relative to any other coach. You cannot take a Howie Kendrick, roll back the years, and have him start all over in this same organization with all things being equal other than the job that Hatcher holds belonging to somebody else, and hten compare results. So I have to dismiss this point of yours as quickly as I dismiss those who argue the opposite.

Ok, that all said, we are not done. What is missing is what I seek to understand. What about (note that I am not calling them “myths”) Objective #6: a hitting coach can take a good hitter who is slumping and help him return to his natural mechanics and approach. Or Objective #7: a hitting coach can help a good player study and break down what the opposing batteries are doing against him and come up with a strategy to adjust and return to his original level of success. These are things I would expect of a hitting coach. Since organizations help set up massive video reviews of all pitchers and indivdual at-bats for each player, EVEN IN GAME, my guess is that these are principal responsibilities. These are where I would want to measure any hitting coach. And you are writing very little to them. Again, unless you are there full time, you do not know, for fact, that Hatcher does not spend a great deal more time with a player after some video review and watches him directly work through some flaw ro adjustment. Getting to a game early and seeing that night’s group by group batting practice doesn’t count.

All that said, I still don’t know if the results we have are because Hatcher is good or bad at his job. We will never know. Even if Reagins and Sosh were to change hitting coaches right now, we will never know what might have been different over the previous 10 years. It is what it is, and I defer to Reagins to know the truth and act accordingly. I trust Arte, and if Arte trusts Reagins…

Borrowing from Gorbachev

2010 (so far): 8th in AL in runs scored
2009: 2nd
2008: 10th
2007: 4th
2006: 11th
2005: 7th
2004: 7th
2003: 11th
2002: 4th
2001: 12th
2000: 7th

Those aren’t great results, especially when you think about how much more money we’re spending than teams like Baltimore, Cleveland, Tampa Bay, Kansas City, Oakland, and Minnesota. Imagine our offense over the past 11 years if we didn’t buy Vlad and Torii.

Let’s think of it this way: You’ve been to a diner 11 times. Three times the food was really good. Four times the food was OK, but nothing special at all. And four times the food was really bad. Would you be happy with that diner? Or would you be interested in eating somewhere else?

Or maybe you have a chance to replace the cook at that diner. You don’t know for sure that he’s the problem, but maybe someone else could do a better job. You wouldn’t change, just to see if you couldn’t do better? You’re happy with your food being either OK or bad most of the time?

is the organization’s idiotic focus on contact hitters. Power and on-base percentage are the only things that correlate to scoring runs. Mickey Hatcher is just the visible tip of the iceberg the Angels have run into.

I’m looking for one particular hitting coach who repeatedly took guys with established reputations and turned them into mush, only to see them transform back into good hitters after they escaped his clutches.

I actually looked into this very question a few years back, and found that of the 9 players with identifiable before, during, and after periods under Rod Carew’s tutelage, 4 players most definitely bottomed out under Rodney, 2 trended downward, 2 trended upward, and 1 was basically the same. The 4 mush pits:

Gary Gaetti

YR   AG  G   AB  R   H  HR RBI  BB  SO   BA  OBP  SLG OPS+

91   32 152 586  58 144 18  66  33 101 .246 .293 .379  85     

92/3 33 150 506  44 112 12  52  26 116 .221 .266 .330  65    

93   34  82 281  37  72 14  46  16  75 .256 .309 .477 103

94   35  90 327  53  94 12  57  19  63 .287 .328 .462  98

(Traded in early ’93. Only after age 40 did Gaetti hit worse than he during Carew era.)

Luis Polonia

YR AG  G   AB  R   H  HR RBI  BB  SO   BA  OBP  SLG OPS+

91 27 150 604  92 179  2  50  52  74 .296 .352 .379 103      

92 28 149 577  83 165  0  35  45  64 .286 .337 .329  87     

93 29 152 576  75 156  1  32  48  53 .271 .328 .326  74     

94 30  95 350  62 109  1  36  37  36 .311 .383 .414 110

(Polonia bested his Carew-era OPS+ of 80 in 8 of 10 other ML seasons.)

Hubie Brooks

YR AG  G   AB  R   H  HR RBI  BB  SO   BA  OBP  SLG OPS+

91 34 103 357  48  85 16  50  44  62 .238 .324 .409 107     

92 35  82 306  28  66  8  36  12  46 .216 .247 .337  62     

93 36  75 168  14  48  1  24  11  27 .286 .331 .375  87

(Only in his final year, at age 37, did Brooks hit worse.)

Phil Nevin

YR AG  G   AB  R   H  HR RBI  BB  SO   BA  OBP  SLG OPS+

97 26  93 251  32  59  9  35  25  68 .235 .306 .414  87      

98 27  75 237  27  54  8  27  17  67 .228 .291 .371  71     

99 28 128 383  52 103 24  85  51  82 .269 .352 .527 123

(Only in his rookie year was Nevin worse.)

Here are two players declining under Carew in their 30s:

Mo Vaughn

YR AG  G   AB  R   H  HR RBI  BB  SO   BA  OBP  SLG OPS+

98 30 154 609 107 205 40 115  61 144 .337 .402 .591 153     

99 31 139 524  63 147 33 108  54 127 .281 .358 .508 118  

00 32 161 614  93 167 36 117  79 181 .272 .365 .498 115

(Vaughn had OPS+s pre-Carew of 139, 146, 144, 150, 152, and 153)

Tony Phillips

YR AG  G   AB  R   H  HR RBI  BB  SO   BA  OBP  SLG OPS+

94 35 114 438  91 123 19  61  95 105 .281 .409 .468  126     

95 36 139 525 119 137 27  61 113 135 .261 .394 .459  122     

96 37 153 581 119 161 12  63 125 132 .277 .404 .399  109     

97 38 105 405  73 107  6  48  73  89 .264 .376 .388  101     

98 39  65 236  34  59  4  21  47  50 .250 .375 .369   98    

(Had two tours under Carew, while aging pretty gracefully, production-wise.)

Here’s one who basically repeated his previous season under Rodney, then improved when he left:

Luis Alicea

YR AG  G   AB  R   H  HR RBI  BB  SO   BA  OBP  SLG OPS+

96 30 129 380  54  98  5  42  52  78 .258 .350 .382  94     

97 31 128 388  59  98  5  37  69  65 .253 .375 .369  96      

98 32 101 259  51  71  6  33  37  40 .274 .372 .425 104

And here’s two who improved under Carew, and sustained/improved on it after leaving:

Stan Javier

YR AG  G   AB  R   H  HR RBI  BB  SO   BA  OBP  SLG OPS+

92 28 130 334  42  83  1  29  37  54 .249 .327 .314  83      

93 29  92 237  33  69  3  28  27  33 .291 .362 .405 104      

94 30 109 419  75 114 10  44  49  76 .272 .349 .399 101      

(From ages 29-34 Javier put up OPS+s of 104, 101, 101, 94, 102, 106.)

Jim Leyritz

YR AG  G   AB  R   H  HR RBI  BB  SO   BA  OBP  SLG OPS+

96 32 121 379  58 105 11  64  60  78 .277 .379 .393  85      

97 33  84 294  47  81 11  50  37  56 .276 .357 .412 101     

98 34 114 272  34  75 12  42  42  74 .276 .384 .467 125

Not sure if this proves things, but hopefully it advances the discussion beyond waving our hands in the air that it’s all unknowable.

Perspective from one coach

Newhan at least knew enough about baseball to guide his kid to the major leagues. I found this article from a blog post last year musing whether Carew could help the Rays. With before and after stats on some more players at the end of the article.
Rod Carew

Are you related to Mickey Hatcher? ;-)

that I thoughtr I accidentally wound up on Lookout Landing. The discourse between Stirrups and Subop was exceptionally well done.

Peer review? Stirrups always makes me laugh.

I happen to think that for the most part, hitting coaches are tits on a bull, but I like Hatcher. I always have. Like Stirrups, he always makes me laugh. My guess is that he keeps things light in the clubhouse as well — which is a tremendous asset with these tightly wound psychos.