We are supposed to hit triple digit temperatures here in SoCal today and tomorrow, but the Giants fired up their winter hot stove yesterday with the bombshell announcement that pitching coach Dave Righetti is being reassigned to a front office role along with longtime bullpen coach Mark Gardner and assistant hitting coach Steve Decker who also were given "Special Assistant" titles. Earlier, they announced that Shane Turner will also be a Special Assistant for pro scouting while former Giant David Bell will be the new Director of Player Personnel which apparently is synonymous with Player Development, the role Turner is vacating.
Rumors swirled around other members of the coaching staff. GM Bobby Evans reportedly interviewed Red Sox hitting coach Chili Davis who might be a replacement for either 3B coach Phil Nevin, who is reportedly in the running for the Phillies' manager job or Hitting Coach Hensley "Bam Bam" Meulens who may also be in the running for a manager job with another team. According to some reports, Bench Coach Ron Wotus may be a candidate for yet another "Special Assistant" job, and you have to wonder what all those Special Assistants are going to be actually doing. Meulens, who some observers see as a possible successor to Manager Bruce Bochy may be in line for Bench Coach as the next stepping stone for the managers job. It remains unclear why Ron Wotus it treated like he is radioactive when it comes to managing jobs in or out of the Giants organization.
Got all that? Good! It's really hard to write about coaching changes because even knowledgeable fans know so little about what makes a good or bad coach. There is even little agreement among professional analysts how much difference coaches make in player performance. I'll offer some thoughts.
The Righetti move is the biggest surprise. Of all the coaches, he seemed to be the most untouchable after serving in the position for 18 years under 3 different managers. All I can say is that Giants pitching seemed to perform noticeably better after he took over as pitching coach. He also seemed to be instrumental in helping several young Giants pitchers make adjustments at the MLB level helping to launch All-Star careers. Examples would include Matt Cain's skipped start in his first full season and triumphant return to the mound, I think that was against the A's. And who can forget Madison Bumgarner's announcement after a delayed start in the postseason that he had been "fixed?" Again, we don't know how much those processes played out. Shawn Estes shed some light in a Postgame Live segment with the observation that Righetti's expertise was more in how to set up and attack hitters while Mark Gardner was actually more involved with mechanical adjustments. Whatever the case, it was a combination that worked well for a long time, until the last 1.5 seasons when something caused the pitching staff, particularly the bullpen, to fall off a cliff. It will be most interesting to see who takes Righetti's place as pitching coach. The beat writers seem to think Evans is looking for someone more "analytical", and it's unclear exactly what that means. Brian Bannister is a guy who seems to be respected in Sabermetrically oriented websites. Beyond that, I would not hazard a guess.
The Giants seem to really like bringing former Giants players back into the organization, and Chili Davis would likely be a popular choice among fans. If he is being considered to replace Bam Bam as hitting coach, that would be interesting seeing as how the Red Sox had a power outage of their own this past season. Coming to SF as Hitting Coach would be a lateral move for Davis, but 3B Coach could be seen as a promotion.
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you have to wonder how much of these moves are setting up the "post-Bochy" era. I think regardless of what happens next year, it will be Bochy's, assuming that he won't end up being part of this purge. Could be bringing in his future replacement while keeping other existing options close in the front office. There is a strategy that isn't being shared.
ReplyDeleteBTW, seeing Bell back with the Giants brings back great memories of the year he had for us. Class act.
Billy Baseball
What's your take on the moves, Doc? It feels a little bit like a desperation move to me.
ReplyDeleteIt's seems like Rags is getting the blame for the problems with the pitching staff. Yes Moore under performed,but he wasn't given much to work with out of the bullpen, which the GM's responsibility, so this move is a joke to me. Would like to know your take doc. They have to make roster changes at some point.
ReplyDeleteLG
Didn't they actually have good pitching this season? Something like being top five in quality starts despite having Matt Cain in the rotation?
ReplyDeleteQuality Start is just one measure. By many others, the pitching was not good at all this season.
DeleteSeveral requests for "my take." As I noted above, it's really hard for us fans to have a "take" because we know so little about what coaches do or how they impact players performance. I'll offer some more guesses:
ReplyDelete1. Yes, It think there is a bit of scapegoating going on here. I don't know of any organization that would not make some serious changes after an embarrassing collapse like what happened this season. Coaches are the easiest targets in a purge because they are the easiest and least expensive to replace.
2. I think Bobby Evans is itching to put his stamp on the organization and put together "his team". Whether that is ultimately good for the organization or bad remains to be seen, but he deserves his shot, IMO.
3. I think part of the "stamp" is that Bobby not only wants the organization to get chronologically younger, but also mentally younger with more use of modern statistical analysis which is advancing at warp speed. I mean, who would have thought as recently as 3 years ago, teams would be studying data on launch angles and then using that information in their hitting instruction? When was the last time you heard or read someone rhapsodizing about OPS?
I’m unsure about 1 and 2 here, because 3 seems to me both plausible and urgent. We think of coaches’ effects on players, but there’s a flow of information from coaches up to the manager and FO. Something happened in 2016 when the Giants went from the best team in baseball to the worst, at least as to W-L, and no one in the organization was able to figure out the problem and remedy it for 2017. If the same men who carry out their jobs capably, with resilience and eclat, suddenly fumble and blunder their way into disaster, someone needs to be shrewd, analytical, and strategic enough to fix what’s wrong, within the constraints of which every team has its peculiar share. The Giants had a season and a half when something plainly needed fixing; and I myself am not aware of any account—there may of course be one or several that I don’t know—that cogently explains the prolonged floundering and foundering of a team riding so high for months in earlier 2016. The shift in coaches, I assume, is to address an information gap, so as to come up with and to apply solutions that the existing team officialdom has been unable to produce or apply.
DeleteI’m much more encouraged by the prospect of some serious re-thinking than I would be with any rebuilding of the sorts that I’ve seen suggested by pundits and fans.
You apparently were not impressed by my own cogent analysis of What Went Wrong? I'll review it again here:
Delete1. Bad Luck- just look up the BABIP numbers, although I admit they improved in the second half without an improvement in W-L.
2. The Giants were constructed to win in a low offense era and got caught flat-footed by the league-wide power surge. Whether power and suppression of power can be taught through the study of launch angles and such remains to be seen, but may explain the need to replace coaches.
3. While the Giants have drafted well with the draft positions they've had, they have lagged significantly in signing and developing international talent which has left them considerably behind the curve in organizational talent. Hopefully this has already begun to change and will get much better with a higher draft position and emerging from the penalty for signing Lucius Fox who ended up as trade bait.
No, I agree with everything you said here. But none of this explains their sudden collapse, I think.
DeleteI wonder if for Rags especially, some of these special assistant roles are semi-retirement. I feel like Righetti for years has been turning down promotions and manager positions, and after 18 years maybe he seen enough. It flabbergasts me sometimes how these guys 'run' out there year after year on bad knees, bad hearts, cancer survivors, etc. I don't thing Rags ever got into the same rat race as everyone else.
ReplyDeleteWotus they obviously wanted to keep for many years and so they paid him well for bench coach to keep him. Maybe special assistant is a holding pattern for him until they find something better. Likewise they've moved Decker around minor/major coaching and special assignments like a organizational guy for what may be 2 decades now. These are guys groomed to be managers, while that is also BamBam's aspiration.
But as Doc point out, have these guys been passed by because of the evolution of tech, stats, and organizational style? Maybe some of them after all the success and the then a year of misery just need a time out, before readjusting or retiring. Again, Rags in particular I could see as a "I'm too old for this s#!%, or to learn new tricks" guy.
I've been noticing that teams are looking for guys that are more into analytics these days. For example, the Cardinals fired their pitching coach and are looking for an analytics-heavy approach to managing their pitchers and bullpen. And while the Giants aren't in the dark-ages of analytics, they're still more toward the traditional side than the analytic side.
ReplyDeleteIf there is anything to the theory that the study of Launch Angles can be incorporated directly into hitting and pitching instruction, then teams have not choice but to get more analytical or they will be hopelessly behind the curve in Player Development.
DeleteI believe the Giants do more analytics than they let on. As Sabean used to love to say, he likes to keep the kimono closed. And as a business person, I agree, why tell other teams how you are successful?
DeleteI would note that the Giants were one of the beta testers of the then new Field/FX system, at which point they noted their analytics on defense, and how excited they were to be able to try out the new system.
But we still have Amy G!
ReplyDeleteCareful there, Anon. I like Amy G!
DeleteYeah, it was the A's Cain was skipped against. In addition, they did that with Lincecum as well.
ReplyDeleteFor Bumgarner, I see a lot of credit being given to Righetti, but it was Tidrow who loved Madison pre-draft and who went down to minors to help Madison fix his issues that one minor league season where he was horrible for weeks. So I don't know.
I was shocked by Righetti and Gardner being pushed out, and I was equally shocked by David Bell, he's the guy who screwed the Giants by opting out and then signing with the Phillies. Of course, that's 15 years ago, but you would think someone would remember.