TAKING A HIT

by Holly Horning

It’s the easiest thing in the world to do……..

When your team can’t hit, just blame the hitting coach.

In some cases, it’s justified but recent articles show that the hitting coach position is the riskiest and hardest one to keep in baseball.  On average, a hitting coach lasts just over 2 years.

Only 2 coaches have kept their jobs for 5 years.  Only 6 teams – Astros, Blue Jays, Braves, Dodgers, Rays and Giants – have a lead hitting coach who has been with their team for more than 2 years.

All you have to do is look at the stats.  In one year – from 2021 to 2022, 17 out of 30 teams changed their hitting coaches.  This coming year, 10 teams will have new coaches, including the Tigers.

So why the change?

Like many things, there are multiple factors involved.

The game itself has changed significantly. Analytics now play into how skills are taught and the expectations by Front Offices require coaches to achieve certain levels of accomplishment.

Pitching coaches now are given huge amounts of data about opposing teams and suggestions about how they should teach attack angles and exit velocities. Their workload in preparing for games has dramatically increased. Some have survived the influx of new data while others haven’t.  It has became an “adapt or die” situation for each one.

But also, pitchers have become significantly better in how hard they throw and how much they have beefed up their own pitching arsenals.

Teams are embracing pitching labs.  Here is a short summary of what one offers in case you are unfamiliar with them:

http://baseballpitchingmechanic.com/p-i-t-c-h-lab/

So now pitchers are coming into organizations where they are expected to get better – and nastier.  Biomechanics are being used to alter deliveries (see Verlander, Justin after he moved to the Astros) and increase velocity.  This has all resulted in pitchers throwing more breaking balls and averaging 94 MPH across MLB in 2022.

It’s also why MLB hitters last year averaged a .243 BA which is the lowest since 1968.

A. J. Hinch put it best when he said that pitching is controllable but hitting is reactionary.

All of this means the life of the pitching coach has gotten noticeably harder.

Which is why the Tigers now have 3 hitting coaches, all with different specialties and backgrounds in analytics and biomechanics.  Only new school hitting coaches can survive today’s game.  And having 3 of them is partially a result of how much data they have to go through.  Their workload has tripled.

Their job is to counter today’s pitching dominance.  And they now focus on studying the physics of hitting and the anatomy of swings instead of teaching an athletic skill.

This is why each team now has to have at least one member of the hitting staff who is a “movement specialist.”

And it’s why Scott Coolbaugh and Mike Hessman are no longer in Detroit, although Hessman is back in Toledo.  (It is reported that Hessman is very tech savvy and pro-active about using analytics and studying data.)  Avila hires, neither one had a background in biomechanics.

Yes, they had a hand in the Tigers having the worst offensive year in 2022 but they are not the only ones to blame.  The former Front Office, true to form, made outdated hires. 

Since 2018, the Tigers led most of baseball in having the worst offensive stats.  They had Lloyd McClendon (3 years) and Joe Vavra (1 year) as their hitting coaches.  Neither had any updated hitting skills.  More than a couple national journalists questioned why the Tigers would hire and keep coaches like McClendon who were teaching outdated hitting techniques that no other team was embracing.

Ironically, those who are now the most successful as hitting coaches, never played the game professionally.  They specialized in the sciences to learn their craft.

They are also much younger, averaging 42 years of age – down from 53.  This coming season, 19 of the new coaches will be in their 30’s.

McClendon and Vavra were in their 60’s.  The last one, Coolbaugh, is in his 50’s.  Today, the Tigers’ 3 hitting coaches are 28, mid-30’s and early 40’s.

So what else has changed?

Hitters are now welcoming more coaching from both inside and outside their organizations.  Private hitting instructors are now welcomed and even encouraged by teams.

But despite all of these changes, hitting remains an uphill battle throughout MLB.  Average runs per game still went down last year to 4.28 runs, averaging 8.16 hits per game.

What does this means for the Tigers?

They have finally updated their hitting coaches who certainly have their work cut out for them.

So many Tigers under-performed at the plate last year which is being seen within the baseball world as not being simply off-years for them but more as a result of outdated coaching.  Those players went into last year not having the best and most updated information about how to address the increasing nastiness of opposing pitchers.

But as with everything, changes will not be immediate.  It takes time for each hitting coach to know and understand each hitter.  Data needs to be assembled and studied. Video that shows every twitch of a hitter’s swing and body motion has to be broken down and studied.  Coaches and players need to get in the box and work at tweaking mechanics.  And improvement is never linear – there will always be struggles and a roller coaster of regression and success.

Coaches also have to learn how a hitter best learns and how to motivate them into making changes.

And those changes don’t come immediately.  Lots of practice cements good habits.

Expect the Tigers to perform better at the plate this year.  But don’t expect huge changes right off the bat.(Bad pun alert.)  That will take time.

And certainly don’t call for the hitting coaches’ heads after 1 year.

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