Hitting

The Cubs dumped hitting coach Chili Davis after one year on the job.  Davis stressed contact and situational hitting, something the front office wanted until it didn’t.  The team seems to be going back to a launch-angle approach.

Dumping Davis is good, bad and beside the point all at once.  What’s good is that players need to see there are consequences to bad play.  You don’t produce, somebody is going to suffer.  The move is bad, at least to me, because I go for hard contact and situational hitting over launch angle every time.  It’s beside the point because you can lead a horse to water….

Nobody develops a style of hitting or pitching in order to fail; players do what feels natural.  In part the job of a coach is to show that sometimes what feels good isn’t working all that much.  The coach has to earn the player’s trust in order to offer fixes.  No trust, no fix, no job.  It’s the way of sports.

When Clare was starting off in high school, she had travel coaches and a hitting coach who had differing philosophies, V-load vs. L-load.  All a 14-year old wants to do is feel comfortable at the plate, not learn a new language in order to receive instruction.  I always tried to keep it simple—see ball, hit ball, but with a twist.  Do you really see the ball, or is your head pulling off?  Why?  If you’re seeing the ball, why aren’t you making better contact?  It’s a wonder young ballplayers don’t go on killing sprees.

Chili Davis had over 2300 hits and 1300 RBIs in a career that spanned nineteen years.  To me, those numbers offer the gravitas a hitting coach needs when trying to convince reluctant players to try a different approach.  He was pretty successful in previous stints with the A’s and Red Sox.  I’d take him over Todd Steverson of the White Sox in a heartbeat.