On Tuesday,
Cubs’ pitching coach Jim Hickey announced he was leaving the team for those
ever-mysterious “personal reasons.” For
those of you keeping tack out there, the North Siders will start next season
with their third pitching and hitting coaches since 2017. What gives?
I’d say team
president Theo Epstein is going through your typical front-office state of
denial, only more so. Team executives
are loath to admit they’ve made mistake in acquiring talent. No, the mistake has to be in the coaching of
that talent, hence the coaching merry-go-round.
From a South
Sider’s vantage point, I’d happily take ex-hitting coach Chili Davis or Hickey,
whose pitching staff finished third in baseball with a 3.65 ERA; imagine what
it would have been without Yu Darvish and Tyler Chatwood coughing up run after
run. This “blame the coaches” mindset
may be a character flaw of Epstein; I seem to recall he made a lot of coaching
changes back in his Boston days. The
White Sox have already taken one Epstein castoff in manager Rick Renteria. Why not go for the hat trick with Davis and
Hickey?
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