I Take It All Back (Sort of, Maybe)

I Take It All Back (Sort of, Maybe)

The collective ears of MLB really must’ve been burning/buzzing/ringing from my remarks yesterday on the status of women in baseball, as in next to invisible.  No sooner do I crack wise, and the Giants hire 29-year old Alyssa Nakken as an assistant coach. 

The former all-conference first baseman from Sacramento State is now one of thirteen coaches named to the staff of new manager Gabe Kapler.  Nakken’s formal job description doesn’t go beyond “assistant coach,” and skeptics—maybe me among them—will point out that she won’t be among the seven uniformed coaches allowed to sit in the dugout at game time.  But Nakken does get to wear a uniform before games.

To do what, exactly?  Kapler explained in a statement that Nakken and Mark Hallberg, another new hire as assistant coach, “will focus on fostering a clubhouse culture that promotes high performance through, among other attributes, a deep sense of collaboration and team.”  Well, that certainly explains it, or not.

A story on MLB.com yesterday did try to flesh out Nakken’s and Hallberg’s duties (in what I’m guessing is a paraphrase of Kapler’s statement).  The story noted the two will work to “streamline practice with an aim toward making on-field work shorter and more intense in duration.  They will be tasked with developing a competition aspect to practice, perhaps recording and tracking sprint times to first base or efficiency in base-running decisions and posting the results.”  I bet soon-to-be 33-year old Buster Posey and 35-year old Jeff Samardzija can hardly wait to have those results made public.  Hey, tortoise.

The Giants are going all-in with a New Age approach to coaching.  Their 32-year old bench coach never played a game in the minors or majors, and a 29-year old assistant hitting coach is, well, 29 as opposed to 34, like Giants’ third baseman Evan Longoria.  The composition of this staff is either a work of genius or a disaster in waiting.  Given that Kapler as a rookie manager with the Phillies nearly ran out of pitchers halfway through a game early in the 2018 season, I’m leaning towards the latter.

But the move is good for women no matter how unproductive Nakken’s job may turn out to be.  It will get players used to being around female coaches and front offices accustomed to thinking of women as coaching material.  Now, if teams would only start inserting female players at second base and actually having women coaches in the dugout, then we’d be cooking with gas.