You and Your Pitching Coaches

A few days ago, while Kiley was dominating with his prospect coverage, I asked you about your favorite team’s pitching coach. I was a little fearful that no one would participate, since, who cares, you know, but many of you still found it in your hearts to throw a vote my direction. In all, there were thousands and thousands of votes, and while everything had to be split 30 ways to get material for each team and each coach, I was still left with sufficient sample sizes for all — even for the two new coaches who haven’t been coaches in a season yet. Bless the FanGraphs platform, and bless the FanGraphs readers. That means you!

I ran this project because I couldn’t recall seeing such a project run in the past. And also, I’m fascinated by crowd-sourcing and fan opinion, and while we all know this project won’t actually uncover the game’s best and worst pitching coaches, data has been generated, reflecting something, and now we’re in position to analyze the data. Let us do exactly that. Here are fruits of labors.

In the original post, each coach had a poll, with the following six options:

• very good
• pretty good
• average
• pretty bad
• very bad
• no opinion

I gave number scores to the first five options, descending from 5 to 1 (very good = 5). That allowed me to calculate, for each coach, an average fan rating. Here is a display of those fan ratings:

In the lead, by one hundredth of one point: Ray Searage, over Don Cooper. Mickey Callaway is just barely behind. At the other end, Steve Foster brings up the rear, but he’s also new so we might elect to give him a break. There’s probably understandable skepticism that any pitching coach in Colorado can make a meaningful difference. Just barely ahead of Foster, Arizona’s Mike Harkey. Then there’s some separation before Bob McClure. The two new pitching coaches are Colorado’s Foster and Minnesota’s Neil Allen, and Allen scored better than Foster, albeit by basically a half-point. Interesting! Or not? If nothing else, it’s been noted.

An important point to make before we proceed any further: in theory, each poll was voted in only by fans of the given team, and while I’m sure there was some overlap and a little bit of casual trolling, this didn’t have equal participation. The people who voted in the Pittsburgh poll weren’t the same people who voted in the Atlanta poll, and different groups of people have different sets of feelings, even aside from feelings regarding pitching coaches. Some people might be more prone to enthusiasm than others. Some fans are happier than others, and, rising tides and everything. There’s a lot going on here, but because there’s not much I can do, I just have to manage with the numbers I’ve been provided.

Here’s a big honkin’ table. It should be sortable, and the default sort is by average rating (for some reason the usual sortable HTML is blowing this table up and I’m tired of trying to fix it). The percents don’t add up to 100% because while “no opinion” was taken over the total number of votes, the actual rating percentages were taken over just the total number of votes that expressed an opinion in some way.

Team	Pitching Coach	Very Good	Pretty Good	Average	Pretty Bad	Very Bad	No Opinion	Rating
Pirates	Ray Searage	79%	12%	8%	1%	0%	4%	4.69
White Sox	Don Cooper	80%	13%	5%	1%	1%	4%	4.68
Indians	Mickey Callaway	75%	16%	6%	2%	1%	4%	4.62
Giants	Dave Righetti	65%	27%	7%	1%	1%	2%	4.54
Rays	Jim Hickey	57%	31%	10%	1%	1%	9%	4.43
Cubs	Chris Bosio	60%	21%	12%	3%	3%	5%	4.33
Braves	Roger McDowell	54%	24%	16%	3%	2%	5%	4.24
Athletics	Curt Young	37%	47%	14%	1%	1%	8%	4.18
Rangers	Mike Maddux	40%	38%	19%	3%	0%	4%	4.14
Padres	Darren Balsley	44%	30%	20%	6%	1%	11%	4.09
Royals	Dave Eiland	34%	42%	18%	5%	2%	7%	4.02
Yankees	Larry Rothschild	35%	35%	21%	7%	2%	4%	3.94
Nationals	Steve McCatty	30%	42%	20%	4%	3%	7%	3.92
Cardinals	Derek Lilliquist	26%	48%	22%	1%	3%	3%	3.91
Dodgers	Rick Honeycutt	28%	41%	24%	3%	4%	7%	3.87
Astros	Brent Strom	33%	26%	26%	10%	4%	21%	3.75
Orioles	Dave Wallace	24%	40%	21%	11%	4%	10%	3.69
Mets	Dan Warthen	15%	34%	32%	9%	9%	10%	3.37
Mariners	Rick Waits	6%	38%	45%	10%	2%	13%	3.36
Red Sox	Juan Nieves	9%	35%	40%	13%	3%	13%	3.33
Tigers	Jeff Jones	12%	34%	31%	18%	5%	7%	3.31
Reds	Jeff Pico	4%	33%	47%	13%	3%	19%	3.23
Marlins	Chuck Hernandez	10%	31%	31%	20%	7%	15%	3.18
Blue Jays	Pete Walker	4%	17%	53%	20%	7%	15%	2.90
Brewers	Rick Kranitz	0%	17%	53%	29%	1%	20%	2.87
Twins	Neil Allen	8%	17%	38%	26%	12%	35%	2.83
Angels	Mike Butcher	4%	18%	44%	23%	12%	9%	2.81
Phillies	Bob McClure	4%	6%	44%	30%	16%	15%	2.51
Diamondbacks	Mike Harkey	0%	5%	29%	52%	14%	18%	2.26
Rockies	Steve Foster	6%	3%	34%	24%	33%	38%	2.25

Maybe the first thing that stands out to you: most fans are at least satisfied with their pitching coaches. It’s the first thing that stood out to me. On the one hand, we’ve come to expect fan projections and ratings to err toward the optimistic or positive. On the other hand, pitching coaches are coaches, and coaches are frequent targets of blame. I wonder if pitching coaches are thought of more favorably than managers, since it’s easier to observe managerial blunders. Anyway, if you set average at 3, then 23 teams are considered to have above-average pitching coaches. The overall average rating here: 3.64. That’s pretty significant inflation. If 23 pitching coaches are above average, then either seven pitching coaches are incredibly terrible, or, 23 pitching coaches aren’t above average. The observed numbers would put the average between Dave Wallace and Dan Warthen.

As an aside, it took until this project for me to learn of the existence of Jeff Pico. The fans are on the same page — Pico’s poll generated the lowest number of votes. Keep in mind that’s out of a pool containing two very new pitching coaches. Chuck Hernandez was second-lowest. At the top, Dave Righetti got the most votes, and then there was a decent gap between him and Chris Bosio and Larry Rothschild.

Let’s look at the “no opinion” results. Appropriately, the two highest rates belong to the two newest coaches. Among the holdovers, Brent Strom got the highest rate of non-votes. Maybe Strom just isn’t very visible. Maybe Astros fans have difficultly separating Strom’s influence from overall organizational influence. Right behind Strom, you get Rick Kranitz, and maybe this is partially because the Brewers don’t get a lot of pitching turnover, and in analytical circles it’s almost like the staff is run by Jonathan Lucroy.

Righetti got the lowest rate of non-votes — Giants fans know how they feel about Dave Righetti. Nine different coaches came in no higher than 5%, and all of them had high ratings. It seems there are a lot more strong positive opinions than strong negative opinions. This is unusual, on the internet.

Don Cooper got four-fifths “very good” votes. That put him just ahead of Searage and Callaway. Neither Kranitz nor Harkey got a single “very good” vote. Similarly or oppositely, neither Searage nor Mike Maddux got a single “very bad” vote. Searage and Righetti come in at just 1.2% dissatisfaction. That doesn’t even meet the usual minimum threshold of internet poll-trolling.

Why might the ratings, in general, be so high? For one thing, it’s easier to remember the successes than the failures. When a pitcher improves, credit goes to the coach, at least in part. When a pitcher fails to improve or gets worse, blame mostly goes to the pitcher. It’s an unbalanced equation. And then, while fans remember, say, successful reclamation projects, they might be relatively unaware of successful projects on other teams. The average per team isn’t zero pitching improvements. For however many pitchers Mickey Callaway has helped to make better, he isn’t that many pitchers better than the average pitching coach. I hope that makes sense.

As a last little thing, here’s a table of standard deviations, and relative standard deviations (now sortable):

Team	Pitching Coach	Rating	StDev	%RSD
Pirates	Ray Searage	4.69	0.67	14%
Brewers	Rick Kranitz	2.87	0.70	24%
Giants	Dave Righetti	4.54	0.71	16%
White Sox	Don Cooper	4.68	0.74	16%
Diamondbacks	Mike Harkey	2.26	0.76	34%
Indians	Mickey Callaway	4.62	0.76	17%
Rays	Jim Hickey	4.43	0.78	18%
Athletics	Curt Young	4.18	0.79	19%
Mariners	Rick Waits	3.36	0.82	24%
Reds	Jeff Pico	3.23	0.83	26%
Rangers	Mike Maddux	4.14	0.84	20%
Blue Jays	Pete Walker	2.90	0.88	30%
Cardinals	Derek Lilliquist	3.91	0.92	23%
Red Sox	Juan Nieves	3.33	0.92	28%
Royals	Dave Eiland	4.02	0.93	23%
Phillies	Bob McClure	2.51	0.96	38%
Nationals	Steve McCatty	3.92	0.97	25%
Padres	Darren Balsley	4.09	0.97	24%
Dodgers	Rick Honeycutt	3.87	0.99	26%
Braves	Roger McDowell	4.24	1.00	24%
Angels	Mike Butcher	2.81	1.00	36%
Cubs	Chris Bosio	4.33	1.01	23%
Yankees	Larry Rothschild	3.94	1.02	26%
Tigers	Jeff Jones	3.31	1.06	32%
Orioles	Dave Wallace	3.69	1.08	29%
Marlins	Chuck Hernandez	3.18	1.08	34%
Twins	Neil Allen	2.83	1.09	38%
Mets	Dan Warthen	3.37	1.13	34%
Rockies	Steve Foster	2.25	1.13	50%
Astros	Brent Strom	3.75	1.14	30%

The game’s least-polarizing pitching coach: none other than Pittsburgh’s Ray Searage. He received the most consistent votes, and then Righetti and Cooper were close. Pretty much every fan loves these guys, and it shows in the data. At the other end, again, the two newest coaches saw the broadest distributions, as there isn’t yet a sense of fan agreement. Among the rest, McClure and Butcher have the highest relative standard deviations; Strom and Warthen have the highest regular standard deviations. The fans know who they love, and they love them almost unanimously. When you move away from the consensus best, there’s more disagreement.

I think we’ve all learned something from this. How important is it? I don’t know. How long will it stick with us? I can’t say. But, mostly, you guys like your pitching coaches. It’s nice to see a little positivity in the world.