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.
Jeff made Lookout Landing a thing, but he does not still write there about the Mariners. He does write here, sometimes about the Mariners, but usually not.
It’s interesting to me that Dave Eiland is 11th on the list when the Royals lead the league (or were near the top) in many pitching categories last year. Are we just not easy to please in KC?
Eiland might lose points from his pitchers pitching in front of a historically good defense…along with the starters’ generally low strikeout totals and Jeremy Guthrie’s scary FIP number.
As I recall, Fip didn’t like any Royals’ starter last season. Pitch to weak contact and hit spots in a big park with a great defense is something Fip can’t value. For the Royals, most important two things are pitch 6+ innings and give up 3 runs or less, then hand off to the ‘pen. Jeremy Guthrie fit that.
This was my thinking too. On one hand, Eiland seems to have done more with the young guys than previous coaches, and he apparently has some secret for maintaining a consistently amazing bullpen, and these maybe point to success where maybe past coaches failed. But that has to be tempered by the lack of a smoking gun-type Eiland product, a guy who came in broken and turned things around (which is, no doubt, why Pittsburgh’s guy gets so much love – I mean, I live in Minneapolis, and watching the difference between Worley and post-surgery Liriano with Peterson vs the same guys in Pittsburgh makes my blood pressure rise), plus, the defense is so good in KC, especially the outfielders backing up a crew of fly ball pitchers, that it must be mentioned whenever discussing the pitching staff and the pitching coach. Basically, it is maybe more difficult to separate Eiland from his environment than with other coaches.
Also, loads of us KC fans are cautious and circumspect and pessimistic.
I think it has to do with his low profile. Before reading this comment I didn’t even think about how successful he has been. He has consistently gotten excellent performance of pitchers pulled off the scrap heap. I’m thinking Guthrie and Bruce Chen. Furthermore, he has gotten decent pitchers to pitch better. I’m thinking of Escobar and Vargas. He helped turn Wade Davis from a mediocre starter into a shut down reliever and he has, so far, successfully transitioned a young fireballer in Ventura into a very good MLB starter. I didn’t vote on Eiland, but I should have and I agree that he should get an excellent rating.
Rockies fans, why did 33% of you say Steve Foster is “very bad”? He has yet to pitching-coach a single game for you.
Are Royals and Marlins fans voting against Steve Foster because they hated him in their bullpens over the past decade? I would understand if he got a lot of “Average” or “No Opinion” votes, but the 33% for “Very Bad” is shocking. Maybe 33% of people thought that Steve Foster was the old pitching coach.
There’s probably some bias involved with Jeff Pico. He’s following Bryan Price in Cincinnati. Price was widely regarded as a very good pitching coach. Even if Pico is average, he’s likely to be voted lower because he’s not Price.
Boy–looks like the D-Backs are assembling a stellar management/coaching team. Who is their hitting coach–Mario Mendoza? But as Mr Stewart intimated–who needs advanced metrics?
Just a small thing, but all the opinionated category options aside from “average” aren’t exactly tied to specific benchmark. Meaning it’s possible that there are more than 15 “pretty good” pitching coaches (according to fans) that bring the average score up, though being “pretty good” doesn’t necessarily mean one is above average relative to other coaches.
This is what I thought as well – ‘pretty good’ creates a different expectation than ‘above average’ to me.
I’d love to see how these correlate with team E.R.A.
Pitcher time on DL might be something to look at, too.
Considering you pretty much always hear that a pitching coach is “one of the best in the game” and it’s so hard for any fan to really know what they’re doing, we’re all pretty much guessing, right? I’d say it’s based almost entirely off results.
Well the Pirates pitching WAR was 29th and the ERA was 23rd so I don’t think its just a case of the team pitches well = good pitching coach. With Searage it is the tangible improvements in so many guys (Burnett, Liriano, Volquez, Morton, Locke, Melancon, Grilli, Hughes, etc) offset by limited fails (JMac (injury), J.Sanchez, and Frieri).
I’m not a robot.
forgot Vanimal too off the scrap heap.
Which is results. I guess I’d be more interested in just how closely those would correlate with average fans’ opinions. I guess Fangraphs poll takers might be a bit more informed, at least on advanced stats.
Still, I doubt any of us really has a clue as to the details of what makes one of the 30 or so best pitching coaches in the country so much better than another.
Correlation with 2014 ERA is R = -0.41. The correlation with park factor is actually a little higher, at R = -0.45. In both cases the Rockies have a big influence, as removing them drops the ERA correlation to R = -0.29 and the park factor correlation to R = -0.30. By comparison, dropping the Pirates hardly changes the correlations at all.
Some park-adjusted metric would be better than ERA of course. (Although fans’ perceptions are certainly skewed by unadjusted ERA; witness the Rockies’ pitching coach ranking.)
You would say this after I junked the spreadsheet :). If I remember rightly the correlation between pitching coach rating and 2014 ERA- was about -0.35.
I wsn’t sure how to vote on SF’s pitching coach, because there wasn’t a separate poll for Chris Lincecum. 😉
Honest question: why all the love for Dave Righetti? I get that the Giants have had decent pitching staffs (staves?), but they also pitch in one of the most pitcher-friendly parks in the most pitcher-friendly division in all of Major League Baseball. On top of that, he has a two-time Cy Young Award winner who plummeted to being a less-than-replacement-level pitcher in the span of a year and has never recovered. I’m not trying to tear him down, I’m just curious why he’s so beloved when he doesn’t really have any recent success stories (that I know of) to rest on.
On the other hand you have Chris Bosio who has made it a habit of taking pitchers that were cast aside by their previous teams (Scott Feldman, Jason Hammel, Jake Arrieta, Hector Rondon, Pedro Strop, etc) and turning them into valuable trade chips or current contributors (in a much less forgiving pitching environment), and he’s behind Righetti.
What am I missing?
it’s “staffs.” why would it be “staves”?
Probably due to “thief”/”thieves” and “leaf”/”leaves”
Oh, right, so it should be stafves.
Alternately! I was just being purposefully stupid.
Both staffs and staves are technically correct, although the latter I’ve heard much often when referred to the rod-type of staff (like a walking staff).
The real argument is whether Staves is pronounced “Stay-ves” or “Stah-ves”. Again, both can be considered correct, but I think “Stay-ves” sounds stupid.
Without discounting anything you say, Righetti is highly regarded here in San Francisco for a bunch of reasons: very high success rate with developing young pitchers (yes Cain, Lincecum, and Bumgarner were all first round picks, but it is rare for three first round pitcher picks in a handful of years to all not only become major leaguers but exceptional pitchers), exceptional bullpens built off of scrap heaps, despite the lack of high velocity and, with the exception of early career Sergio Romo, high strikeout rates), and a history of teaching new pitches that transform pitchers at the major league level (the most famous example being transforming Jason Schmidt into a Cy Young candidate by teaching him a change-up that was one of the most dominant in baseball for several years).
He’s also been the pitching coach for three managers now (going back to the Dusty Baker era), so he is the longest-tenured coach on the staff and would likely be pretty popular regardless of his quality.
Also: Righetti does get some credit for Tim Lincecum’s early career success well beyond expectations(remember, part of why he dropped to the Giants was that many teams and scouts thought he could only succeed at the major league level as a relief pitcher).
Along with all the pitchers listed above, Vogelsong, Petit, and maybe even Peavy. That’s a pretty impressive track record of turn-arounds and successes.
I think Cooper probably would disagree that Righetti had anything to do with Peavy. But I get what you’re saying with Vogelsong and Petit.
He said maybe.
And did you also forget Peavy was already good long before his White Sox days?
If you are to credit anyone in Chi re Peavy- credit team trainer Herm Schneider.
Righetti also grew up in San Jose and played for the Giants.
That fan opinion of a teams pitching coach may have no correlation to anything.
People often think like a one-way street. For example a pitcher is 2/3 good and 1/3 bad over a season. Fans remember only the 1/3 bad and blame that on the PC or manager, not the player. No credit is given for the 2/3 good.
Two (or it three) rings.
I’m not sure how Twins fans could have any kind of opinion on Allen since he’s new there and never been a major league pitching coach anywhere else. Glad to see only one team’s pitching coach had a higher percentage for no opinion.
For giggles, they should have put Rick Anderson on here.
So Bob McClure is only kept from being the least regarded pitching coach because of two men who are both brand new at the job. Interesting.
It’s things like this why I’m grateful for liquor.
I have a hard time saying McClure is terrible. He’s had nothing to work with. Everything he does for Hamels and Lee is lost because they are already great. The rest of the staff is terrible. The only talented young pitcher within a mile of his team is Giles and his development could be, atleast partially, credited to McClure. (Who I remember from such teams as the Brewers, Mets, and Californy Angels).
Ah Rick Waits, the very definition of mediocre.
And there is considerable agreement that he is mediocre.
The thing is, with the failures, it’s often hard to pinpoint whether it’s the pitching coach at work or the manager at work, since there are a lot of people involved in coaching a pitcher, unless someone was actually quoted as saying this thing from this coach didn’t work. And obviously, coaching can only go so far to help a player succeed. You can’t coach velocity into Barry Zito, or control (back) into Steve Blass. As far as I can recall, the only recent failures where you could clearly attribute something to the pitching coach were Trevor Bauer and Tyler Skaggs, both courtesy of our favorite D-Backs – and there’s a case to be made that Bauer has significant responsibility for his early failures.
This also applies to the successes, but on the other hand, when a pitcher takes a step forward, there’s often something specific that they can attribute to a pitching coach, which is the case with high-profile reclamation projects associated with the top-rated pitching coaches. But did a change of environment make the same set of instructions more effective for a pitcher? It’s very hard to tell, and even harder to penalize the previous pitching coach.
Are you at all concerned that polling people in a post that leads with a Don Cooper handjob might affect the results on Don Cooper? I realize this isn’t a perfect system, but …
Actually, no, not really, because while ordinarily that would be a huge source of bias, Cooper was going to get these results no matter what. People love them some Don Cooper.
Even I love Don Cooper, and I don’t particularly like the White Sox.
The rating inflation may be attributable to voters including pitching coaches who are no longer MLB pitching coaches when we make out evaluations of what an average pitching coach is. If we use a larger sample size of everyone who has been a pitching coach in the last several years and assume that teams are making reasonably rational hires then we should expect that the average rating would be a bit higher than the designated average ranking.
Maybe that’s why league offense is down. The pitchers aren’t getting better – higher velocity is a red herring. It’s the pitching coaches that are getting better.
I was trying to think of retired pitching coaches that were regarded as excellent. I’ve thought of Leo Mazzone and Dave Duncan. Who else?
I don’t know how Dan Warthen is so low on this list. The impact the Warthen slider has had on Harvey, Wheeler, and deGrom cannot be overstated.
I’m usually not one to praise coaching staffs (at least Mets coaching staffs), but Dan Warthen is a great pitching coach.
I would like to see a separate post on “What do you think makes your pitching coach a good coach?” and preferably, if “increase in the use of the deadly circle change” (etc.) is the answer, confirmation with data of this assertion would be interesting as well. I ask this in part because I wonder a) do pitching coaches contribute anything that fans can (substantively) appreciate?; b) Is the role of the pitching coach the same on all teams?; c) How do you disentangle age of pitching staff, quality of pitchers, and pitching coach contribution?
Regarding Warthen, I wonder if elbow surgeries will be equal part of his contribution to Mets pitchers. The uncertain, but suggestive, association of pitch type and elbow injury is noted.
Will he be great in July if these pitchers perform badly. How do we tell if it is the coach or the player?
I think that we could be seeing a bit of bias because we’re at the point of the year where most fans are optimistic about their teams. This could spill over to the respective coaching staffs as well. I would like to see this repolled at the all star break when there’s a bit more certainty about how good or bad the teams and pitching staffs are.
The reason that the fans might have such a high opinion of their pitching coaches is because of the shift in recent years in favor of pitching over hitting. The fact might be that 23 of the teams in the league have above average pitching, and therefore perceived above average pitching coaches, in comparison to 10-15 years ago which is when many people came up watching the game. I am sure that if you were to do a similar survey for hitting coaches it would not return the same results.