Looking at the Pirates’ new coaching and front office hires this offseason, you’d be hard pressed to find a common theme among them.
Dewey Robinson, a 66-year-old pitching guru who helped develop the Rays’ outstanding pitching over the last decade, joined as a special advisor to pitching development. On the other side of the coin, you have Eric Munson and Quentin Brown, two hitting coaches who had run private baseball facilities, but never did any formal coaching in professional baseball. Munson, a former major-leaguer, will be the Class AAA hitting coach and Brown will be the Florida complex league hitting coach.
But when you’re searching for the right group of people for a player development team, you have to be creative where you look.
“We don't want to fish in only one pond, whether it's players or staff,” Ben Cherington said over Zoom Wednesday. “Good coaches come from everywhere.”
“You really have to find a way to problem solve with a player without unlimited resources and with constraints on time and technology,” Cherington continued. “Sometimes you’ve got to be creative to find solutions.”
For example, the Pirates made some team history this winter by hiring Caitlyn Callahan as a development coach based in Bradenton, Fla. The 26-year-old former collegiate softball player and Reds intern is the first uniformed female coach in the team’s history.
After getting to work with Callahan at the Get Better at Baseball camp in Bradenton in November, they decided she had the characteristics they look for in a coach.
“[She has] a passionate curiosity for learning about the best and most modern coaching practices,” Cherington said. “She’s certainly literate in all of the forms of technology we would use in player development. Most of all, she wants to help players get better and is passionate about putting the player first and doing whatever she can to help the player get better.”
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• Next year’s minor-league staffs will have five coaches: A manager, hitting coach, pitching coach, a bench or development coach and a new position called an “integrated baseball performance coach.”
So what exactly is an integrated baseball coach?
“The way I would describe it is if you think about an individual player development plan, it is the person who is going to be accountable for helping us facilitate those in real life and real time at each affiliate,” Cherington said. “Each of those coaches would be responsible for collaborating with other coaches – with strength coaches, with research & development, with our medical staff, our nutritionists – to make sure for every player at that affiliate, their plan is in a good spot in terms of the assessment that has happened on that player, the identification of a skill-development priority that we’ve assigned, practice that fits that skill-development priority, and that we are measuring improvement on that over the course of the season. So it’s someone embedded in that staff who would help pull all of that together, working with the entire collaborative team around that player.”
The short answer is the coach is an extra set of hands to help share coaching duties and give players more time with coaches while offering different areas of expertise, like catching or infield defense.
“It’s what we all experienced in school and know about learning in any environment: Student-to-teacher ratio matters,” Cherington said. “So we’re trying to improve that any way we can.”
• Miguel Pérez and Kieran Mattison are both moving up a level as manager for next season, going to Class AAA Indianapolis and AA Altoona, respectively. That was partly to keep them with some key prospects, but also to reward them for their quality work last season.
Coaching assignments aren’t always so cut and dry, though. Moving a level isn’t always a promotion or demotion.
“We traditionally think about Class AAA being above Class AA, and Class AA being above Class A,” Cherington said. “For a player, that's certainly true. For a coach, I can think of a lot of cases where we might have a really skilled, expert coach who happens to have a set of strengths or maybe is just at a point in their career where the best match is at a lower level, working with younger players.”
An example of that can be seen with Jon Nunnally, who is going from being Class AAA Indianapolis’ hitting coach to Altoona’s. It’s not a demotion, but rather the organization thinks he’s the right fit to work with that group of prospects, which includes Nick Gonzales, Liover Peguero, Matt Fraizer and potentially Henry Davis.
Bradenton manager Jonathan Johnston is the one returning manager who is not being moved up a level, but that’s because he clicks with players that age range after coaching in the college ranks for years.
Callix Crabee, who spent the last three years as the Rangers' assistant hitting coach, will manager Class High-A Greensboro, with Cherington calling him a "really interesting young manager and manager prospect."
• As for the major-league staff, Cherington says the Pirates aren’t planning on replacing Glenn Sherlock, who is leaving to become the Mets bench coach. Sherlock had been part of the Pirates’ staff the last two years, with one of his main duties being coaching catchers.
Instead, his duties will likely be divided among members of the staff, including third base coach Mike Rabelo, game-planning strategy coach Radley Haddad and bullpen catcher/catching assistant Jordan Comadena.
“We feel like we've already got some people on staff who are already helping in the catching area,” Cherington said. “There may be an opportunity to grow some people's roles in that area.”
