San Francisco Giants: An In-Depth Look at the Coaching Staff Additions

The San Francisco Giants have their new-look coaching staff in place, and there’s plenty of new faces to get to know before the season starts.

The one thing the San Francisco Giants can do this early in the offseason has been done. Free agents aren’t going to sign yet (at least not the big names) and trades aren’t going to go down yet, but the team can put together their new coaching staff. After the surprising announcement earlier this year that basically the entire staff would be shaken up, that is now taken care of.

Previous pitching coach Dave Righetti, bullpen coach Mark Gardner, and assistant hitting coach Steve Decker were moved into positions in the front office. Hitting coach Hensley Meulens was moved to bench coach, presumably where he can continue to be groomed as a future manager, while former bench coach Ron Wotus was moved to the third base coaching box after Phil Nevin was not retained when he declined a front office job. That left manager Bruce Bochy and first base coach Jose Alguacil as the only holdovers in the same position.

That also left four open spots: pitching coach, bullpen coach, hitting coach, and assistant hitting coach, all of which have been filled. Curt Young is the new pitching coach, joined by new bullpen head Matt Herges. Leading the hitters is Alonzo Powell, and his assistant is Rick Schu.

These new coaches are not indicative of what success the team will have, both in 2018 and beyond. They will bring new voices, new viewpoints, and new techniques, which will likely impact players up and down the dugout. Some impacts will be positive, and others will be negative. At the end of the day, it will be on the players on the field to right the Giants’ ship.

There are four new coaches to get to know, something that is relatively foreign to Giants’ fans. The team has had the same coaching staff for a long, long time, with Righetti and Gardner nearing two decades in their positions. Wotus was initially a third base coach for the Giants, taking the position during the 1998 season under manager Dusty Baker before taking the bench coach position in 1999. Meulens was the least-tenured of the group, but had still been in his position for more than seven seasons.

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Turnover is expected on major league coaching staffs, but having the level of continuity the Giants had is nearly unheard of, not just in baseball but in professional sports in general. After the season the team endured in 2017, however, maybe these changes were necessary. There are four new coaches to meet, so let’s take some time to get to know their background, and what made them the Giants’ choice.

The new pitching coach Young is a familiar name to fans of baseball on both sides of the Bridge. The former left-handed pitcher went through two different stints with the Oakland Athletics as a player, and two more stints as a pitching coach. Oakland made Young a fourth-round pick in 1981, and he made his major league debut with the club in 1983. Over nine seasons in his first stint, he pitched to a 4.33 ERA and 1.349 WHIP while working mostly as a starter (152 starts) but also coming out of the bullpen (73 relief appearances).

Young pitched in the 1988 World Series against the Los Angeles Dodgers and in the 1990 World Series against the Cincinnati Reds, both losing efforts for his ballclub. He split the 1992 season between the Kansas City Royals and New York Yankees, his first year outside of the Oakland organization, but returned in 1993. He made three starts for the A’s that year, which turned out to be his last as a professional player.

His first gig as a pitching coach came in 2000, when he joined the A’s minor league organization in the role. Young moved to the major leagues in 2004 as Oakland’s pitching coach, and spent seven seasons in that role the first time around. He joined the Boston Red Sox coaching staff as their pitching coach in 2011, but returned back to Oakland the following year. He remained their pitching coach until he was relieved of his duties on June 15th, 2017.

Young comes with a recommendation from previous coach Righetti, which already seems like a point in his favor. He was on the Oakland coaching staff for some high times for the organization, and the pitching staff was usually leading the way, from the Big Three of Tim Hudson, Barry Zito, and Mark Mulder to more recent years with Jon Lester, Sonny Gray, and Jeff Samardzija.

Samardzija will now be under Young’s tutelage again, and that should be something about which he is quite happy, if his previous comments are any indication. Back in 2014, the then-Oakland pitcher praised Young for convincing him to not completely overhaul his entire approach following an awful outing. Instead, Young and Samardzija worked on minor tweaks, and it worked well.

After that blowup start that nearly broke Samardzija, he made seven starts before the season ended. He pitched to a 2.08 ERA, 0.808 WHIP, .207 opponent average, and struck out 56 batters in 52 innings. Following that stretch, Samardzija called Young a “great observer and a great listener”.

Lester, whom Young worked with in both Boston and Oakland, talked about Young’s demeanor as well, particularly during mound visits. He pointed out that “there’s no panic or urgency when he’s out there talking to you. He has this process, and I think that especially helps the younger guys slow things down and take a deep breath”.

All the way back in his rookie year as a major league coach in 2004, Young was already earning high marks from then-A’s manager Ken Macha. Similar to what Lester would say years later, Macha admired Young’s steady demeanor, and that Young “does his homework, just sitting in the meetings listening to the feedback he gets from the pitchers”.

Finally, after Young was fired in 2017, former A’s closer and All-Star Sean Doolittle expressed his frustration at the move, remarking that Young was “super invested in each and every one of his guys”.

Now, Young will again get to work with Samardzija in hopes of keeping up the fantastic control he showed in 2017 while also cutting down on the 4.42 ERA and 30 home runs he allowed. He also has a hard task in helping left-hander Matt Moore regain form after a terrible year, and trying to develop youngsters like Chris Stratton, Kyle Crick, and Steven Okert.

Working with him as the bullpen coach will be Herges, a former right-handed pitcher. Herges spent three years of his 11-year big league career with the Giants, pitching for them from 2003 to 2005. He retired from baseball after spending the 2010 season as a minor leaguer, and joined the Dodgers’ organization as a minor league instructor the next year. Over the last two seasons, Herges was pitching coach for the Triple-A Oklahoma City Dodgers.

The Giants have made their intention of becoming a more analytically-driven team known, and bringing in Herges is an obvious move in that direction. The Dodgers are one of the teams that most heavily rely on advanced metrics. Herges was involved in that while in his previous position, and the team is clearly hoping that he can bring some of those techniques with him.

Dodgers’ left-handed reliever Grant Dayton, who has spent parts of the last two seasons with the big league club, was extremely complimentary of Herges after the move was announced. On Twitter, Dayton stated that his former Triple-A pitching coach “helped me more than he’ll ever know” and called him a “great guy and a great coach”.

On the hitting side of the equation, the Giants are bringing in a rookie hitting coach in the form of Powell, who was the assistant hitting coach for the Houston Astros the last two years. Powell was born and bred in San Francisco, attending Lincoln High before signing with the Giants as an amateur free agent in 1983.

However, he would never play big league ball for the Giants, instead making his MLB debut in 1987 for the Montreal Expos. He played only 14 games that year and hit .195, and wouldn’t return to the big leagues until 1991 with the Seattle Mariners. That year, he hit .216 over 57 games and 125 plate appearances in what turned out to be his last major league action.

After the 1991 season, Powell moved to Japan and played Chunichi Dragons in Nippon Professional Baseball, and he become a star hitter. In seven seasons, Powell won three straight batting titles from 1994 to 1996 (hitting .324, .355, and .340) to become the first foreigner to three-peat as batting champion in the Central League. The two-time Central League All-Star finished his Japanese career hitting .313/.371/.510 over 710 games.

After the end of his playing career, he began his coaching career back with the Mariners in 2002. In their organization, he would be both a hitting coach and manager over the next eight years before becoming the team’s big league hitting coach in 2010. He would move on to become the San Diego Padres’ assistant hitting coach in 2012 before taking the same position with the Astros for the 2016 season.

Like Young, Powell was recommended by his predecessor Meulens, who was a teammate of Powell’s in 2001 on the Atlantic League’s Newark Bears. And like Herges, Powell is another coach from an analytically-driven team. Houston, just like the Dodgers, are at the forefront of the new era of baseball, using advanced metrics to drive the team’s success.

A.J. Hinch, the Astros’ manager during Powell’s tenure, spoke highly of Powell and the team’s hitting coach, Dave Hudgens, before the team began their playoff run in 2017. In a press conference, Hinch praised the hitting coach duo’s ability to lay out a game plan and individualize it to certain players. A few days later in another press conference, Hinch again lauded the duo’s ability to set a plan, saying they are great at recognizing “what each guy does well within the zone, which guys chase, [and] match that up with what the pitcher is going to do against us, and we come up with a pretty good offensive approach”.

Powell has a tough task put in front of him, going from the high-powered, World Series champion Astros’ lineup to the lackluster, worst-team-in-baseball Giants’ lineup. Houston led the league in all triple-slash categories (.282/.346/.478) and runs scored (896) while finishing second with 238 home runs. The Giants were last in slugging (.380) and home runs (128), and 29th out of 30 teams in runs (639) and on-base percentage (.309).

An impressive part of the Astros’ game in 2017 was their ability to put the ball in play. In 2016, Houston hitters struck out in 23.4 percent of their plate appearances, the fourth-highest total in the league. They improved greatly in 2017, cutting that down to a league-low 17.3 percent. Last year, the Giants struck out 19.6 percent of the time, their second-highest total since 2010.

Working under Powell will be a more experienced big league coach, Rick Schu. The former Washington Nationals’ hitting coach is also a Northern California native, growing up in Sacramento. He played nine years in the MLB, debuting with the Philadelphia Phillies in 1984 and spending four years with the team. The three years after were split between the Baltimore Orioles, Detroit Tigers, and California Angels before a one-season reunion with the Phillies in 1991. Schu wouldn’t return to the big leagues until 1996, when he played one game with the Montreal Expos.

Two years of Schu’s four-year MLB hiatus was spent in Japan, where he hit .257/.335/.437 and hit 24 home runs in 1993. As a major leaguer, Schu hit .246/.310/.384 in 580 games.

Schu became a major league hitting coach for the first time in 2007, joining the Arizona Diamondbacks’ staff after spending more than a decade in the organization. Before the 2010 season, he moved to the Nationals’ organization as a minor league hitting coach. He returned to the major leagues for the 2013 season as Washington’s next hitting coach, and spent five years in that capacity.

When he was promoted to the Nationals’ big league staff, his main point of emphasis for a team that was struggling to hit was to be more aggressive. He wanted his hitters to “hunt fastballs [and] keep it simple”. Scott Hairston, a former big leaguer who played under Schu, recalled Schu as “very positive” and that he always made his players “feel good as a hitter”.

During the 2016 season, Nats’ catcher Wilson Ramos credited Schu for helping him bust out of a little slump, helping him stay to the middle of the field rather than being pull happy, and stay relaxed at the plate. Ramos enjoyed his best season in 2016, hitting .307/.354/.496 with 22 home runs and a career-low 15.1 percent strikeout rate while being named an All-Star. His season was unfortunately cut short in late September by a torn ACL.

Now that we’re all familiar with each other, these four gentlemen have a lot of work to do to bring the team back from one of the worst seasons in franchise history. As mentioned earlier, it will be on the players to get it done on the field, but the new coaches can help their improvement.

Offensively, the team isn’t going to become a home run happy club overnight, and Powell recognizes that. During his introductory conference call, Powell mentioned the team’s need to improve their on-base percentage while also hitting the ball hard. While the Giants finished 29th in OBP, the Astros led baseball and the Nationals finished ninth. San Francisco also hit the ball hard only 28.1 percent of the time, dead last in MLB. Both Powell’s and Alonzo’s former teams were much better, with Houston at 32.3 percent and Washington at 31.4 percent. While the Giants do need more power, they also need better plate recognition, patience, and contact ability.

For pitching, the team is probably much closer to a great pitching staff than a great lineup. Still, Young and Herges do have work to do. They need to help their staff with sequencing, a big issue for Moore last year, and getting better at pitching while ahead in the count. In two-strike counts last season, Giants’ pitchers allowed 552 hits, third-most in the NL. Overall, they allowed 463 hits while pitching ahead in the count, second-most in the NL. These are all things that a fresh pair of eyes could help fix.

Next: An Outside the Box Option at Third Base

San Francisco has a new coaching staff for the first time in a long time. Time will tell if this is good or bad, but the immediate outlook isn’t half bad.