Hitting coaches hardly matter

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Thursday, November 11, 2004

Hitting coaches hardly matter

By JOHN LEVESQUE
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER COLUMNIST

Attention e-mailers and voice-mailers and snail-mailers who wondered why we never gave Mariners hitting coach Paul Molitor holy whatever for the anemic performance of M's hitters last season. This column is for you.

We didn't lambaste Molitor for the same reason we never commissioned a statue in the likeness of Gerald Perry after the Mariners hit remarkably well while winning 116 games during the 2001 season. When it comes to imparting knowledge and teaching the principles of hitting, big-league hitting coaches really don't do much of either.

Their jobs exist more as a means of getting ex-players, especially ex-players of color, involved in the coaching/managing ranks. Even if they tried to teach hitting, they'd run into a solid wall of resistance from self-centered, supremely focused athletes who've made it this far on talent and ability and aren't about to change their swings for anyone, even if he's got street cred in Cooperstown.

Take it from Rob Ellis, he of the career .229 batting average in three seasons with the Milwaukee Brewers.

"There's very little solid instruction going on," Ellis said yesterday from his home in Grand Rapids, Mich., where, at 54, he is a combination marriage counselor/hitting instructor.

"The hitting coach," Ellis continued, "tends to be a PR guy, a hitter's best friend, a security blanket, a go-to guy for salve on his wounds, a friendly guy who's a little bit psychologist and a little bit con man."

That's not to say the position should be eliminated. Ellis actually thinks Don Baylor, the choice of new Mariners manager Mike Hargrove to succeed Molitor, who succeeded Lamar Johnson, who succeeded Perry, who succeeded Jesse Barfield, who succeeded Lee Elia, might be a smart hire for the Mariners.

"Don Baylor is a man's man, a leader, an alpha male," Ellis said. "All those things will help him get along and lead other players."

In terms of teaching the art of hitting, however, Ellis doesn't expect Baylor to be much different from Molitor -- or any other hitting coach in the professional game.

"I never met one truly effective hitting coach," he said. "The system is not set up to teach hitting."

Still, Ellis, who created five videos on hitting and wrote a book with Mike Schmidt ("The Mike Schmidt Hitting Study"), gave it a try, thinking perhaps that every now and then baseball embraces a guy like Charley Lau, who happened to have a star pupil name George Brett in the 1970s. Alas, Ellis had no apparent Hall of Famers in his tutorials to spread the word that the high finish, often attributed to Lau's teaching but incorrectly so, is the bane of most hitters.

Players who swing on a flat plane, such as Ichiro Suzuki and Barry Bonds, have far more success, Ellis contends, though some players with long, loopy swings can get by on sheer strength and ability.

That's not the case for players who aren't built like Mark McGwire.

"An average size man trying to swing like the big guys cannot pack enough power or consistency," Ellis writes on BeABetterHitter.com. "The strikeouts and lack of team hits eventually eliminate him."

Ellis' last hurrah in professional baseball was from 1998-99 as a minor league hitting instructor with the Twins. He filled a similar role with the Orioles from 1995-97, was an assistant coach at Michigan State, his alma mater, from 1985-90, and a coach in the Cubs organization in 1983.

He even managed the Everett Giants in 1991, when they were owned by Bob Bavasi, the brother of Mariners general manager Bill Bavasi. But don't think the connection afforded Ellis a courtesy interview for the job Baylor filled this week.

Ellis, who cheerfully consents to being described as a contrarian, is a square peg in baseball's go-along-to- get-along circle. He was fired in Everett for running afoul of organizational policy. Seems he overstepped his bounds on lecturing his Class A players about drug abuse and for distributing a list of ways to stay out of trouble on the road, such as "writing a journal" and "visiting the library."

"I just wanted to get these guys out of bed," Ellis said. "That got back to front office. Turns out they wanted these guys in bed resting."

Ellis is clearly not cut from the same bolt of polyester that produces most baseball men. On a Web site called BaseballTips.com, he cites "13 Reasons Why Professional Baseball Cannot Teach Hitting."

"Real teaching," he writes, "scares coaches who can't do it. It so rattles a non-teaching coaching staff to the point where an organization must eliminate him. Real teachers are in college, many trained with teaching techniques such as 'explanation, demonstration, repetition.' But simple techniques like these are foreign to professional baseball. Using them is so strange as to mark one's self as a troublemaker among the staff, which collectively doesn't enjoy something it can't do."

Ellis acknowledges his outspoken nature virtually guarantees he's finished in pro baseball, unless there's a manager or a general manager out there with his heart set on hiring an iconoclast just to make a desperately offbeat statement.

But he'll keep peddling his hitting theories (for sale online at http://prohitter.home.mindspring.com) and wondering if baseball will ever catch on.

As for Baylor's time in Seattle, Ellis said: "Don Baylor will be very good at getting a player to take advantage of the count, watching the pitcher, watching the hitter ahead of him, what the pitcher did to get him out last time. These little mental mechanics are something teachable and learnable. But as far as physically altering or tailoring a player's style of swing, almost zero of that will take place."

That's too bad. But that, dear readers, is baseball.

P-I columnist John Levesque can be reached at 206-448-8330 or johnlevesque@seattlepi.com

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