Marlins Hire Randy St. Claire

by jrsyeagle on Oct 27, 2009 4:52 PM EDT

Really?

That's all I have to say about this. The man has never lead a staff that has had more wins than losses. His professional career was with one organization that was never good during his time with them. He WAS FIRED BY THE LAST PLACE WASHINGTON NATIONALS!?!

I guess he had to come cheap if even the Nationals have fired him... How little money are we offering this position that our best option is this chiste?

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The important question is why does this matter?

I think pitching coaches have more impact on play than any other coach, but to be fair, blaming St. Claire for coaching the Expos/Nationals instead of a good team is ludicrous. He did whatever he could with the people he had. That team never developed good pitching talent because they never had it, or they traded it all away for Bartolo Colon.

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by SFiercex4 on Oct 27, 2009 5:00 PM EDT reply actions

Saying it's not St. Claire's fault due to lack of legit pitching talent

is troubling. It implies that in the last 7+ years, there are no successes we can point to as a fanbase and say “Hey, St. Claire just might be an improvement over Wiley”. No past cases of him improving young raw talent — this doesn’t bode well for Miller taking the next step or the possibility of improving VandenHurk and/or Badenhop to 4/5 starter status. No cases of him regularly spinning gold out of yearly bp reclamation projects — how are we so sure he would’ve yielded similar results out of Nelson, Gardner, Sanches, Meyer, Donnelly, etc.? Some of that credit has to go to Wiley. All we have is “Hey, Loria hired one of his buddies from the Expos days.” That sucks.

by dgriot on Oct 28, 2009 1:45 AM EDT up reply actions

Widely praised, but results lacking

Since I started following the Natinals as soon as they announced the move from Montreal, EVERYBODY raved about how great Randy St. Claire was with a pitching staff. To listen to these folks (who knew more than I) Randy could walk on water to reclaim failing arms and turn young pitchers into staff aces.

Then came the Natinals’ disastrous 2009 baseball season. As soon as he was replaced bloggers and SABRmetricians wondered aloud at the number of pitching arms had been blown out under Randy’s watchful eye, as well as making the same observations as those made here.

Off the top of my head in a few short years I can think of John Patterson, Chad Cordero, Gary Majewski, and Ryan Wagner (hung ’em up), all young pitchers who must have had bad mechanics to have their careers hampered so severely by injuries to their pitching arms or shoulders. Patterson was never right since and Ryan Wagner said “to hell with it!” and quit the game.

I heard an interview of former pitcher (Mike Moore??? or similar name) who staunchly advocates that proper pitching mechanics can carry a pitcher through his career without injury.

So if RStC was such a great pitching coach, the question remains: why did so many of his young pitchers suffer such severe injuries to their arms? Is this just par for the course due to genetics and random chance, or did he teach them mechanics that were flawed?

Another knock on Randy is that he forces a pitcher to abandon his own style in favor of what Randy teaches, even if he had been previously effective. I’m not sure I like the sound of that. If a kid can pitch and just needs a tweak to fine-tune his delivery, then just fine-tune him and watch him excel. If it aint broke, don’t fix it.

I doubt this helps much, but there it is.

When the roof happens, it will rain.

by boteman on Oct 30, 2009 10:11 PM EDT reply actions