Look, let's be real, this is on Bryan Reynolds.
And Kevin Newman. And Josh Bell. And Adam Frazier. And Gregory Polanco.
Trim down any list of all that's gone so terribly wrong in these Pirates' 2020 season, and the precipitous fall of their projected top five in the batting order, the root of the worst offensive output in the franchise's 134 years, undoubtedly towers above the rest. It really does. More than the pitching. More than the fielding. More than the injuries. Because it affects not only the present but also the future. Because if those players lose value, whether in Pittsburgh or via potential trade, any building/rebuilding process Ben Cherington's got in mind gets pushed way, way, back.
It's a scary scenario. Scarier, I'll bet, than even the most cynical of cynics had envisioned entering this summer.
And it's one that demands a significant solution.
But ... um, what?
I'll admit that my first thought, on this particular Thursday night at PNC Park, was to just admonish everyone involved to perform precisely as they did all through their near-perfect 5-1 cutdown of the Cardinals, a thing of beauty that Derek Shelton fairly called "our best game all season." Steven Brault's gorgeous complete game was the Pirates' first in two years. Jacob Stallings called every pitch, with Brault willingly flying blind by eschewing the scouting report. Ke'Bryan Hayes kept threading the needle at third base and the defense didn't commit an error.
And my goodness, even the lumber came to life, with Polanco lasering a three-run home run ...
... as well as an equally authoritative double, both with exit velocities approaching his ... uh, batting average. To boot, Reynolds, Newman, Bell and Frazier also contributed hits, walks and RBIs.
So yeah, that. Just do that. Or, as Shelton worded it in a response to one of my questions, "I’ll sign up for every game going like this. Nine innings out of the starter, timely hitting, catch the ball. I’m in for that."
If only.
The cold water here is that there won't be some catch-all solution. They won't wake up Friday morning and have all of this magically reverse course:
Nor will they fire the hitting coach. And I probably should get that out of the way here and now.
Rick Eckstein was hired for that job entering the 2019 season, and it couldn't have been coincidence that, under his tutelage, the careers of all of the above took off. Or that all those players credited him and his assistant, Jacob Cruz, and did so passionately and at every opportunity. They'd describe in vivid detail, in eureka-type tones, how Eckstein taught them to own a single, small quadrant of the strike zone, to ignore anything out of it, to attack anything inside it.
And then, it all blew up. For all of them. All at the same time. Their approaches became a collective, chaotic mess, varying not just from at-bat to at-bat but from pitch to pitch. They've lacked recognition. They've lacked situational awareness. They've lacked steadiness with both their feet and hands. And above all, they've lacked aggressiveness.
It's mostly the same players, too, working under the same hitting coach. The only two differences were that Cruz left for the Brewers -- where he's overseen the most eye-popping individual plunge in baseball with Christian Yelich somehow still hitting .208 -- and that Shelton, a lifelong hitting coach, took the manager's job here. And man, it sure seems like both those elements should've been pluses.
I asked Shelton a couple questions about Eckstein and his other coaches before this game, opening with this: What kind of mental toll must this season be taking on his staff?
The context: All were either hired or retained to make players 'better,' as repeatedly stressed by Shelton and Cherington, and the polar opposite's occurred.
“Actually they’re doing well," Shelton began of his coaches before pumping the brakes a bit. "Well, let me say this: They’re doing as well as can be expected. They’re doing a good job of internally focusing on what we can continue to do better, and it’s challenging. When you’re a hitting coach or pitching coach, especially, because those are the two places we isolate the most."
He mentioned, in addition to Eckstein, his new assistant Mike Rabelo, plus pitching coach Oscar Marin and bullpen coach Justin Meccage.
"The one thing Eck and Rabs and Oscar and Mecc have done is they’re continuing to challenge themselves how we can get better," Shelton continued. "That’s all we can do. To say it’s easy ... it’s not easy. But I will give them a lot of credit that they’ve handled it really well. Probably a lot better than I would’ve handled it as a hitting coach."
Of Eckstein specifically, Shelton added, "Being a hitting coach is challenging. There are a lot of things that I can’t talk about in-game, but I can talk about that one. It’s extremely challenging. There’s no one who cares more than Rick Eckstein. There’s no one who’s spending more time thinking about things than Rick Eckstein. He’s a really good hitting coach. A really good hitting coach. We’re just trying to figure out why our guys are going through this."
Returning to my question, he wrapped up, "But to your point, he did an unbelievable job last year, and we just need to, as we move forward, figure out how we can go back to untapping those things."
One more time: They aren't firing Eckstein.
Not after a 60-game schedule. Not after a pandemic threw a four-month interruption between two phases of spring training. Not after at least a couple other players -- chiefly Erik Gonzalez and Colin Moran -- took modest but meaningful strides forward. And definitely not after a lot of these players were the ones who appealed directly to Bob Nutting to keep Eckstein in the fold even as Nutting was firing nearly everyone else last winter.
Look, Eckstein might be the most clueless hitting coach in the history of clueless hitting coaches. It's certainly possible. But that call can't and won't be made by management in this circumstance. Nor should it.
I'll swing way back to the beginning: This is on Reynolds and everyone else who's plunged off the cliff this summer like Wile E. Coyote with a piano strapped to his back.
Ultimately, it's always on the athlete, in any sport at any level.
Maybe Reynolds and Eckstein can figure this out. Or maybe Reynolds reaches out to a friend from the Cape Cod League, or an old coach at Vanderbilt, or even a family member, to seek advice. Frazier did that a summer ago, some might recall, and his dad told him he'd noticed his son's hand placement being out of whack, after which he went berserk at the plate for a couple weeks. This sort of thing is far more common than most might realize.
If Reynolds reached out to me for advice, which he definitely wouldn't and shouldn't, I'd show him this clip from this very game:
He's fishing for a ball, then getting rung up. And rightly so.
How many times has that been witnessed?
He'll dig a two-strike hole, usually on offspeed junk, and then, rather than protecting the plate, he'll sit back, plop the bat back on his shoulder and hope for a ball to balance the count. Punctuated soon thereafter by a third strike.
Like they shout in Little League, 'SWING!'
Reynolds isn't alone on this, either. It's a symptom of an underlying cause that's coursed its way through most of the lineup and, if Hayes doesn't keep that mask on, he might catch it someday, too.
I'm no hitting coach, and I won't pretend otherwise. But I've been covering ball long enough to have learned how to listen to the real experts. And when I hear the manager saying the hitters aren't being aggressive enough, and I've heard the hitting coach saying the hitters aren't being aggressive enough, and I've heard the hitters say they aren't being aggressive enough ... I won't qualify for a Pulitzer the day the Pirates resume being more aggressive on fastballs right down the pipe.
Shelton got technical on the topic.
"There are times when we get on and off the fastball, and that happens throughout the count, and then we’ll see ourselves take fastballs with two strikes or we’ll take one early in the count," he explained. "When you don’t stay on the fastball, it leads to timing and other issues. I think that’s been the one thing that’s probably been the most inconsistent."
And the technical solution?
“I think there’s a lot of things that get guys off the fastball. The first thing is there’s more breaking balls thrown than there are fastballs thrown in the game, and that’s the way it’s trending. But if you don’t hit the fastball, you don’t give yourself an opportunity to hit anything else. So you have to stay on the fastball. Secondly, when you struggle offensively, there’s millions of things that go through your mind on a daily basis. Having been a hitting coach, I know that and the psychology of it. Every day, I think Rick and Rabs are challenging our guys to stay consistent and not let that vacillate."
It was at that point that Shelton laughed at his usage of a 50-cent word. A few hours later, his players swung at fastballs with bad intentions, laid off most everything else, and hammered home a victory. Doesn't have to be that hard.
