Let’s catch up on the latest coaching signings as teams finalize their field staffs:
- One-time superstar slugger Mark McGwire is set to join the Padres as the bench coach alongside new manager Andy Green, Jon Heyman of CBSSports.com recently reports. (Dennis Lin of the San Diego Union-Tribune first reported as a strong possibility.) McGwire has worked as a hitting coach with the Cardinals and Dodgers over the past six years. The 52-year-old’s ascension to a bench coach role suggests that a managerial opportunity might not be far off.
- The Nationals have brought back Bobby Henley as the team’s third base coach, per a club announcement. Henley was set loose along with the rest of the staff (and manager Matt Williams) at the end of a disappointing 2015 campaign, but he’ll join hitting coach Rick Schu in reprising their roles. Most of skipper Dusty Baker’s staff is now set.
- Dave Magadan has been announced as the Diamondbacks’ new hitting coach. A 16-year MLB veteran, Magadan has previously worked in the Padres, Red Sox, and Rangers organizations, most recently serving as the top batting instructor for Texas.
- Former big leaguer Aaron Rowand will serve as a minor league outfield and baserunning instructor, the White Sox have announced. Rowand, 38, retired after the 2011 season. He’ll return to the place where he started his professional and MLB career.
Rowand as a coach makes sense.
What’s more pathetic- Jeff working on T’day or us checking the site for a signing!
Actually I wouldn’t be surprised if something doesn’t happen today, although it is kinda pathetic we are checking and he is working.
Glad Mark is still working in baseball. PEDs aside on of my favorite players.
From what I’ve heard from other Dodger fans, McGwire wasn’t the best coach. It’ll be interesting to see how he does in San Diego.
AS a Dodgers fan, I was never thrilled about having a hitting coach that relied on steroids and power throughout his career. The Dodgers had a stacked offense but failed miserably with RISP, and scored most of their runs via HRs, and a lot of them, especially younger guys, seemed to be swinging for the fences every time. I don’t know if McGwire is to blame, but I certainly did not see any reason to praise him as a hitting coach. I am happy he is going away. That said, I have no idea how he would be as a bench coach, (and the notion of him being a manager seems comical to me), but I would not be optimistic if he was joining my favorite team. It doesn’t help that he cried on national TV before congress and never actually admitted anything.
I was waiting for someone to chime in on the roids issue. I can’t see him getting the proper respect to be a manager (or even a bench coach), but the younger generation seems to shrug the issue off a lot (i.e. the HOF balloting), so I guess we’ll see.
McGwire was supposed to have worked miracles with the St. Louis offense, which is why the Dodgers went after him in the first place. It’s unrealistic to expect coaches to work miracles but in the end the housecleaning in LA wasn’t about coaches not doing their jobs well enough, it was about the FO getting the people they want.
I would love it if McGwire wins several division titles and 3-4 World Series titles as a manager. I would just love to see the anti-PED crowd have to watch him get inducted into the Hall of Fame as a manager. Although I still think he deserves it as a player, because without Sosa and McGwire in 1998 I never would have have come back to the game after the strike of ’94, and I suspect I am not alone in that idea. If that is not worthy of induction, then nothing is.
I never knew there was a pro-PED crowd. Live and learn I guess.
Oh, I’m 100% certain there’s an actual, legitimate pro-PED crowd, but not being anti-PED is not even close to equal to being pro-PED. We’re well over a decade beyond the era’s climax at this point. There’s enough time between then and now for some folks to take it simply as a thing that happened and move on. There’s also tons out stuff out there to get a gain a solid understanding of the era, and it’s pretty easy to come away with the feeling that everything was overblown and/or the system was as much at fault as the players. That doesn’t make everything okay, it just means some of us have come to terms with it, and don’t feel like scapegoating the known/suspected users, or the era as a whole (which many of us found immensely enjoyable to watch) is the right path to take.
As to Ray Ray’s notion that they brought a lot of people back to the game, everything I’ve come across over the years backs him up on that. Whether that makes Sosa, McGwire, Bonds, Clemens, etc Hallworthy is entirely in the eye of the beholder, of course. To anyone that’s more-or-less over all the hand-wringing and pearl-clutching in regards to the steroid era, however, considering such contributions alongside the numbers and/or personal eye test is completely valid when discussing their candidacy.
S/o to google for eating 2/3 of my comment when I went to edit a minor grammatical thing, btw. Re-wrote it as best I could. If anything ends up wonky about it later, my browser randomly deciding to not be okay with letting me read more would be why.
Leaving the game or coming back is not compelling reason for induction to hof if I leave and then come back does Pete Rose get in. McGuire stole more from game than he put in. Low character hire by pads. The more things change the more stay same.
If PEDs make someone a low character guy, then you have every right to be completely disillusioned by a huge amount of Baseballers over a period of decades. It’s a general consensus that PEDs were rampant – some just happen to play more productively than others.
No one hates on the .220 hitting middle infielders. But the sluggers? Terrible people.
Not sure how doing something that, regardless of any selfish intent, ultimately comes down to “trying too hard to win” constitutes stealing from the game. It isn’t like nobody ever cheated before 1987. That’s just the point where it became more sophisticated and, allegedly, more effective. This doesn’t make it okay, but it does just make it a modernized version of the same ol’ thing that’s been happening since time immemorial. It’s just basic, garden variety misbehavior.
Meanwhile, by betting on baseball, Pete Rose not only knowingly violated the single most sacred rule in all of sports while still a player (a rule that was put in place because the first time it happened in a high profile way, it threatened to permanently destroy the legitimacy of the still relatively young sport baseball in the eyes of the public), he continued to do so while in a position where he could easily manipulate the outcome of his team’s games if he so chose.
Cheating is still cheating, even if it has gone on forever. So perhaps you are at least correct that McGwire and the other PED guys may indeed have relatively low character (though even then, every Hall of Fame in existence still houses considerably worse). Bringing Pete Rose into the argument is just silly though. He committed the one truly unforgivable sin in sports in about the most cartoonishly brazen way possible. What Pete did was immeasurably worse.
I think MLB can create a path back for PED’s users. In effect, they already are–didn’t we just have A-Rod giving commentary, and we are going to get a whole season of marketing Ortiz’s retirement (yes, I know, he’s not guilty in certain areas of the country). Jason Giambi is well thought of in the clubhouse. I’m not condoning the usage, and if I had a vote for HOF I’d really have to hold my nose, but I think it’s inevitable, at least for the top tier. McGwire gave a lot of value on the field to his teams, he played hard, and his usage was at a time where it was illegal but quietly condoned. He doesn’t have to be honored for breaking the rules, but if he has something to contribute, why not?
To this day I still think it was a mistake not to bring back rowand after the Chicago White Sox glorius world series championship season!
Yeah, because Jim Thome was so horrible his four seasons in Chicago.
Nationals are proving step by step why they won’t be able to win even with superior talent. They lowball Black and tell him he cant pick his coaching staff and then they take on a washed up Baker and stick him with the coaching staff that was in a large part responsible for last seasons failure.
Rowand Day 1, Lesson 1: Running THROUGH the wall.