OCTOBER 27: The Friars have finalized an agreement with Niebla, reports Dennis Lin of the Athletic (Twitter link). As expected, he’ll be the club’s pitching coach in 2022.
OCTOBER 24: The Padres “are locking in on” Indians assistant pitching coach Ruben Niebla as their next pitching coach, ESPN.com’s Buster Olney tweets. The hiring isn’t yet official, though Kevin Acee of The San Diego Union-Tribune reports (via Twitter) that Niebla “is considered all but a done deal” to change teams.
Ben Fritz had been serving as the Padres’ interim pitching coach since Larry Rothschild was fired in late August. According to Acee, the Padres are hoping Fritz remains with the team — Fritz had been working as the bullpen coach before his in-season promotion. It remains to be seen how the rest of the coaching staff will shake out, as bench coach/third base coach Bobby Dickerson has already left the team to join the Phillies, and there could be a wider coaching shakeup once the new San Diego manager is hired (as presumably that new skipper would get some say in assembling the staff).
Niebla will already be in place, however, as the SoCal native will now be moving closer to home for his first official gig as a Major League pitching coach. Niebla briefly served as Cleveland’s interim pitching coach in 2012, his highest rank in 21 seasons with the organization. Much of that first decade was spent as a minor league coach before Niebla joined the MLB staff as a coaching assistant in 2010, and then following his interim gig in 2012, he worked seven seasons as a minor league pitching coordinator. Niebla has been in his current role on the Major League coaching staff for the last two seasons.
At least one familiar face will already be there in San Diego to welcome Niebla, as former Indians hurler Mike Clevinger is expected to be back next season after missing 2021 due to Tommy John surgery. On paper, San Diego has plenty of solid rotation options in place with Joe Musgrove, Yu Darvish, Blake Snell, Chris Paddack, Clevinger, Ryan Weathers, and (around midseason) Adrian Morejon, except injuries and general under-performance ravaged this group last year.
In the bigger picture, the Padres will also surely be looking to pick Niebla’s brain about some of the secrets of Cleveland’s success at drafting and developing pitchers in recent years. While the Padres have had no shortage of promising young pitching prospects, they’ve had issues in converting that potential into success at the big league level. (To wit, all of Musgrove, Darvish, Snell, Paddack, and Clevinger were acquired in trades.)
It’s not Balsley but hard to complain about getting a pitching coach from the Guardians. I been saying for a whole that the Padres need to bring in coaches who know what they are doing rather than selling off all their prospects for 60 cents on the dollar and this looks like a step in the right direction.
*Indians.
Why hire the coaches before the manager? Indicative of the front office wanting to make all the decisions for the manager like the Dodgers and Yankees do. I don’t think all managers should have total control or anything because some are really bad. Still… This is a bad way to run a franchise.
Preller controls the lineup, the pitching, and who plays when and where. He thinks the Padres are his own personal Fantasy team. I don’t even know why he bothers with a manager except to be his scapegoat.
I’m betting a majority of the teams are ran like this.
Many are. But I don’t think it’s a majority. Yet. Not to that degree.
The Civil War is over, too
Not a big fan of picking a new Managers coaches before one has been hired. Makes you think that someone the Padres have already interviewed gave their go ahead/agreed with this signing. As a Padre fan, I hope Niebla can bring some “Cleveland magic” to the Padres pitching staff.
If the new manager is really opposed to having a pitching coach that they stole from the Guardians then they probably aren’t going to be a good manager anyway.
I agree with your premise, but the new Manager NEEDS to have more say in things than Green or Tingler had in my opinion. Just running out another talking head isn’t going to get the Padres where they want to go.
I still can’t wrap my head around “Guardians.” Cleveland is a legacy team with a long and storied history.
Long and storied history of losing!
Better record over the past 25 years than the Bronx Bums.
And still no rings, sad!
Cleveland has a third of the bums payroll with a higher winning percentage over the last 25 years. Yes it’s been a long time for us winning a championship, but I haven’t seen the bums for over a decade in spite of their inflated payroll.
Oh, that’s such a 2015 way of thinking.
I’m joking. I think.
A guy who has never been the main pitching coach with a veteran pitching staff doesn’t seem like a great match.
lol
@DodgerOK … obviously you haven’t paid attention to how good Cleveland’s pitching has been for most of the last 15 years
This sort of shows how little respect front offices have for team Managers when they start hiring the coaching staff before hiring the Manager. The Manager should have at least some say in his coaching staff
The Padres have had a pitching coach vacancy for quite a bit longer than they’ve had a managerial vacancy. This is fine.
The only respect Preller has shown for managers has been by undermining their authority and using them as scapegoats for his own failures.
Niebla worked in Cleveland’s minor league system for years before joining the major league coaching staff. He’s had A TON to do with how they’ve been churning out pitchers over the years.
As a Cleveland fan, this is a huge loss. Carl Willis isn’t even a bad pitching coach but I’d fire him in a heartbeat if it meant they could keep Niebla instead.
Not enough people understand that Niebla was pretty much *the guy* responsible for instituting most of the changes that gave them that “pitching pipeline”. They promoted him to the big league staff a couple of years ago because he basically demanded a big league role and he was too successful not to promote from minor league pitching coordinator. Between him and the guy the Yankees poached, they’ve lost their main architects of that system.
Honestly I was kind of hoping they’d make him pitching coach and move Carl Willis to some front office position given his age.
They should look at future GMs….first.
Niebla has largely been considered “the straw that stirs the drink” in Cleveland when it comes to pitching development. The player acquisition side of things might be the most important component to Cleveland’s pitching success but Niebla could potentially be the “pitching whisperer” and a great investment for the Padres. I give them credit for thinking outside the box by hiring him before having a manager.
I bet the Padres paid him a top-of-the-market salary too. This guy is the real deal. While in Cleveland, he aligned pitching development and pitching programs at all levels of the minors, so when a pitcher jumped from A ball to AA or from AA to AAA, the program was fundamentally the same and pitchers could focus purely on their development and not learning a new methodology or approach as they matriculated through the system. I would have to say the results speak for themselves. Hopefully for San Diego, he implements and oversees a similar system-wide program that will lead to a strong pipeline of well taught and well developed pitching prospects, while he works directly with a solid collection of veteran arms on the big league club.
Only if he doesn’t get undermined and scapegoated by Preller.
Was this the guy indians fans told me about couple months ago?
This is exactly who I was talking about back when we fired our pitching coach. Great hire for our Padres.
I don’t think Padres ownership has a clue that everyone is laughing at Preller, not with him…..
Not laughing…….
Mostly savvy MLB FO’s have been taking advantage of him since he got the job though.
Not, really. They have a very talented club. He’s been aggressive and made mistakes but his organization has done a pretty solid job at acquiring talent. Are the White Sox still laughing about how they stole Shields for some minor leaguer named Tatis?
#@ tribepride17;
Please……
The guy made one terrific trade in 8 years. The Nationals stole Trea Turner from him. The Rays and Indians have been robbing him blind. There’s more. He gives out ridiculous long-term contracts to players and gets stuck with them as no other team will take them on.
Yes, his team has talent. But talent alone seldom wins. His teams have finished over .500 once in 8 years – and that was in a Covid-shortened season. He’s not in charge of bringing talent onto the roster, he’s in charge of the entire Baseball Ops area. His job is to build and maintain a winner. His record is awful. It appears from recent moves that ownership is stepping in and paring his authority back.
tribepride17
Not, really. They have a very talented club.
=====================================
Not really. At the end of the day, they have a .488 team, with a $206M payroll. Their Py W/L should add a few wins, and Clevinger coming back should add some wins, But they need to climb from 79 wins to about 90 wins to be a WC contender.
For a team that had a $140M a few years back, plus the best farm system I’ve ever seen, this is a disaster.
You might want to double-check that farm system. It has fallen drastically. And there is little organizational depth, especially pitching.
Also, let’s be real on Clevinger. He’ll be coming back from his second TJ. He should be regarded as a question mark unless or until he proves otherwise.
Py W/L this year was 83-79, so you’re really talking about ~7 wins they need to pickup. One thing in their favor is that they’re not losing anyone who is super notable from the position players or starting rotation to free agency.
In my mind it all comes down to what kind of performances they get out of the starting rotation. It was so wildly inconsistent this last year. Weathers in April allowed 1 run over like 17 innings and then in August allowed like 23 runs over the same amount. Darvish’s ERA through the first 15 starts was 2.50, then the next 15 starts were so bad he finished with a 4.22 ERA. Snell was almost unwatchable in May and then had some lights out outings in August.
If they can add some actual depth to that rotation so that they’re not signing guys like Arrieta off the street and then get more consistent performances from the starters they already have, then I think that’s where those ~7+ wins come from.
It wasn’t just inconsistent, there wasn’t any depth at all.
Case in point is Weathers. He should have been in AA last year, and he pitched that way.
The starting pitching problems were evident in Spring Training, but Preller did nothing to address it.
@ Joe Brady – While I agree the Padres have a lot of work left to do, they were hit as hard as team with injuries to key pitchers. Losing Clevinger & Morejon to TJS was a huge blow as was losing Lamet for most of the season along with Pomeranz, who was a Top 5 setup man in MLB prior to his injury. If these players all come back healthy, that’s another 15-18 wins right off the bat.
By signing one of the best pitching developers in MLB, I’m sure they hope he and his staff can unlock Gore’s potential as well. Even if this happens, they still have some work to do on the offensive side of the ball, namely how to purge Hosmer and Myers, but that is up to Preller. While teams like the Giants, Seattle and perhaps even the Red Sox over performed this season, I think everyone can agree that the Padres vastly under performed this year. With a new pitching coach, new (eventual) manager, and a little more luck on the health front, it would surprise very few people to see the Padres put up a 95 win season next year. IMO, the only team that underperformed worse than SD was the Minnesota Twins. Others will say the Mets did as well, but let’s face it, the Mets were overrated from the get go, but even they should improve considerably next year if deGrom & Cookie can stay healthy and they retain Stroman and Thor.
Only way to purge Hosmer and Myers is to cut them and eat the rest of the money they are owed.
1. Who gave them that money?
2. The Padres have no veteran team leaders. They pander to Tatis, and Machado – immature players that undercut anyone that tries to instill discipline onto the team.
3. There is more to building a winning ML team than “acquiring talent”. That talent has to be developed and nurtured. The Padres don’t do that. Who’s been in charge for 8 years? Many other teams – starting with 2 in NYC – have the same problem.
P.S.
Posters here need to stop making fun of Al Avila. He may not be flamboyant and sexy – but he’s built a strong foundation of young players, has some respected veterans on the ML roster acclimating them to playing in MLB, and has a manager that was successful in getting the most out of young players in Houston. There is no comparison to what the Padres have been doing vs. what the Astros did and what the Tigers are doing.
They undercut anyone who tries to instill discipline? Where do you get your sources for this statement.
I’m used to you talking out of your ass consistently, but this one is especially ass worthy…
I’m not buying the “injuries” excuse. A lot of teams had injuries, and they took steps to fill holes and overcome. Preller did nothing, even knowing he had no depth coming out of ST. Even Niebla can’t fix poor roster building and pitching staff management.
@damascus …
By paying attention to local meadia, reading some of the recent stories in The Athletic, and watching Preller publicly undermine his managers (more than once with Green).
MLB is all about developing players at the major league level. Really always has been. But with analytics, player turnover, and technical tools to revamp individual players games, winning FO’s have made it more important than drafting, minor league development, trades and FA signings. Look at the Rays, Giants, Brewers, Dodgers, Braves, Astros, Indians/Guardians, Bloom’s Red Sox…and Pirates are on the way. It’s all about making the players on your roster better.
The Yankees hit paydirt by hiring Matt Blake from the Indians as Pitching Coach for 2021. The only smart move they’ve made in years.
Recently the Cubs hired Carter Hawkins away from the Indians to be their GM.
For decades the Indians were a “farm club to the major leagues”. They’d develop some decent players, then have to trade them away for multiple prospects as their teams sucked…..and if one or two of the acquired prospects panned out they traded him / them 3-4 years later for another grab bag of prospects as the cycle (and the team losing) continued (until the Jacob brothers bought the team and brought in Hank Peters as President). Now it appears that they’re developing FO and coaching help for other major league organizations. A proud tradition.
Heck…..
“In December 2011, the Cleveland Indians hired David Stearns and Derek Falvey as their co-directors of baseball operations, with Stearns focusing on player contracts, data analysis, and strategy, and Falvey working on player acquisitions.”
I’m convinced that you have probably irritated all of your friends (if you have any) and family to the point where no one wants to listen to your bullsh*t anymore so you come here and write 10 pages essays on topics you pretend to understand to people who honestly think that you’re a pretentious d-bag with very little baseball knowledge.
Remember that other pitching staff member from the Indians that went elsewhere and had great success? Some guy named Kevin Cash.
This will be a steal for San Diego, if it happens.
A few thoughts: The new manager won’t have much of a say in assembling a coaching staff unless he’s already been hired.
This is a good baseball man that Preller has landed from Cleveland and a huge assist for Clevinger to regain form.
Possibly Shildt is already on board but the announcement is delayed for business reasons.
Now go and hire Sandy Alomar Jr & you may actually have a crack at turning this thing around while you still have Tatis under contact, AJ. Don’t eff this up!!!
The Indians quietly demoted Alomar after his tryout run in 2020. He’s back to being just a base coach after having been promoted to bench coach to interim manager. They had Demarlo Hale managing when Tito went out this year. I suspect that if they believed in Sandy as a future manager they would have left him as a bench coach after Mills retired instead of hiring Hale. Just doesn’t seem to have the right personality for the job or something.
My understanding is that Alomar chose to return to coaching 1B. He loves that it allows him to head the running game, and he also gets to work with the catchers.
Huge loss is Cleveland allows him to get away. Should find a way to promote him to be Willis’ replacement in waiting.
Padres AJ Preller is making a stupid move by hiring a pitching coach before he has a new Manager in place, It is common practice to let the New Manager pick his coaching staff or to at least have very strong input into the coaching staff that he will be working with.
Preller, again, doing things back asswords
So now it’s a stupid move to bring in a pitching coach from the best organization in baseball at developing pitchers?
Not until you have your manager in place so he has input into the team that will be going to war with him for 162 days.
Again, the Manager usually picks his pitching coach, not the GM or PBO.
It could affect the quality of managerial candidates.
Experienced Managers whether it be in business or sports want to pick their own team, as a general rule.
It’s not stupid or unusual. Rick Honeycutt became Dodgers pitching coach when Grady Little was the manager. Honeycutt remained in that position under Joe Torre, Don Mattingly, and Dave Roberts. That worked out pretty darned well. Lots of pitching coaches outlast the manager. Had the Padres not hired Niebla now, they might have lost out on a guy they really wanted.
It’s no different than any other business. When a company hires a new department head, the new person doesn’t fire the existing staff and bring in their own people. They learn to work with those people already on board. It’s something the best managers are good at doing.
@SportsFan …
What you say is true, but that hasn’t been the case with Preller.
Not the case at all, any Manager should be happy to have Niebla as their PC – he’s the main reason for the CLE pitching and development.
@Sportsfan – From a historical standpoint you are correct but baseball has changed a lot in this analytic driven period. When the opportunity presents itself to land a ‘big fish’, teams have to jump at that opportunity. There’s not one future manager that they could hire who would not be thrilled working with this new pitching coach so Preller absolutely did the correct thing here and it could even help him attract a better manager. Also, at the end of the day, the GM/POBO has final say in all coaching hires. We’ve already seen other teams this year like the Yankees extend their manager but fire multiple other coaches on the team who I assume Boone has some say in originally hiring. Managers have less input these days on coaching staffs than they’ve had in the past. I commend Preller for making this hire and it will have no negative impact on hiring the best manager available.
Get him working with MacKenzie Gore and Ryan Weathers yesterday.
Weathers needs to go to AAA. He should have been in AA last year.
Agree
First problem hiring PC before your HC he should have say in that if not make it his choice this just shows Preller will hire another puppett.Showalter,Bochy,Shildt all will want there own coaches good luck Padre fans they need to fire Preller not the coaches or Mgrs
Which team is run worse the Padres or the Mets?!
The Padres have a lot of catching up to do, but they’re trending in that direction.
Mets have 2 WS and 4 pennants staring 7 years earlier. Padres have 2 pennants and got ambushed in their 2 WS
That’s ancient history. As an organization, they’re diving into a disorganized clusterf— of discontent.
I like Darren Balsely
Yes Virginia there is a Santa Claus!
Rumor has it Niebla was concerned the Mets might contact him for the open GM position, so he wanted to quickly sign to be the Padres pitching coach.
Sandy Alomar is next.
Mets manager??? Why not
Also a racist.
Guy has AIDS.
Its probably full blown super AIDS now.
Sorry but hiring coaches before hiring a manager is just stupid.
And before you talk about how good this guy is, that’s irrelevant. A manager should have say in who his coaches are, and that should not be a debatable point.
Managers should pick their own coaches. They work together a LOT, and need to be on the same page, and share the same philosophies.
Great points!
Look how badly it worked out for the Astros when Dusty Baker was hired to manage and got stuck with a staff he didn’t pick.
By the way, it’s October 27 – why are those Astros still playing baseball?
You’re comparison is ignorant.
Really? How so?
I’d suggest that in today’s MLB it’s organizations that win. Did the Dodgers manager pick all his coaches? The Rays? The Braves? The Brewers? The Giants? The Red Sox? I’m not sure there’s been a manager in the past 10 years that’s had the authority to pick all his coaches.
Social media is full of people with 12 year-old mentalities that can’t make a point so they make a statement about what someone wrote and then call them a name to discredit them.
Tired of it.
P.S. It’s “Your”. Not “You’re”.
You are comparison is ignorant?
@ RemovePitcherWinsFromTheRecordBooks;
Pot. Kettle.
L O L
Mea Culpa on the you’re & your thing. I didn’t proof and I should know better.
As for the rest, I called your comparison ignorant because it is. The two situations don’t compare. Dusty Baker was coming into a special situation where the a highly successful team had to dismiss a manager in a vacuum. That was a team that was highly motivated to keep their coaching staff intact and I’d imagine Dusty in particular wanted coaches who knew the team since he was the one new guy.
The situation in San Diego is very different. You’re talking about a problematic team and a problematic franchise in a situation where they’re bringing in both a new manager and a new coach. In such a situation the manager should have a vote. To deny him that vote is disrespectful and degrading. It indicates that the organization doesn’t place value in their manager as a figure of organizational authority.
And no, I’m sure no manager today has absolute authority to hire and fire coaches, but I’m equally sure that most managers–at least managers in successful franchises–are consulted when coaches are hired and fired.
And of course it’s organizations that do the winning. That’s always been true. But the manager is, or should be, part of the organization. The manager should be respected by the leaders of the organization as a figure of authority within the organization, not treated as a disposable diaper which is what the Padres are clearly doing and apparently have been doing for some time. The devaluation of managers is one of this sport’s core problems and the Padres are the poster child for it.
Finally, I’m not required to care what *you’re* tired of.
A legend in your own mind.
Tell me the teams that have hired a manager in the past 5-10 years that allowed their new manager to select all his own coaches.
You have no clue how complicated MLB coaching has become, and how teams try to keep the portions of their coaching staffs that are working well intact.
If a potential manager doesn’t like the coaches he’s told will remain, he can refuse the offer of a job.
You need to learn how to read.
I didn’t say anything about the new manager unilaterally selecting all his coaches.
I certainly didn’t say anything about any of the coaches San Diego has chosen to retain.
I said that because the team is hiring both a new manager and a new pitching coach at the same time the manager should be in place first and should be part of the process for selecting the new coach.
That’s it.
And yes, I do understand how complex MLB coaching has become and I do understand that managers are no longer shape organizational philosophy the way the once did… and I’m saying that’s a bad thing. I’m saying it’s fundamentally wrong and one of the several core reason why fan interest in this sport is rapidly falling.
So he has never been given an opportunity above ASSISTANT pitching coach….. and suddenly people think Preller discovered some hidden gem again? I remember when padres fans thought that when he “discovered” Chris paddack
Oh is that how we’re doing things now? Rothschild had worked as a PC before they hired him. Would you have preferred they stick with him?
It’s typical nitwit Padre fandom they hey all excited about pitching coach then want him fired midway through season
Yes. We have a weird fanbase. Mostly due to a complete inability to see anything objectively, including a belief that all prospects and rookies are supposed to be “elite” from the time they debut, and calling them busts if they aren’t. And then there’s the completely unfounded Preller love among many …
Padres best hire him before he’s offered the President position by the mets.
Weird timing, making this hire before a manager, but anytime you can get a pitching coach from Cleveland or Tampa Bay, you jump at that chance.
I agree with the general premise that you should let the manager chose the coaching staff. But Niebla isn’t a run of the mill hire, he’s universally thought of as one of the top pitching minds in baseball. He can give padres a significant boost. I do hope whoever they hire have significant say over the rest of the coaching staff however
Please, tell me which team has a manager that picked his coaching staff? I’ll wait here…