@alysonfooter: The Astros have dismissed Sean Berry as hitting coach. Jeff Bagwell will take over as the new hitting coach.
@alysonfooter: Bagwell will not be in uniform Sunday. The team will have workout Thurs in PIT and the season resumes Fri. That will be Bagwell's 1st game. @alysonfooter: Bagwell will address media after game.
should he really be teaching hitting form to players? he had one of the ugliest stances i've ever seen
doesn't mean he's a poor judge of form. he knew his stance was bad...doesn't mean he taught it to others. You think Jeff Van Gundy was teaching people to play defense the way he did when he was younger, or the way they could potentially play given their skill set?
hitting coaches are overrated. our players just suck. can't wait to see Drayton's face when the batting is still horrible and he wants to fire an Astros icon.
It's about time. I know that it's baseball and you're not supposed to overreact to on field performance and lay too much blame on the managers let alone hitting and pitching coaches, but almost every single hitter on the team is noticeably worse than they were last year. I don't know how much of that was Berry's fault, but when all your normally reliable players regress at the same time, you got to go. I don't know how good Bagwell will do. His stance and swing were unorthodox. But he knew how to find what worked and stuck with it.
I know everybody in the media loved Sean Berry but this move had to be made. It's all about results and the hitting has been terrible. Pretty much everybody in the lineup has regressed from last year. I know this team sucks and it’s ultimately on the players but Berry was the hitting coach and the hitting was bad.
As Alyson Footer put it, Bagwell is the HITTING coach, not the BATTING STANCE coach. There is a difference and the latter probably doesn't exist.
Every hitter has a unique stance. If hitting coaches made every hitter they coached use the hitting coach's stance, every hitter would have the same stance. Hitting coaches do not chance stances, they change things like toe taps (or not -- see Josh Hamilton) and the general approach to each at-bat. Not stances. Logic helps when arguing, FYI.
Well, we now have a permanent hitting coach for the next 10 years. No matter how good or bad Bagwell is at this or how good/bad the team hitting is, you'd think he's not getting fired.
I'd say hand path, weight shift, and lower-body rotation has a much larger influence on your swing. Like, maybe 90%. Timing mechanisms related to leg-kick and batting stance have a much smaller influence, IMO. This disparity definitely seems to get larger the higher up you go. I'm not sure how much a hitting coach can really affect a team's fortune at the major league level, especially at midseason. I doubt Sean Berry's at fault for Houston's struggles, it's not his fault the front office put together a lousy team. I could have told you at the start of the season that this unit was going to struggle to score runs.
