In a social media discussion with Chuck Douglas, former Wizards executive, he brought to my attention that the Nationals might be building a mega coaching staff, similar to the New York Yankees. Last year, the Yankees had 12 MLB coaches in uniform. If all of the leaked reports hold, the Nats will have their largest coaching staff in their history.
After our social media post that the Nats finally found their hitting coach (not official) with Matt Borgschulte, Douglas believes that the staff is already set-up for 12 MLB coaches in uniform:
- Manager: Blake Butera
- Bench Coach: Michael Johns
- Hitting Coach: Matt Borgschulte
- Assistant Hitting Coach: Andrew Aydt
- Pitching Coach: Simon Mathews
- Assistant Pitching Coach: TBD
- First Base Coach: TBD
- Third Base Coach: TBD
- Bullpen Coach: TBD
- Major League Field Coordinator: Tyler Smarslok
- Director of Catching: Bobby Wilson
- Bullpen Catcher: TBD
If the Nats have two assistant hitting coaches like the Yankees, then the Nats would have a baker’s dozen of 13 coaches. My question is whether Smarslok and Wilson would be on the MLB or MiLB side. For the Yankees, they had an MLB field coordinator combined with their director of catching into one position. The MLB field coordinator on some teams is called the quality control coordinator.
One constant with every coach is that they embrace analytics. While age doesn’t matter to Paul Toboni, these new hires are made-up of all 30-somethings except for Johns, Wilson, and Andrew Wright (front office) as the Los Viejos on the staff.
A few of these coaches became available when their teams changed managers. You don’t always get your first choice on personnel as front office and coaching personnel might not be granted the ability to interview for jobs. Also, a source told us that Toboni was pursuing an ex-manager for the hitting coach position, and that did not come to fruition. That happens, and this might be why the process is taking so long.
Another trend with coaches, and not surprisingly, they have hired coaches with baseball “lab” experience as we knew with Simon Mathews who worked for Driveline Baseball. The same for Andrew Aydt who was the assistant director of hitting for Driveline. The book on Aydt is that he worked with MLB hitters on refining their bat angles, improving their bat speed and gaining bat speed and exit velo? Sound familiar? Yes, Jacob Young was just at Driveline’s Tampa facility to work with hitting coordinator Travis Fitta. Driveline also focuses on advanced biomechanics to go with everything else.
We have heard for well nearly two weeks that Wilson was hired, and over the weekend for Aydt. But neither coach has been officially announced, and the same for Borgschulte after we broke that news on Monday. We also heard directly from manager Blake Butera that former Nats’ assistant pitching coach Sean Doolittle would return to the team, although his position had not been finalized. Another former coach, assistant hitting coach, Chris Johnson, was rumored to be coming back to the staff in a position to be determined.
Officially, the Nats only list Butera, Johns, and Simon Mathews on their coaching roster. Have they hit some more snags? What is going on? Remember, Toboni and his staff also need to build-out a minor league coaching staff as few coaches were retained. Besides Matt LeCroy, Brian Daubach, and Delino DeShields, there aren’t any other names we have heard. And again, we don’t even know their positions in the organization.
Clearly, this is an ongoing process that could take days, weeks, or months more to finalize. In the meantime, Spring Training camp opens in just over 100-days, but players start arriving at the team’s Cacti Park of the Palm Beaches facility in larger numbers on February 1st.
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