More about Gregg Ritchie

I've been beating this hitting coach thing to death lately (first post here and second post here), but I came up with more thoughts tonight.

Dejan Kovacevic details some things in this column that got me thinking.

Kovacevic points out that Ritchie got his job by being promoted from the minor league levels. That's fine. I can understand Neil Huntington and company wanting to reward their employees in promoting them if they feel it's a good move for the team, but to not even interview anybody else is suspicious. I'm not so much talking about that here though.

Minor league hitting coach and major league hitting coach are not the same job. The Pirates have a lot of young players at the major league level, so the job isn't as immensely different here as other places, but it's still a different job.

Minor leaguers need developing. They need to be taught things. Major leaguers often don't. They need more tweaks and confidence. Results are expected at the big league level and when you don't get them, you start to fight a serious mental battle. There's a huge responsibility on the big league hitting coach to keep the guys mentally capable of performing, Ritchie told me that himself. I'm not saying Ritchie isn't qualified to be in the major leagues, but I am saying that it doesn't make a lot of sense to move your coaches up through the system like they're players. They are different jobs, and different people are better suited for each type of job.

Maybe Ritchie is the right man for the job, maybe not. I have said before that I don't think the hitting coach has much bearing at all on results, but at this point you have to wonder if what he's doing is beneficial or not. He was promoted to a different kind of job, and it's possible that it's not where he is best suited to work.