Meoli: Creating Jungle Tigers

[weams]

7 PM hitters.

https://www.baltimoresun.com/sports/orioles/bs-sp-orioles-minors-hitting-20200306-jyfxpefwtza25ekb3ujimuajyq-story.html

Quote

The game represented something larger for the organization as a whole. The fresh minor league hitting coaches hired this offseason by new farm director Matt Blood have carte blanche to tap their diverse backgrounds and create a collaborative, challenging environment to build major league caliber hitters.

“It’s a blank canvas here, and everybody is pulling in the same direction,” said Ryan Fuller, who was hired from a central Connecticut high school to be the hitting coach at Low-A Delmarva. “Everybody wants to be challenged more, more random practice, and just creating an environment that gets the best out of the players versus being a really good 5 o’clock player. Can we create those 7 o’clock guys? Jungle tigers, we call them. They want to be challenged, and they’re going to go out there and earn everything they can get.”

 

Their work so far has been with a few dozen position players at an early camp, with the rest of the team’s minor leaguers due in Sarasota on Sunday. They’ll find a group of hitting coaches delivering exactly what Blood sought when he took this job in September.

 

[weams]

Quote

With extra coaches at each level and turnover from the 2019 minor league staffs, the hitting coaches aren’t the only difference on the farm. But they’re a significant one.

Fuller, who played at UConn, taught English and coached high school while working at a hitting facility before joining the Orioles. Short-A Aberdeen hitting coach Anthony Villa was a player-coach in the Texas Rangers organization in 2019, and GCL Orioles hitting coach Patrick Jones played at Xavier before coaching high school and teaching hitting in Ohio.

Those three have been at camp for several weeks, with High-A Frederick hitting coach Tom Eller — hired in 2019 from Harford Community College to bring a modern bent to Short-A Aberdeen — recently joining.

At Double-A Bowie, Tim Gibbons was hired from Be Elite Sports Training academy in Chicago, though he and Triple-A Norfolk hitting coach Sean Berry have both been at major league camp mostly.

 

[PHRESH]

 

[baltfan]

This is great.  I. Just hope that other teams haven’t already moved on to the next thing.  We likely aren’t behind like we once were, but you can bet teams that have been doing this for a few years are doing more different stuff now and have realized what doesn’t work as well as they thought it would.