Roch: Hitting Coach Terry Crowley is coming back

[Sports Guy]

We spent half the season without Brian Roberts, had a broken down Miggy at 3B, the Atkins/Hughes/Wigginton(after his one month surge) turd sandwich at 1B, and Corey Patterson and depressed Nolan Reimold in LF for half the season. And don't forget Cesar Izturis batting 9th on a regular basis.

Let's not act like we were talented offensively this season. Did we underachieve a bit? Yes. But I don't put all of that on Crowley.

No one does...But at some point, the results on the field must matter...And the idea of a new voice and a new approach is a good thing.

[Sports Guy]

I think your conclusions are based on bad data. You're using team statistics as a proxy for performance of the hitting coach, and we all know the connection there is tenuous at best.

For all we know the O's talent was dead last in the league for most of the past 11 seasons, and Crowley pushed them up 2-3 slots, which is more than I could hope for. We know the O's have had poor talent for a decade. That's beyond question in my mind. If you think the hitting coach should be able to produce consistently good results from consistently poor talent then you're ascribing a value to that position that's far beyond the best players in the game. You're suggesting that the hitting coach is worth tens of millions of dollars a year, if not more. If you think Crowley should take a 650 run team and turn it into a 750 run team then he's the AL MVP almost every year.

In any case, your conclusion that results don't matter hold no water at all. The Orioles have changed out almost everyone in the entire organization except Terry Crowley over the last 11 years. If results didn't matter why aren't Beattie, Flanagan, Thrift (or his ghost), Perlozzo, Mazilli, Wren, Duquette, Mazzone, Miller, et al still employed? Why has the roster turned over four or five times over? Why have they gone through multiple minor league instructors, scouting directors, first/third base coaches, bench coaches?

The simple answer is that all those folks were thought to be part of the problem. But Crowely never was.

Good to know results don't matter for you. I guess you never feel a coach or manager, in any sport, should be fired, correct?

BTW, what you are saying I am suggesting is Jtrea like logic.

As I said, I don't care if Crow is good at mechanics...I don't care if he is well liked by the players.

I find it odd that the guy that believes everything that doesn't have a stat behind it is meaningless doesn't think the results here matter..both individual and team.

[Sports Guy]

This post wins.

The poor post award? The jumping to conclusions award? The putting words into my mouth award?

[Moose Milligan]

Good to know results don't matter for you. I guess you never feel a coach or manager, in any sport, should be fired, correct?

BTW, what you are saying I am suggesting is Jtrea like logic.

As I said, I don't care if Crow is good at mechanics...I don't care if he is well liked by the players.

Sorry SG, but this is an awful argument on your part here. While Trea is the master of ducking posts, you're the master of selecting/picking parts of posts and ignoring other valid points.

Drungo has correctly explained just how pathetic the O's talent has been over the past decade and what Crowley has been able to do with it. Of course we suck at getting on base...we have hitters who, at their core, traditionally have sucked at getting on base. Crowley can't fix that. Crowley can't, as Drungo explained, take 650 run talent and somehow make it produce 750 runs.

[DrungoHazewood]

His job to make the players he has better. That is the job of any coach. Put their players in a position to succeed and improve on their weaknesses.

He has failed in doing that.

How do you know that? What coach-specific (in other words, team-independent) data can you point to that suggests his teams should have hit better without him?

Good point. I would like to know from a Crow supporter: What objective criteria do you use to evaluate a hitting coach? And are there any objective criteria you would ever use to get rid of Terry Crowley?

The only way I can see doing that would be to run a multi-year query using preseason projections (say, historical Marcel, or PECOTA, or similar) and comparing that to real results. That would still be really noisy, but might provide some good data, especially with Crowley's long track record. That would be a good research project for someone, if they could find the historical projections. I know BP has that for PECOTA because they're using it to tweak the projection engine. I don't think it's publicly available though, at least not yet.

[El Gordo]

He has helped some players. Whether he's helped enough is the question.

Back to the topic of whether Peter Angelos is protecting Terry Crowley. That seems very unlikely to me. Why would Angelos do this? It's not as if Crowley is some iconic figure in Orioles history. You can't even say he was a fan favorite. He was a minor cog in the wheel for the Orioles. I just can't think of a good reason why a team owner would meddle in the hiring of firing of a hitting coach. So, I put very little credence in this, until there's some actual evidence.

Now, I do think MacPhail has a very high opinion of Crowley, because he's said so. So it woudn't surprise me if MacPhail has expressed the opinion that Crowley should be kept. But at the end of the day, I doubt MacPhaill would stand in the way if Buck wanted someone else in that job.

I doubt the decision was as black and white as some want to make it out. Buck may have had other preferences that weren't available, like Jaramillo e.g.

He may have felt that Crowley was the best choice of his remaining options. He also is aware that Crowley is popular with the players and with AM. So in leau of some major upgrade Crowley is fine with him. He like Drungo realizes that the results others keep referring to, aren't the ones that matter.

[Dipper9]

Good to know results don't matter for you. I guess you never feel a coach or manager, in any sport, should be fired, correct?

BTW, what you are saying I am suggesting is Jtrea like logic.

As I said, I don't care if Crow is good at mechanics...I don't care if he is well liked by the players.

I find it odd that the guy that believes everything that doesn't have a stat behind it is meaningless doesn't think the results here matter..both individual and team.

I understand your logic crystal clear, and I agree that at some point 10+ years of poor results should be acknowledged and a new coach should be tried.

However, please don't take this the wrong way, but open your mind a bit and look at what you're saying. The owner and GM like Crow. Apparantly Buck likes Crow. And most importantly, the PLAYERS like Crow. And yet you make the statement repeatedly that none of that matters to you. Don't you think YOUNG players who are fighting for their careers at this point would want the best coach available to help them get out of their slumps or problems at the plate? And yet they speak well of Crowley and think he is a good batting coach. This HAS to mean something to Buck, and even if YOU don't care about their opinions, obviously the opinions of the players is important to Buck when he chose to keep Crow around.

[Frobby]

Good to know results don't matter for you. I guess you never feel a coach or manager, in any sport, should be fired, correct?

BTW, what you are saying I am suggesting is Jtrea like logic.

As I said, I don't care if Crow is good at mechanics...I don't care if he is well liked by the players.

I find it odd that the guy that believes everything that doesn't have a stat behind it is meaningless doesn't think the results here matter..both individual and team.

Look, SG, I am not a Crowley supporter, but this logic makes no sense. If the front office sees fit to go sign Cesar Izturis at the SS, is that Crowley's fault?

I suspect that if I had 48 hours to do nothing else, I could come up with a detailed analysis of players who either came through our system and then went elsewhere, or players who were somewhere else and then came here, and come up with some correlation to how they were coached. But short of doing something like that, I don't think it's a simple as saying "the Orioles offense has been consistently bad while Crowley has been the coach, and therefore Crowley must be a bad coach." If the talent has been bad, Crowley can't control that.

I'm not saying this to support Crowley. Frankly, I've been ready to see a change for at least 3-4 years, just to see if it helps. But it is not as simple as bad results = bad coach.

[DrungoHazewood]

Good to know results don't matter for you. I guess you never feel a coach or manager, in any sport, should be fired, correct?

BTW, what you are saying I am suggesting is Jtrea like logic.

As I said, I don't care if Crow is good at mechanics...I don't care if he is well liked by the players.

I find it odd that the guy that believes everything that doesn't have a stat behind it is meaningless doesn't think the results here matter..both individual and team.

I think results are all that matter, and when hard data says someone isn't doing their job they need to be fired.

But nobody has shown me a single shred of objective evidence that Terry Crowley isn't a good hitting coach.

[Sports Guy]

You put words in his mouth and then accuse him of doing it to you. Classic SportsGuy!

I asked him a question...He assumed that I am saying a new hitting coach means 100 more runs.

[DrungoHazewood]

I understand your logic crystal clear, and I agree that at some point 10+ years of poor results should be acknowledged and a new coach should be tried.

However, please don't take this the wrong way, but open your mind a bit and look at what you're saying. The owner and GM like Crow. Apparantly Buck likes Crow. And most importantly, the PLAYERS like Crow. And yet you make the statement repeatedly that none of that matters to you. Don't you think YOUNG players who are fighting for their careers at this point would want the best coach available to help them get out of their slumps or problems at the plate? And yet they speak well of Crowley and think he is a good batting coach. This HAS to mean something to Buck, and even if YOU don't care about their opinions, obviously the opinions of the players is important to Buck when he chose to keep Crow around.

One point that I think is hard to refute: The Orioles have turned over players constantly, as bad teams are apt to do. Most of the roster over the past 11 seasons has played for many hitting coaches at the major league, minor league, and amateur levels. The managers have worked with tons of hitting coaches. And all of these players and managers and coaches who've personally worked with and watched dozens, if not hundreds, of hitting coaches respect Terry Crowley and the job he does.

[Sports Guy]

Sorry SG, but this is an awful argument on your part here. While Trea is the master of ducking posts, you're the master of selecting/picking parts of posts and ignoring other valid points.

Drungo has correctly explained just how pathetic the O's talent has been over the past decade and what Crowley has been able to do with it. Of course we suck at getting on base...we have hitters who, at their core, traditionally have sucked at getting on base. Crowley can't fix that. Crowley can't, as Drungo explained, take 650 run talent and somehow make it produce 750 runs.

Can you point to any post, made by myself or someone else, that has said Crow has had a ton of talent to work with?

Drungo pointing that out is pretty meaningless when EVERYONE acknowledges the same thing. That's not exactly some kind of brilliant revelation.

[DrungoHazewood]

I'm not saying this to support Crowley. Frankly, I've been ready to see a change for at least 3-4 years, just to see if it helps. But it is not as simple as bad results = bad coach.

Lest anyone thinks I'm a die hard Crowley supporter, this is more-or-less my position, too. I would have no problem with a new coach, even if just on the principal that a new person can often see things the old one missed.

I'm just fundamentally against jumping to conclusions based on bad information. And the idea that Crowley has coached bad teams makes him bad, is poor logic. It's a shoddy argument, one that just might be made to look silly when better data is available. It's certainly possible that a historical projection vs real results project could show Crowley's results to be excellent. Or terrible. You just don't know until the data is run.

[square634]

Look, SG, I am not a Crowley supporter, but this logic makes no sense. If the front office sees fit to go sign Cesar Izturis at the SS, is that Crowley's fault?

I suspect that if I had 48 hours to do nothing else, I could come up with a detailed analysis of players who either came through our system and then went elsewhere, or players who were somewhere else and then came here, and come up with some correlation to how they were coached. But short of doing something like that, I don't think it's a simple as saying "the Orioles offense has been consistently bad while Crowley has been the coach, and therefore Crowley must be a bad coach." If the talent has been bad, Crowley can't control that.

I'm not saying this to support Crowley. Frankly, I've been ready to see a change for at least 3-4 years, just to see if it helps. But it is not as simple as bad results = bad coach.

In my senior year of high school (so 2007) I did an admittedly very limited statistical study on Orioles free agents for my AP Statistics class. I think I posted the results somewhere here, but the actual data appear to be lost to board cleaning and dead computers. Anyway, I looked at free agents signed by the Orioles from 1998-2006 (so almost all Crowley years) who had a certain threshold of innings pitched or at-bats and did a matched-pair analysis on ERA and OPS in the year prior to being signed vs. the first year with the Orioles. FWIW, hitters had no statistically significant difference in OPS, whereas pitchers had a statistically significantly higher ERA (IIRC, it was something on the order of a 0.5 increase on average). My conclusion was that the O's basically knew what they were getting from hitters they signed, but not so much for pitchers. Of course, looking at only two years and ignoring age, park, league, etc. effects made the study very limited. And obviously, free agents are usually established veterans as opposed to young developing players coming up through the system.

[Frobby]

Maybe what we need to do is design a statistical test to measure how Crowley has done. Here is a possibility:

Take every player who either joined the Orioles from another team or left the Orioles for another team from 2006-10. Compare their actual performance in the year the joined/left the Orioles to their PECOTA for that year. Then do a cumulative analysis for all those players and see if there is a statisitically significant trend.

My guess is, if you did this, you'd find a trend that wasn't strong enough to prove anything one way or the other. You'd also have the issue of needing to make adjustments for league and run environment.