The Futility Infielder

At the Prospectus/Bible Pizza Feed the other night, a bunch of us were kicking around the managerial prospects of Yankee coaches Willie Randolph and Don Mattingly, two names often mentioned as potential successors to Joe Torre. Like everyone else in Yankeeland, these two will surely receive a lot of scrutiny in the coming season. Randolph was promoted from third base coach to bench coach upon the resignation of Don Zimmer, while Mattingly was added as the hitting coach to replace the fired Rick Down.

Neither man has any managerial experience either in the majors or the minors, a gap which has presumably worked against Randolph, who has interviewed for several big-league openings and even been offered (and declined) the Cincinnati Reds job that Bob Boone eventually took. Our consensus was that had he ever gone to the minor leagues to manage, he'ld have been hired for one of those other jobs by now (I mentioned yesterday that Alex Belth extrapolated on this further).

Another former Yankee coach who had done just that, Chris Chambliss, was held up as a counterexample. In addition to serving as a major-league hitting coach for over a decade for the Cardinals, Yanks (1996-2000) and Mets, Chambliss has managed in the minors for five seasons, from 1989-1992 and again in 2001. Like Randolph, he's been on his share of unsuccessful interviews for big league managing jobs, and in his case, his past experience hasn't elevated his candidacy.

We wondered aloud as to Chambliss' wherebouts, and as if on cue, the Management by Baseball blog called attention to a Cincinnati Enquirer piece about his new role as the Reds hitting coach. It seems Chambliss has been making waves in Sarasota (where the Reds train) for reviving the classic baseball drill of Pepper as a means of increasing hand-eye coordination. Writes Paul Daugherty in the Enquirer:

I've seen Pepper a few times, in grainy newsreels where Babe Ruth is mincing his way around the bases about 100 miles an hour and every player's hat looks like it comes with a propeller. Three guys in baggy flannels, fielding slaps from a fourth guy a few feet away, choking up on a fungo bat. Pepper was popular when Bonnie and Clyde were robbing the building and loan.

...Pepper is so out of fashion, most ballparks don't even bother with the NO PEPPER signs that once adorned backstop walls. It's just assumed nobody will play.

Reds batting coach Chris Chambliss brought it back this year. Pepper teaches bat control and enhances reaction skills. This is what the players say. At least some of them.

I have only the vaguest memories of playing Pepper myself in Little League or baseball camp, and from the omnipresence of those "No Pepper" signs in ballparks, it really has been de-emphasized for quite awhile. Like Daugherty, the first thing that pops into my mind is archival footage of old-timers fooling around; in my case it's the "Gashouse Gang," the St. Louis Cardinals of Leo Durocher and Pepper Martin stylishly doing so in the fantastic When It Was a Game DVD series.

Regarding the archaic drill, MBB blogger Jeff Angus elaborates:

The concept is the hitter is making contact with balls coming from a myriad of angles and spins, and using the wrists and arms to react quickly. The fielders and trying to snare balls hit at them from very close range and that requires not only quick hands and weight/balance changes, but hones the ability to predict the direction a ball will take. That's the way it's supposed to work.

Over the last twenty years, and especially since the ball was juiced for the 1994 season, the incremental value of fielding has inched down, and as the frequency of power hitting has gone up, the incremental value of putting a ball in play without a lot of mustard (that is, a ball you focus on hitting squarely at a specific angle rather than swinging through with power) has gone down too.

Whether this will actually help the Reds remains to be seen; their lousy defense (26th in Defensive Efficiency) and situational hitting (25th in OPS with runners in scoring position at .727) certainly left something to be desired. It's the definition of springtime optimism to suggest that this could make a huge difference in the Reds' fortunes, but should they show improvement which can be remotely traced to the drill, this might be a nice feather in Chambliss' cap the next time he interviews.