Loading ...JD says we’re screwed:
So there you have it. If Chambliss is telling the truth, and I really can’t imagine him lying here, the front office is blaming the hitting coach and the players for not making good adjustments in the second half.
The offense sucking in the second half had nothing to do with Wayne Krivsky trading 25% of the starting lineup (for some magic beans), or Royce Clayton playing all the time, or Ken Griffey Jr. hurting his big toe. No, it was apparently all about not making good adjustments.
You have to honestly wonder if it’s crossed Krivsky or Narron’s mind at all that Adam Dunn might not have gone into a tailspin if guys like Kearns and Lopez were still in the lineup. What was the incentive to pitch to Dunn in September? There was no Ken Griffey Jr. Other players were slumping. Kearns and Lopez were long gone. If I’m an opposing coach I sure as hell wouldn’t be giving Dunn anything to hit.
And remember what I said about communication? Here we’ve got a hitting coach getting fired for problems that weren’t relayed to him at the time they were occurring.
This is not at all a promising development. I’ve got a bad feeling about all this, and all I can hope is that I’m not giving Krivsky enough credit.
I agree, not a promising development.
Look, Chambliss may have been a terrible hitting coach for all I know. I don’t see what he does with the players from day to day. But if they’re trying to make him the scapegoat for the disastrous performance of the team post-TRADE, well, Krivsky and company need to look a little harder.
Chambliss should have been the last coach considered for firing. Do they have a replacement in mind?
Tunnell did get fired as well, correct?
What was the incentive to pitch to Dunn in September?
Is that what happened? They pitched around him, or he was an easy out? My anecdotal evidence was the it was moreso the latter.
Dunn did suck, for the last two entire months – anecdotally and statistically. But the balance of a lineup can affect the performances of players in it. Dunn did very well in July immediately following The Trade. But it’s quite possible that opposing pitchers soon realized that he was not protected well in that lineup, and stopped giving him much to hit. It is possible, though it doesn’t seem Dunn-like, that he then started pressing and swinging at bad pitches more – hastening his slump.
Make excuses for Dunn all you want, but the fact remains that he is not the first hitter to have that issue. Albert Pujols this season mashed despite sitting in the middle of a weak lineup, as did Barry Bonds in a season where he was flanked by Marquis Grissom and Pedro Feliz. If Dunn is as otherworldly a hitter as his supporters would like us to believe, this “weak lineup” argument would be unnecessary.
this team’s offense was streaky and problematic before the trade too. i think it’s reasonable to want a better hitting coach when you have a good offense that isn’t producing. It wasn’t just Dunn remember. EdE slumped, phillips slumped, hatty slumped. And there was the month before the trade that the whole team sucked too.
I don’t think they should make him the scapegoat chambliss, clearly the trade was bad, the revolving door pen was bad, clayton was really really bad.
but chambliss was probably also bad and i’m glad they’re addressing a problem. If they cut clayton would people be saying “don’t scapegoat him, it was the trade that ruined the season!” I doubt it.
Maybe we’ll get something from bowden for the trade and we can all put that behind us.
You can call the pre-trade offense streaky and problematic if you want, but it was on pace to score 815 runs. That would’ve been 5th in the NL (50 behind the Phillies).
In reality, they scored 749, 10th place and 116 off the lead. Their post-trade scoring would’ve ranked last in the league.
You could posit – as Narron and Krivsky have – that Chambliss mysteriously forgot how to coach hitters on July 13.
Or, you could think that the most obvious hypothesis is probably the truth, and that an offensive slide occurring after the trade of two above-average hitters had something to do with the absence of those hitters.
I think Dunn just misses his Lil’ Buddy….
hmmm chris, i was sure that i said the trade was bad, how could i have forgotten to do that.
oh wait, i did say that the trade was bad, didn’t i? what i forgot is that you don’t read people’s posts before responding. that, and you like to be condescending when you do it, which is a lovely combination if i do say so myself.
to help you out i’ve compiled the reds runs by month with their MLB rank:
april 149, 2nd
may 114, 27th
june 140, 8th
july 118, 26th
august 137, 11th
september 91, 30th
so you tell me chris, when in there did the reds completely collapse on offense like they’d never before in that season? the day after the trade? don’t think so.
If it was all the trade, why does august look a lot like june, before the trade? and why was may the second worst month overall if that was before the trade?
if they could have put up august numbers in september we’d probably still be watching them right now, and that’s all that narron has said about chambliss: that over the last weeks of the season it was his responsibility to get them to adjust, and he didn’t.
seems reasonable to me. sure THE TRADE WAS BAD, but if they could score 137 runs in august it wasn’t completly to blame for scoring 91 in sept.
so what was? I’d like them to address all the problems, wouldn’t you? or would you rather just be right all the time? if so, we can just declare you right for all time and then get down to talking baseball.
Ignoring the nonsense, your points about month-to-month scoring are interesting — where did you find that data? I\’ve never seen that before.
if they could have put up august numbers in september we’d probably still be watching them right now, and that’s all that narron has said about chambliss: that over the last weeks of the season it was his responsibility to get them to adjust, and he didn’t.
Wait, I just caught this: Are you saying that Chambliss was fired for one bad month (the month where Griffey had 14 ABs, btw)?
And that the team needed to make certain adjustments in the last few weeks of the season? Like what – the pitchers were pitching them differently in September, compared to the past three years? (Don’t get bent out of shape – I’m seriously asking).
month to month scoring was from espn team statistics using the drop down splits they have.
the adjustments comment that was from narron. i assumed he meant that over the course of the season the reds offense was streaky because when they got in a slump they couldn’t make the adjustments needed to get out of them very fast and would go on a tail spin.
part of being a hitting coach is helping hitters find the things that are going wrong at the plate so the hitters can fix them quickly, rather than going from 2nd to 27th in runs over a month.
when the reds slumped terribly over the last 6 weeks, chambliss couldn’t get them out of it and it cost them the postseason. I don’t think he got fired just for the last 6 weeks, it was probably something they wanted fixed all year, but when they missed the postseason because they had the worst offense in baseball, someone was going to get it.
grady little got his team to game 7 of the ALCS and lost his job because he left Pedro in too long. When the stakes get that high, it doesn’t take much.