Wednesday, June 23, 2010
Mike Flanagan
I got into a good exchange with @CamdenDepot today regarding the potential re-re-hiring of Mike Flanagan as pitching coach. He contends that the "current pitching development system the O's run is still the model Flanny put in place." Since Flanagan was previously the pitching coach in 1995 and 1998, I naturally wondered if that covered the entire time between now and then, or if this was a relatively recent plan put in place during Flanagan's tenure as an executive (which began in 2003). Since pitching busts like Matt Riley, Mike Paradis, Richard Stahl, Beau Hale and Chris Smith all hail from the intermediate time, I think it's important to ask just when the development program took effect. I think Crawdaddy is arguing that most of the plan went into effect in recent years (and not in the late 90s), but since this is difficult to discuss over Twitter and it seems like an important part of the organization's direction, I wanted to open up a thread for discussion. If you've got anything to add, please do!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Basically, he is thought around baseball as someone with a good perspective of pitching. When he took over the Orioles, his actions mainly came in the form of trying to unify the developmental system and put his mark on the pitching side of things. I'd say things started getting in order around him in about 2004/2005. As with any minor league system, it takes about 8 years to develop a strong system. That movement has been seen on the pitching side of things as we have several arms in the system and some choke points. That same movement has not been seen with respect to hitting.
That makes perfect sense, and I think the 2004/2005 time frame makes is spot on. The difference in the way guys like Matusz, Tillman, and Arrieta have been handled is like night and day from the way the org treated Penn, Loewen and others. That's why I was confused; it seemed to me that there had been a noticeable shift in recent years and yet you were saying the org "still" used the Flanagan Plan.
Post a Comment