MyDaughterLovesTomGordon said:
Good for Pete Abe. Anonymous comments like that are bullshit. If you're going to call a young player uncoachable and stubborn, put your name to it. That kind of thing can stick to a player for a long time.
Mostly good for him. I think he let his pique get away from him there, at the end, in calling for the Sox to trade Bradley. He surely knows, first, that two voices do not make an "organization," and second, that they could belong to anyone, theoretically including a clubbie. In fact that's his point about anonymity. He shouldn't then use anonymous sources to be the basis of an insistence that they trade JBJ.
This thread is a little disappointing in what a lot of folks don't seem to grasp, and I say that, or hope I am taken as saying it, without meaning any conceited puffed-uppedness. I can't be the only person around here with experience with professional coaches and coaching, though. Most of them, if not all of them, want to fix you. A lot of them want to be the "guy" that impacts you, especially in the minors, when some guys are trying to make their reputations. So the kind of "coaching" we are talking about is not Nicky Cafardo's idea of coaching. In fact, the one thing I would say that many pro coaches don't do enough of, and need to be much better at, is learning when
not to say anything.
And this is all JBJ means when he says he's got to be back to trusting what got him as far as he's come. (That's the very advice Pedroia gave him, in fact, partly because Pedey himself knows, and I don't see a lot of folks knocking Pedey.) JBJ didn't perform at those levels all the way through AAA, especially his on-base skills, to suddenly suck in the wallow of 2014. It's not a problem of coachability. It is fundamentally a problem, as some people upthread have pointed out, of too much information -- of confusion. If anything he's tried to please too many people, and tried to listen too much.
Here is the difference as you climb the ladder. You face guys with explosive stuff all through the minors, maybe most of all, and ironically, in A ball. But what separates guys as they pitch their way up is command -- the higher they go, the more able are they to hit spots. And by the time you see the big leagues, these are starters who can throw three pitches, and some more than that, for good strikes. [I did not say strikes: I said
good strikes.] So you might have seen dudes in A ball who could smoke it or spin it. But you can sit in ambush on those guys for the ones they manage to put over the plate. In AA you might see guys with better command but might only command one or two pitches -- so you eliminate one and square up what you're sitting on. At AAA and higher, and obviously in the bigs, now you've got three pitches some days to worry about. One of those pitches, or two, might be better than the others, but when you're dealing with 90+ velocity that doesn't matter. All he has to do is show it for a strike to make you worry about it. If you've ever seen 90+, you know there is no way to get to it with impact unless you are geared for it -- both for the velocity
and the location. In other words, you can be sitting fastball, but you're still going to have to make a choice on location. If you're a split of a second hesitant -- waiting fastball but worried in the back of your mind about the change or the curve or whatever -- you're not going to do much more than react if you do get the fastball: you're going to be late, and late is no way to make a living.
My point here is that young hitters struggle with pitch sequencing and location more than they struggle with stuff -- they've seen the raw stuff before, but they've not seen guys who can throw multiple pitches for good strikes. And so they find themselves trying to think along, reacting rather than hunting for a pitch. After that all kinds of mechanical things can creep in. Your swing gets slow. Maybe it gets long. Maybe it gets slow and long. Maybe you're not getting up and down in time to recognize the pitch.
It's an
approach that JBJ's got to get back to -- hunt the fastball. Until he does that, he's going to struggle. And when he shows he can mash the fastball, he'll then unlock a better idea of how pitchers will approach him, and be better able to think along, and better control of his mechanics. And that is all he means himself when you hear him talk about being lost, etc. He's got so much coming at him that he's got to clear out the clutter and get back to the basic fundamental approach.
[A case in reverse in Ortiz. The guy isn't hitting 32 dongs because he's just as strong and quick now as he was in 2006. He's doing it because he is an exceptionally smart hitter who knows how guys are currently trying to get him out, and how he has to generate power at 38 in ways he didn't have to at 28. Look at his leg kick now compared to 10 years ago, for instance. Some of those bombs this year? He's completely sold out for the fastball on the hands, because that's the only way he can turn on it. But he also knows it's coming, or has a reasonable guess that it is.]
