Jim Leyland complained that the Tigers are taking strikes and swinging at balls. This is a problem Dombrowski’s been trying to address for a few years:
“We had a meeting a couple of years ago on some of these topics with our hitting people, and we’re going to do that again this winter, to try to get back, from a philosophical perspective, how to approach that — major league and minor league,” Dombrowski said. “Sometimes at the minor league level when I traveled around, that (lack of plate discipline) was also an observation.”
But Dombrowski said such a philosophy won’t matter if it’s not accompanied by execution.
“You can have a philosophy, and we can talk until we’re blue in the face and tell somebody how to do something, and sometimes they just can’t do it,” Dombrowski said.
“There is a great deal of difference between planning and executing, and all of the difficulty is with the latter.”
This goes back to an observation in Moneyball
Posted by David Pinto at 9:05 am | Management, Offense | Permalink | 1 Comment
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October 13th, 2009 @ 10:17 pm
I wouldn’t say teams can not develop players to be selective. I would say most teams have been unsuccessful in developing that habit. The Yankees of the mid to late 1990’s definitely had a team wide patient mentality at the plate. If the Tigers have this as a goal and are not seeing results then it is a problem of communications and/or a failure of coaching..