Blast from the past: Looking for a Leo Mazzone effect

Photo by Jeff Gross/Getty ImagesThe best things in life come, as they often do, from the comments section. With respect to judgments cast on pitching coaches, this is no exception. Pitching coaches themselves are a slippery topic. Who among us can really say, with definitive clarity, “Yes, the pitching coach caused this to occur!” My own inclination is generally to credit the players for pretty much everything. In the end, the players are the ones executing, and in a paradigm where we attempt to quantify and value everything, that value flows back to the players. There’s 1,000 WAR in a season to be distributed across players in the box score; we don’t, as yet, have a framework for separate “coaching reservoir” of WAR that would get its own set of numbers. (And if we did, that’d make the current relationship between player WAR, team WAR, and team wins more complicated, for sure.)

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