We fans don’t really know what a pitching coach does. All we get to see is him walking out to the mound when his pitcher is struggling, putting his hand over his mouth to hide his lips, and chatting for a bit. Then the pitcher either pitches better or doesn’t.
We also get to see the pitchers work, and to study their process. We assume that the pitching coach has something to do with that, so we attribute an amount of a pitcher’s success or failure to his coach.
But we don’t know.
So understand that there are probably lots of other people who deserve credit for what we will call “The Jim Hickey Era,” but still, that’s what we’ll call it, because Hickey was the face of Rays pitching for the past eleven years, and it was a very good run.