I noticed that Willie Randolph was just hired as a bench coach for the upcoming season. What does a bench coach actually do?
I believe he’s an extra set of eyes for the manager.
The Bench Coach is the one who decides where everybody sits in the dugout.
Actually, he’s basically the “Assistant Manager.”
Per Wiki:
Depending on the team the bench coach is often an additional specialist coach; when Gene Tenace was Toronto’s bench coach he served as a hitting instructor as well, a job he’d previously done. The Jays also used the first base coach, Dwayne Murphy, as a hitting coach - again, a job Murphy had considerable credentials in. When Ron Washington was a base coach for Oakland he also served as fielding instructor. A team’s bullpen coach is usually the second pitching coach and works to the plans set out by the pitching coach. The coaching staff is, really, a collection of guys whose official in-game titles are often less important than hat they do during practice.
I’m sort of surprised baseball teams don’t have MORE coaches, to be honest, given teh incredibly high cost of the athletes and relative cheapness of coaches, but then I suppose there’s probably a lot of coaching staff we don’t see in uniform, the trainers and whatnot.
Those benches don’t just coach themselves you know.
I believe the duties of bench coaches include:
- Sitting
- Scratching
- Hemming
- Hawing
oh, and lest we forget
5)Spitting
I’ve wondered about this, too, particularly with hitting and pitching coaches.
On the hitting side, in one lineup you’ve got a number of different roles, talents, and abilities; your slugger is going to need different coaching to preserve his power while doing something about that hole in his swing, than your Mendoza-line shortstop will need to get his BA and OBP up to a more tenable level. And on the pitching side, power and control pitchers, starters, closers, and LOOGYs are going to need advice on very different sorts of problems.
I’m surprised that every mid-seven-figure (and up) pitcher or everyday player doesn’t have his own personal pitching or batting coach; I think it would make economic sense. There’d probably be a sufficient number of sufficiently skilled coaches for that many players, and they’d cost, what, a couple hundred thousand a year, maybe?
What are all those coaches going to do the other 22 hours of the day? And I think by the time they get to that level it’s mostly a question of watching for bad habits to spring up. I’m amazed that the single A team around me only has hitting coach, pitching coach and manager on the roster. I would have thought that level is where coaching would pay dividends. I don’t know, maybe Short Season single A is more about scouting than player development.
Teams are restricted as to how many uniformed coaches they’re allowed to have. They can have as many out-of-uniform “consultants” as they like.
The Bench coach varies by team and situation. Often a young manager will have an older ex-manager to help with little things like double switches and to help check the charts. Another common one is the old experienced manager possibly nearing retirement will have a series of young promising bench coaches to train them to be manager. Willie Randalf, Lee Mazilli, Joe Girardi and Don Mattingly are all examples of this under Joe Torre.
Most of them have additional duties along the lines of OF coach (to position Outfielders) Infield Coach (same idea but also usually works with the players on turning double plays and run downs), Catcher Coach, if the bench coach was a excellent catcher he might also double as the guy to try to get young catchers to catch better.
A good example of bench coaches of the past is Billy Martin often just had a drinking buddy as his bench coach that did only small detail stuff. Another example is Don Zimmer as Joe Torre’s Bench Coach was close to co-manager and the Yanks were at their best under this tandem of conservative Torre and nearly foolhardy hit-and-run all the time Zimmer.