Baseball is accustomed to coaches changing jobs during the offseason, but I don't think Major League Baseball is used to the idea of another offseason taking precedent when it comes to opportunities within the game.
But here's Minnesota Twins pitching coach Wes Johnson stepping down during the season in order to return to the collegiate ranks. The Twins hired him from Arkansas, and he's leaving the Twins to take the same title for LSU.
The reason: a gigantic pay raise.
Johnson reportedly received an annual salary around $350,000 from the Twins when he left the University of Arkansas for MLB in November 2018. He will now be paid $750,000 per year by LSU, sources confirmed.
It's a shock, yet the elements are there for this to be normalized. MLB teams hadn't hired coaches from college programs for decades before the Twins broke that wall by hiring Johnson in 2018, and the Tigers followed two years later by hiring pitching coach Chris Fetter from Michigan.
The events of this month may explain why. It's been an active college coaching carousel. Fetter had to dismiss rumors that he was interested in the Michigan head coaching job when Erik Bakich headed from the Big Ten to Clemson. Johnson decided to take the leap, and if he likes the college game and it's double the pay, it's hard to argue against the decision. Johnson just has to be comfortable with the idea that he may never work in MLB again, at least under current attitudes. There is the possibility that teams could shift and pay coaches considerably more than the going rate.
For the time being, the Twins are going to have to figure out how to maintain their grip on first place without the guy to whom they directed all major pitching decisions.
“I don’t try to play pitching coach,” Baldelli said earlier this month. “I do let Wes take control and set up a plan for each one of our guys. You’re always going to have times where guys are not throwing the ball the way they want to, even your trusted guys. That’s going to happen. You kind of get back down to the plan of what you’re trying to accomplish when you get out there on the mound. Beyond the plan, are we executing the plan? Are we throwing the pitches that we want to throw, the way we want to throw them? Or not? Wes is really good about that. He’s done that many times over for us.”
Bullpen coach Pete Maki is expected to take over the lead pitching coach role from Johnson, but Twins officials have stressed that truly replacing Johnson will be a group effort involving multiple internal staff members. As of Sunday night, the team was still working through all of its staffing options.
Spare Parts
I'll have more about Yoán Moncada's likely return tomorrow, but Mark Gonzales has a note about Reynaldo López's desire to return to the rotation because he'd never had the kind of the slider he does now. There's also this:
Lopez acknowledged that he is pitching more aggressively as a reliever and has appreciated the tips given to him at the start of the season by fellow reliever Kendall Graveman, such as game-planning and studying the strengths and weaknesses of opposing batters more closely.
This feels like it should be a basic part of pitching development, but the Sox also didn't know that López had trouble seeing the catcher's signs for seasons, so who the hell knows.
We keep seeing a lot about the White Sox wanting hitters to drive the ball to right center -- or in Gavin Sheets' case, left center -- but seeing that the White Sox still don't have a guy with 10 homers this year, I wonder if this works when most of the team is dealing with some kind of leg injury. That's the longest way out of the park, and they might not have the functioning bases for it.
Dallas Keuchel's debut with Arizona looked a lot like any start with the White Sox: 4.1 IP, 6 H, 4 R, 4 ER, 3 BB, 7 K, 55 of 98 pitches for strikes.
And his postgame reaction would fit in as well:
"There was a lot of great feels… I'm not getting 13 swings and misses in 4 ⅓ with just getting lucky," Keuchel said. "There was plans, there was pitch shape. Outside of a lot of uncompetitive pitches, I would say, there was a lot of really, really good pitches mixed in."
Yermín Mercedes has resurfaced in San Francisco, where he hopes to follow Luis González's path from cast-off to contributor (although González is currently on the shelf with a back injury). Mercedes made his Giants debut on Sunday and went 0-for-2 with a strikeout.
The simmering beef between the Mariners and Angels finally exploded after Jesse Winker took a sinker to the stinker, resulting in benches clearing and some punches -- or at least forearm shivers -- being exchanged. Three fun stories developed alongside it: a girl who once again watched the player she came to see get ejected, a fan who had a pizza delivered to Winker, and the driver who got handsomely paid for fulfilling the request.
