Despite the criticism that followed Chili Davis after he was let go by the Red Sox after 2017, he was still seen as an upgrade to be the Cubs hitting coach. He was hand-picked by not only Joe Maddon, but the front office too. Yet, his hiring seems to have been doomed from the very beginning.
The Cubs fired Davis after only one season, meaning the team will have a different hitting coach for the third straight year in 2019. And no, it wasn’t just the two-run performance combined in Game 163 against the Brewers and the Wild Card Game loss against the Rockies, but Cubs players never bought in to Davis.
First, 670 The Score’s Dan Bernstein said the following about what players said during their exit interviews and none of it sounds positive about Davis.
Mentioned last week on @Bernstein_McK on @670TheScore that some material players told Theo that they felt their swings/approaches had been altered for the worse. 2/2
— Dan Bernstein (@dan_bernstein) October 11, 2018
Obviously, we’re going to point to the decline in home runs and overall power for the Cubs. Yes, you have to take Kris Bryant’s shoulder injury into account because his power was sapped after May, but Javier Baez was the only Cubs player who had more homers in 2018 than 2017.
Theo Epstein and Maddon wanted Davis because they thought he could improve the overall approach. Yet, as Epstein pointed out in his press conference, the team never expected to give up power just for more opposite-field singles.
“The goal, what Joe mentioned and certainly what I was hoping for, was never to sacrifice power or in my opinion, launch angle. It’s not a fad. The bottom line is, line drives and balls in the air are way more productive than ground balls. We weren’t looking to sacrifice power and walks in exchange for ground balls and opposite field hits. But in the second half, that’s what the results were. That’s not what we’re looking for.”
(Theo Epstein)
So, Davis’ philosophy just didn’t work, but maybe it’s because players never gave him a shot.
Here’s what Sahadev Sharma reported in The Athletic.
Yes, Davis should be helping them adjust, but it’s also on the players to be able to soak in that information and apply it properly.
But that seems to be exactly part of what went wrong. According to a source familiar with the situation, the Cubs aren’t saying this is Davis’ fault, but rather the team’s hitters not being ready for what he had to offer. Apparently, not many of the players, outside of a few like Ben Zobrist, Jason Heyward and a handful of others, really ever clicked with Davis. At one point last winter, Maddon suggested Davis’ arrival would be like the Cubs hitters moving to a graduate level program. It appears as though too many of them were a few credits shy.
Here’s the thing and it’s been said before, the offensive collapse can’t in any way be completely Chili Davis’ fault. He wasn’t the one out there shitting the bed. The players simply didn’t buy into him as the hitting coach and it makes sense that as a whole the offense looked lost after the all-star break.
This was seemingly a miscalculation by the front office. Chili Davis was never going to fit in with what made these players successful before and everything went downhill after it appears that players tuned him out.
Again, Davis is at fault, but it’s not all his fault.
For now he is the scape goat, but you should definitely expect a few players to be gone too, as the front office tries to repair the broken offense in the offseason.
