San Francisco Giants: Top Three Hitting Coaches to Target

The San Francisco Giants are clearly making quite a bit of an overhaul within their coaching staff. We know that Phil Nevin, and Dave Righetti are off the staff, while Henlsey Muelens is now the bench coach with Ron Wotus moved to third base coach.

The San Francisco Giants current openings are as follows: Pitching Coach, Hitting Coach, and Bullpen Coach. We’ve already highlighted three that we believe should be targeted for pitching coach. Now it’s time to look at some hitting coaches.

“Bam Bam” Muelens has been an OK hitting coach. The Giants offense was terrible last season, and frankly, over his time as a hitting coach, hasn’t been great. It’s been average at best. Muelens took over as batting coach in 2010, and despite winning three world series in that time, the offense hasn’t been wonderful.

According to fangraphs, they’ve had the 12th best wRC+, which is about 4% below average anyways. The Giants did have a batting average in the top ten over that period of time, but were down in the bottom quarter of the league in terms of runs scored. The Giants were also there in the bottom third for times grounded into double plays in that time-span.

Normally for a team so heavy on the ground attack, there would’ve been a decent amount of running game attached, but the Giants were also in the bottom third in stolen bases as well. No wonder their run production was so low.

They were taught to approach as a gap-to-gap, ground attack team. But they never had the running game necessary to help run production. The idea also works if you have somebody in the lineup who can run into one often enough to bang home runs. But the Giants really haven’t had that since 2014. It might have been sustainable if their pitching level had been sustainable, but it wasn’t. Now it’s time to change/evolve.

So who are some targets that can help do that? Well, get clicking.