Something seemed strange about the Orioles’ shakeup of the major league pitching coach situation, but when Mike Elias hired Atlanta Braves bullpen coach Drew French to be the major league pitching coach, things seemed to fall into place.
French, who used to work in Houston with Elias and Holt, will now fall in line behind Holt, who will remain with the Orioles as their director of pitching. Holt also held the position in his three years (2021-2023) as major league pitching coach.
What made the decision to remove Holt as major league pitching coach — along with assistant pitching coach Darren Holmes, who is not returning to the organization — so surprising was that by any statistical measure the major league staff was making real progress.
Some of that progress was just having better arms and maybe some more experience. Oh, and maybe that reconfiguration of the left field wall. But the stats are pretty hard to refute:
| Year | ERA | Rank | WHIP | Rank |
| 2021 | 5.85 | 30 | 1.48 | 30 |
| 2022 | 3.97 | 17 | 1.29 | 19 |
| 2023 | 3.91 | 7 | 1.24 | 8 |
So, with such a high rate of improvement, why fix something that’s not broken? Or, did it just seem like it wasn’t broken?
Holt was brought in as minor league pitching coordinator ahead of the 2019 season and promoted to director of pitching in 2020. At the time, the Orioles’ major league pitching coach was Doug Brocail, who had also been the pitching coach for the Texas Rangers and Houston Astros.
To avoid losing Holt, Elias let go of Brocail following the shortened 2020 season and gave the big league job to Holt. But with the hiring of French, the reason for Holt’s removal at the big league level seems to have come into clearer focus.
Holt is not really being replaced at the big league level. They are simply replacing him with someone who understands at some level that he’ll be working for Holt, not the other way around.
Think back to the Buck Showalter-Dan Duquette era. The relationship worked between the two, but it was not without dysfunction. That was because Andy MacPhail hired Showalter, then resigned two months later to spend time with his ailing father. That left Duquette in the odd situation of inheriting a manager who had already forged a warm relationship with Peter Angelos.
Duquette hired Rick Peterson to be his director of pitching development back in 2012. Well, Showalter had openings at pitching coach and bullpen coach following the 2013 season. It seemed odd at the time that Peterson never really was a candidate for the big league pitching coach job, which eventually went to Dave Wallace, who was allowed to bring in Dom Chiti to be more like an assistant pitching coach than a traditional bullpen coach.
I got to know Peterson pretty well and he confided to me that his much more newfangled and analytically-based methods were not appreciated by the big league staff. Essentially, the guy tasked with developing the young arms in the organization never had the confidence of the staff at the top.
Now, I am not here to say which side was correct in the battle. But I sure as hell am here to tell you that development in the scenario I just laid out was counterproductive and left by the wayside.
Is it possible that two young arms drafted by the Orioles as first-round picks in Dylan Bundy and Kevin Gausman were collateral damage to that dysfunction? Sure, Bundy had a raft of injuries, but Gausman never got clear direction during his formative years in Baltimore.
So, how does this explain Holt’s move away from the big league club? If my intuition is correct, Elias wants it this way because he wants two things out of this shakeup.
First, he wants a seamless way of teaching the art of pitching through Holt’s vision. That way, pitchers aren’t being taught differently every step up the ladder. A pitcher at Low-A Delmarva is learning an Oriole Way, if you will.
Second, Elias has noticed that the pitching prospects don’t seem to be developing at the pace of the hitters. True, Elias used much of the ammunition he had in high draft picks on offense, but the move is also being made to stress some urgency in developing arms.
The most inexpensive way to improve the arms is by developing them because acquiring them as free agents is way more costly, as Elias is experiencing again this offseason.
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