Speaking exclusively with Mike Puma of the New York Post, former hitting coach Chili Davis gave a scathing rebuke of the Mets organization on Friday.
While he stressed that replacements Hugh Quattlebaum and Kevin Howard were put in an incredibly tough position after they replaced himself and Tom Slater in May as lead and assistant hitting coach, he was not so kind to former acting general manager Zack Scott and Mets ownership.
“That organization needs a big turnaround, they need to clean house,” Davis said in the interview. “Some of the people that have been there so long during those dismal years, they need to bring some fresh faces and baseball people in there. To be honest I don’t think Zack Scott was a baseball person. He was the head of analytics in Boston. … That’s where he belonged, in analytics.”
Davis did not believe players like Michel Conforto, Dominic Smith and Jeff McNeil would have struggled like they did had he and Slater not been fired after just a month.
He also talked about a game in April where his challenges to the analytics department showcased the chasm between the people at the top and the coaches instructed to follow their analytics driven data to the letter of the law.
Facing Jake Arrieta, the analytics department cited his previous three starts to say he would only throw his changeup 7 percent of the time. Chili, having been with the ball club the prior year, remembered Jake throwing more change ups against the Mets than that, specifically in a game from September 2020 in which he threw the pitch 32 percent of the time. That night, Arrieta threw his changeup 14 percent of the time in the Mets loss, the Post points out, affirming Chili’s belief that experience and analytics have to go hand in hand.
“I look at analytics as information. It could be good information, but am I going to coach solely with analytics? No. Because numbers and computers and machines have a place, but when you are dealing with human beings and you are a hitting coach or pitching coach or any kind of coach, you have to deal with personalities, you have to deal with emotions sometimes. You have to deal with some guys’ psyche. I am saying that as a former player.”
In the interview, Chili painted a picture of the Mets organization that trusts numbers over baseball people, a path Davis believes is one baseball teams shouldn’t travel far down.
“I believe in my heart Steve Cohen wants to win and I know in his business analytics are big,” Davis said. “He’s a hedge-fund guy and analytics are big in that business and they should be because you are dealing with numbers every day. Just like baseball, you are dealing with numbers, but you are also dealing with a lot of human element in baseball. You don’t ever feel the same as a player every day, even when you are hot. Even when you are swinging good. You don’t walk to the ballpark every day and feel the same.”
