‘The most volatile job in baseball’: Why an MLB hitting coach role is so hard to keep

Kevin Seitzer laughs when he hears the question.

“I had no idea,” he says. “But I see the news and see all the changes. I’m thankful for every day, let’s put it that way.”

Seitzer wasn’t aware of this until now, but going into his ninth season as the hitting coach for the Atlanta Braves, he has the curious distinction of being in his current position longer than any other hitting coach in Major League Baseball.

The job he occupies — part coach, part therapist, part scientist — has quickly become the most unsteady occupation in a world where people take jobs knowing they will eventually be fired.

“It’s the most volatile job in baseball,” Tigers manager A.J. Hinch said this offseason.

Indeed, the MLB hitting coach has become a fragile title — 17 teams changed hitting coaches between the 2021 and 2022 seasons. This coming season, 10 coaches will enter their first year with new teams. The average length of tenure for active MLB hitting coaches is about 2.4 years.

Those figures lead to a layered series of questions. Why are there so many new hitting coaches? Why are these jobs so hard to keep?

“Why there’s so much turnover is because one of the easiest things to do is just to blame the hitting coach,” said Pirates manager Derek Shelton, who was hitting coach for the Indians from 2004-09 and the Rays from 2010-16. “The reason it’s hard is because anybody who’s ever picked up a bat thinks they can be a hitting coach, and because of that, everybody has an opinion on it.”

In Atlanta, Seitzer has become an exception to the rule. He is 60 years old and has watched as his hitting-coach acquaintances seemingly get younger each year. Seitzer is admittedly cut from an older-school cloth, much like Braves’ manager Brian Snitker. He’s been around long enough to be on his fourth hitting coach job. He was fired from two previous ones with the Diamondbacks and Royals, so he knows what it’s like.

Seitzer, though, has adapted over the past nine years, working in one of baseball’s top analytical organizations. And despite a profile different from many of his peers, he is in charge of a lineup that has ranked in the top one-third in the league in terms of run production in five consecutive seasons. Last year, the Braves’ .443 team slugging percentage was the best in baseball.

“We always say, ‘the better your players, the better hitting coach you got,’” Seitzer said. “A hitting coach comes alongside to help and support, encourage, prepare, and then hopefully we’ve got a button or two to push when guys are scuffling to get them going again. But it’s hard because you’ve got all kinds of players from different backgrounds, different makeups, different tendencies, mentally, emotionally, mechanically. There’s so much that goes into it.”

The reason the hitting coach job has become so unstable — the reason Seitzer and Tampa Bay’s Chad Mottola are the only coaches who have been in their current roles for more than five years — relates to a variety of factors swirling around today’s game. It connects to baseball’s analytical movement, the increasing nastiness of pitchers across the league and a culture where hitting coaches can often be scapegoats for teams and front offices obsessed with “efficient” paths to winning.

Seitzer is the first to admit his job today is much different from when he started after the 2014 season. “It’s changed big time,” he said. “It would be with so many exclamation points it’s not even funny.”

When the Braves’ front office first began presenting Seitzer with bundles of new information — specifics on attack angles and exit velocities just scratching the surface — Seitzer was skeptical.

“It was scary,” he said. “It was, ‘Oh my gosh, I already take hours to prepare, now it’s gonna take more hours to process additional information.’”

But Braves staffers, Seitzer said, kept preaching patience. “They kept saying, ‘No, no, no,’” he said. “‘It’s gonna cut the time you need to prepare.’”

Seitzer tried to take in the data with an open mind. He listened to the direction of his bosses and embraced the advance reports sent his way.

There were others throughout the league who did not adapt so seamlessly. And many of those who did not adapt eventually lost their jobs.

“Sure enough, it took a month before I was like, ‘Dang, they were right,’” Seitzer said. “I don’t need to watch video for two hours. I can see what I need to see in 45 minutes, a half-hour, and then you start to get more efficient because you trust the information you’re getting that’s telling you what the pitchers are doing, and then the whole process starts to roll, and then we put together our plan and approach and we’re ready to go get ’em.”

Seitzer with Ronald Acuña Jr in 2019. (Adam Hagy / USA TODAY Sports)

More data and more information can have their caveats, though. In today’s game, it’s easy for hitters to get overwhelmed with all the different numbers they’re presented with. And worse, pitchers have had a distinct advantage since science and technology infiltrated baseball like never before over the past decade.

As pitchers design sliders in labs and use biomechanics to alter their deliveries and increase velocity, hitting has become more difficult. Last year’s league-wide batting average was .243, the lowest since 1968. Strikeouts across the league have increased precipitously almost year over year, from 23,853 in 1990 to 40,812 last season. The average MLB fastball is now 93.9 mph, pitchers are throwing breaking balls more than ever and teams use a revolving door of relief pitchers to lock down games.

All that makes life tough for a hitting coach.

“The velocity has been the big difference, and it’s not just on the fastball,” Seitzer said. “It’s on the secondary stuff, too. Then you’ve got the spin rates to go with it and you’re still getting break at 5-6 mph harder than what you’re used to seeing. It’s like (the ball) is on plane and then it’s gone.

“To me, that’s the reason strikeouts are up so much. Everybody thinks it’s because they’re trying to slug and hit homers and OPS numbers and all of that. That’s part of it, but for me, it’s the strike-to-ball stuff that is so hard to see.”

In 2021, the Detroit Tigers won 77 games and were seen as on the rise. With the help of hitting coach Scott Coolbaugh, under-the-radar players such as Jonathan Schoop, Jeimer Candelario, Eric Haase and Akil Baddoo had successful seasons.

In 2022, the Tigers won only 66 games, several players regressed in their performance and Coolbaugh ultimately lost his job. That’s just one example of the fickle art of hitting.

“Pitching is a very controllable skill,” Hinch, the Tigers manager, said. “You control your grip, you control your delivery, the things that you can enhance. Hitting is reactionary, so it’s hard to get too scientific in the hitting department, because we’re reacting to 98 with sink and cut, and he might slide it and he might change it and he might have split. There’s a lot more that goes into it than the simple science of swing mechanics. It’s the reaction part of our sport.”

Although the hitting coach cannot ultimately react for the player at the plate, teams are working hard to counteract the rise in pitching dominance. The Tigers replaced Coolbaugh and assistant Mike Hessman with a three-person hitting department, highlighted by 28-year-old Michael Brdar, who came over from the Padres. Brdar and other new-school hitting coaches like him have a bent toward analytics and biomechanics. (Coolbaugh, curiously enough, ended up as an assistant hitting coach with Brdar’s old team, the Padres.)

Being a big-league hitting coach goes well beyond throwing soft-toss in a cage and telling a player to squash the bug. Coaching hitters is evolving into a job less about teaching an athletic skill and more about studying the physics of hitting a ball and the anatomy behind a swing.

“Six years ago, when I was a hitting coach, you didn’t have to be a movement specialist,” Shelton said. “Now you have to be some sort of movement specialist or you have to have someone on your staff who is a movement specialist. You have to be able to let them have conversations about what hitters are doing.”

Players, too, are exposed to more voices than ever. Most players work with private hitting instructors during the offseason. Such outside influences were seen as taboo only a few years ago. Now, most teams have worked toward embracing private hitting instructors. Aaron Judge, for instance, works with hitting instructor Richard Schenk, a pool hall owner who studied hitters online before morphing into a hitting guru.

“Years ago, and I can speak from experience, you were extremely sensitive that they were going elsewhere,” Shelton said, “almost like it was an indictment that you didn’t have the information to provide. It’s become such a norm now.”

Only a few years ago, outsiders such as Dodgers hitting coach Robert Van Scoyoc — a former private hitting instructor who never played professionally — were seen as radical hires. Now the old guard of hitting coaches has been almost replaced by younger, forward-thinking hitting coaches, many of whom never played in the majors.

In 2018, per Sports Illustrated, the average age of 13 newly hired hitting coaches was 42.3, down from an average age of 53 among the coaches they replaced.

In 2023, there will be 19 lead hitting coaches under age 40.

As staffs grow younger, they are also growing larger. Teams are increasingly hiring assistant hitting coaches or finding other ways to divvy up responsibilities to help handle massive amounts of information. Seitzer has worked with an assistant hitting coach since the start of his time in Atlanta. Gabe Kapler’s San Francisco Giants now have 13 coaches on his staff, including hitting coach Justin Viele, director of hitting Dustin Lind and assistant hitting coach Pedro Guerrero.

“It helps immensely,” Seitzer said of expanded hitting staffs. “It helps with the preparation, deciphering the advanced stuff that we get and then being able to relay to the hitters.”

One problem: Despite all the changes in personnel, hitters across the league have yet to find more success. Teams scored 4.28 runs per game last season, down slightly from 4.53 in 2021. Teams averaged only 8.16 hits per game, the 11th-lowest total in MLB history.

“Somebody takes responsibility for failure, and it just seems like it’s always landing on the hitting coaches right now,” said A’s manager Mark Kotsay, who worked as the Padres’ hitting coach in 2015. “It’s a tough job. It’s a full-time job, and one that I don’t envy from being able to speak as a prior hitting coach.”

MLB is banning the infield shift beginning in 2023, just one measure designed to aid offenses. But any rule changes will not undo the massive amounts of turnover we’ve seen among hitting coaches. Next season, only six teams — the Braves, Rays, Astros, Dodgers, Giants and Blue Jays — will have a primary hitting coach who has been in the same role for more than two seasons.

So that leads to another question: Should hitting coaches have longer leashes? Ask anyone who has done the job, and they’ll tell you it takes time to build relationships, to get to know hitters and what they like, what they don’t like, how to coach them and what gets them to respond best.

“If you can be around your kids every single day, you know how your kids act and think,” Seitzer said. “You know their tendencies. You know when they’re happy, when they’re not, when they’re worried, when they’re frustrated. It’s the same way with players. That’s a part of the job, that you have to have some feel and some court awareness and an understanding of how these guys work and how they act and what they’re sensitive to. And it takes time.”

In Atlanta, Seitzer knows he is lucky. He works in an organization with admired leadership and a strong on-field roster. But it wasn’t always that way. The Braves lost 95, 93 and 90 games in each of Seitzer’s first three seasons. Over time, the roster evolved and young players such as Ronald Acuña Jr., Ozzie Albies, Austin Riley and Michael Harris flourished. Seitzer remained in his position, and now the Braves are among the best teams in baseball.

“You can’t ever take this job for granted,” Seitzer said. “There’s only 30 of them. They’re hard to get. They’re hard to keep.”

(Top photo of Kevin Seitzer: Kim Klement / USA TODAY Sports)