The Crow sucks donkey balls. He preaches a free swinging mindset. He tried to get Jack Cust to swing more rather use his plate discipline skills. I don’t know if the O’s offense produced over its head last year. Huff had a surprising year. Mora was hot for 6 weeks. Everybody else produced at their expected levels.

That you posted this here upon my dare. I don’t have passionate feelings about this issue, but i’ve seen people here that are. I just think that hitting coaches dont really impact much once a player has been playing baseball for as long as most these players have.

Let’s put it another way. If you conducted an experiment in which half of the O’s players are randomly assigned Tom Emanski’s hitting videos as their hitting “coach” and other half of players remain with the Crow, there wouldn’t be much a difference in their hitting performance at the end of the season. In fact, the Emanski group would probably do better.

He was in charge of coaching bats that were league average or below for years. Then last year all of a sudden the offense bucked up, with the help of a Huff fluke, just to spite us as Crow criticism was reaching critical mass at CC. The jist of the criticism of Terry Crowley around here is that he is not actually a coach. He’s an enabler. A buddy. A cheerleader. A clubhouse gladhander who let’s hitters do whatever the fuck they want. We don’t want that. We want a philosophy that centers around plate discpline, getting on base and knocking it out of the park, if and when the opportunity presents itself, if the player has that sort of power and talent. Terry Crowley is lucky he’s in fucking baseball, and if his ass hadn’t married an Oriole clubhouse bench back in 70’s he probably would’ve been shitcanned by now.

I guess I don’t need to respond on Minor Leauge Ball as you have your answer right here.

that makes the Orioles hitters any better.

Now, is there anything about him that makes them worse? I dunno; who knows what effect coaches have on MLB players? I sure don’t. I DO know that I don’t like hearing the free-swinging crap he apparently preaches.

I also know that while waiting outside the spring training complex a few years ago to snag autographs, when the Crow rolled by and opened his window, the reek of gin rolled across the assembled fans like a noxious wind. Maybe a bottle spilled. Maybe it was just a particularly noisome cologne. But I’m pretty sure I know gin when I smell it.

He seems like a great dude but that’s about 15th on my list of things coaches at this level should be.

worthy of a new fanpost but I got home from work today to find that the postlady had left a package for me from MLB. My wife didn’t really like it or believe me when I told her I had no idea what it was. Anyway, my friend who is a die hard braves fan sent my newborn daughter her first orange onesie. I was pretty pumped up and will ahve to post a pic soon.

You’ve made that perfectly clear, but most of you have just leaned on jokes and the broad idea that Crowley doesn’t preach plate discipline, one of you even insinuated that he does, or did, drink on the job. But there has been very little statistical analysis done, so I’ve decided to do some.

The Orioles scored the 11th most runs in baseball, 8th most in the American League, and walked the 21st most. These numbers don’t really tell us anything we didn’t already know. The O’s had a good offense last year, even with the equivalent of a pitcher’s spot in the lineup when you consider the short stops that we were trotting out there. Is that Crowley’s work, or are our hitters that talented? That’s a tough question to answer, but I believe we can get an idea by looking at how Oriole hitters have done in the majors compared to their minor league numbers.

The first guy I looked at was Brian Roberts. Some may talk about PEDs, but there is no denying that Roberts’ numbers have improved since working with the Crow. In 1,097 minor league at-bats Roberts hit .281/376/372. Over his major league career BRob has hit .284/355/416. Those numbers are artificially lowered by his first two seasons in which his line was 244/314/324. When looking at these numbers I don’t think anyone can definitively say that Crowley hurt BRobs development in anyway. The slugging percentage has dramatically increased and it hasn’t come at a tremendous loss of power.

Markakis’s minor league OBP was 381, in the 3 years in the bigs it is 375.

How about Melvin Mora? Before working with Crowley he was a 28 year-old journey man. Since coming to the O’s he has raised his career OBP about 60 points and put together a very good career.

Ramon Hernandez improved his OBP about 10 points from his career average while in Baltimore.

I’m not saying the Crow is the greatest thing since sliced bread, and it is extremely difficult to pinpoint the effect of a player on his hitting coach, but I think the Crow is being unfairly targeted. From what I’ve seen it looks like he is doing a fine job.

Crow would have been let go by now if he was half as bad as everyone here seems to think. Regardless of his ties to the organization, no one can perform as poorly as stated in this thread and hope to remain on the job.

The two best hitters on the team (Nick and Brian) seem to be just fine with the guy, and people want to bring me Jack F-ing Cust as an example of Crow’s failures…c’mon now. I also seem to recall him working extensively with Adam Jones on his ability to hit offspeed junk, and that has been progressing nicely and should continue to improve. Terry Crowley hasn’t exactly had the best lineups to work with throughout the past few years, or have we all forgotten the futility of the front office pre-MacPhail.

So, with that said, who would be a good candidate to replace Crowley? Since everyone here seems to think we could do better, please, give me names. What amazing being is going to help Luke Scott become more consistent? What batting genius is going to enable Felix Pie to live up to his billing?

But in the interests of getting the most out of this thread:

http://108mag.typepad.com/the_southpaw/Weaver_Mgr_Corner2.mp3

"Well, Terry, Terry Crowley’s lucky he’s in fucking baseball. He was released by the Cincinnati Reds, he was released by the fucking god dammed Atlanta Braves. We saw that Terry Crowley could sit on his fucking ass for eight innings and enjoy watching the baseball game just like any other fan, and has the ability to get up there and break one open in the fucking ninth. So if this cocksucker would mind his own business and let me manage the fucking team we’d be a lot better off. "

the people that Crowley has been working with. Look at our roster throughout the last 11 years (birdman, this means you). The W/L record is DIRECTLY due to the players, and INDIRECTLY due to the coaches. Blaming Terry Crowley for the O’s lack of offense can only get you so far. He did not choose the players he has to work with, he was given sub-par lineups that would not produce NO MATTER WHO THE BATTING COACH WAS!!
If we are going to point fingers here, lets start at the top with Pete.

So, again I ask, who would do a better job?? Earlier in the thread I asked for some names, but alas, nothing.

And the first sentence is not ambiguous; it reads fine either way.