mobanmarketHugh Quattlebaum wasn’t given much notice, but he had an idea of where to start.
Expected to help a team with all the potential in the world, but struggling at the plate, the new Mets new hitting coach (as of the early morning hours on Tuesday) was tasked with picking up the team’s beleaguered batters.
“I just have a brief experience at this level,” Quattlebaum, 42, said Wednesday before the Mets doubleheader against the Cardinals at Busch Stadium. “Preparation is key to everything up here and I think generally I would try to drive everything off of getting guys as confident as possible. Guys are more confident when they’re prepared. They feel more prepared when things are simple.
“So if we can get all the information we have and pair it all down to something really simple, guys will walk into the box more confident because they feel more prepared for what they’re going to see,” he continued. “Number one, this is a game of confidence 100 percent.”
The Mets, who had scored just 18 runs in their last three games before Tuesday night’s rainout, need to get their bats on track. Highlighting the Mets struggles at the plate is their new $341 million shortstop Francisco Lindor who is off to an awful start with his new team. Lindor is slashing just .163/.284/.209 over his first 23 games for the Mets.
Quattlebaum was drafted by the Tigers back in 2000 and spent four years playing for Detroit’s and the Baltimore Orioles’ minor league affiliates. He made his MLB coaching debut with the Seattle Mariners in 2018, first as their minor league hitting coordinator and then last season as the big league team’s assistant hitting coach.
He was hired by the Mets in January as the minor league director of hitting development, but was promoted after the Mets surprising decision to fire hitting coach Chili Davis and assistant hitting coach Tom Slater after the struggling Mets lost to the Cardinals on Monday night.
He didn’t get to know many of the big league players during spring training, having spent his time getting acquainted with the players in the team’s minor league system. So, he’s pretty much starting from scratch in the middle of the season building a relationship with his new major league players and trying to implement his own philosophy on guys who spent more than two years learning under Davis.
“I gotta get to know these guys better,” the rookie big league hitting coach said, “and know the words that link up with how they like to think about their swings and their approaches. Gotta know them better to know how their mental game works in general, so you know when they’re distracted, when they’re confident, so you can keep em in a good mental equilibrium there as well.
Quattlebaum said he had no idea what the players had been working on with Davis and Slater, having been thrown in so abruptly, but explained his methods wouldn’t deviate too much from what they had already been used to.
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“Everything in this game for me is a happy medium,” he said when asked whether his coaching style was more analytical or contact based. “At the end of the day if the results are good, it doesn’t really matter how a guy’s getting there, what he’s thinking, what his thoughts or approach are.”