The off-season got underway for the St. Louis Cardinals in dramatic fashion Wednesday, as President of Baseball Operations John Mozeliak announced hitting coach Jeff Albert, pitching coach Mike Maddux and bullpen coach Bryan Eversgerd would all be leaving the coaching staff ahead of the 2023 season.
On Tuesday, the Miami Marlins announced former bench coach Skip Schumaker had been hired as their new bench coaching, creating four openings on the Cardinals’ Major League staff for which they will seek replacements both inside and outside the organization.
They did, however, announce one important return — starter Adam Wainwright agreed to terms to return to the mound for his 18th season in St. Louis.
Mozeliak said he was prepared to offer contracts to return to both Albert and Maddux, both of whom had deals which expired, and both preferred to depart.
Eversgerd, a native of Carlyle, was assigned elsewhere in the organization as a special assistant.
“He’s not retiring, he was not fired,” Mozeliak said of Maddux. “He wants to do something different. He wants to do something at a different pace.”
The team, Mozeliak said, would be open to discussing a special assistant or consulting position with Maddux as well, should that be something in which he was interested.
Maddux joined the Cardinals prior to the 2018 season and served as pitching coach for three different managers. His deep well of experience as both a player and a coach provided him with a gravitas and credibility that contributed to his sterling reputation around the game.
Consistently referred to by his nickname, “Mad Dog,” he was instead often a source of calm, timing mound visits as necessary to maximize stress release for his pitchers, often physically drawing it out with a firm hand on the collarbone.
Wainwright’s return comes after a string of social media posts in which the righty outlined a flaw in his delivery which contributed to his late-season struggles and went undetected for a matter of weeks. Mozeliak, who said he knew about Wainwright’s plans to go public before the tweets appeared, refused to place blame for the oversight on Maddux or the coaching staff.
“I think when you really understand Adam’s process, he’s not leaning on coaching as much as maybe a younger player might,” Mozeliak said. “I don’t think placing fault here is as important as, at least we have an answer, and now we’re moving forward.”
The transition away from Albert, who was hired before the 2019 season, comes at a time in which the Cardinals finished with one of the National League’s top offenses in 2022, even as production dipped across baseball. Originally hired as part of an effort to integrate modern methods of instruction throughout the system, Mozeliak shared “frustration” from Albert regarding the extent to which he was often blamed for dips in productivity by the public.
“I think in Jeff’s particular case,” Mozeliak explained, “I think there was some levels of frustration and feeling like he took a lot of the blame when things weren’t going well. And for him, I think he’s just open to change.
“I think Jeff accomplished exactly what we were hoping him to do,” he added. “He modernized our hitting program, our strategy. I think he made a huge contribution to our minor league side. So I think from that standpoint, it was a success.”
In seeking a hitting coach that will be willing and able to continue some of those philosophies, one internal candidate who would seemingly top a list of consideration is Russ Steinhorn, the team’s minor league hitting coordinator.
Looking at the outside world?
It was Steinhorn, along with Albert, who gathered prospects from throughout the minor league system at the team’s complex in Jupiter, Florida, prior to the 2020 season to introduce the technology and methods that would be at the core of the team’s offensive philosophy moving forward, and it has been Steinhorn’s work throughout different levels of the minors that has assisted with vertical integration of that plan.
Similarly, major league pitching coordinator Dusty Blake was the only one of the three pitching coaches on the 2022 staff to be slated for a return in 2023. Even as Mozeliak declined to comment on names of potential candidates for the vacant positions, he did acknowledge Blake would be a candidate to slide into Maddux’s prior role.
Mozeliak declined to offer a timetable for filling the open positions, but did say the team, “want(s) to understand what the outside world looks like.”
Planning to fill positions quickly
The other coaches on staff — first base coach Stubby Clapp, third base coach Pop Warner, assistant coach Willie McGee, assistant hitting coach Turner Ward, hitting strategist Patrick Elkins and Blake — are all expected to return, though Mozeliak said their roles could change.
Aside from Blake’s candidacy for pitching coach, Clapp is expected to be a top consideration to fill Schumaker’s role as the bench coach.
“I can imagine the next couple of weeks we’ll be working feverishly to get this done,” Mozeliak said.