The Cincinnati Reds have announced that Chris Valaika is their new hitting coach and director of hitting. He had been the hitting coach for the Cleveland Guardians for the past three seasons, and prior to that was the assistant hitting coach with the Chicago Cubs.
As a player, Chris Valaika was a 3rd round draft pick by the Cincinnati Reds back in 2006 out of UC Santa Barbara. In his professional debut with the Billings Mustangs he ran off a 32-game hitting streak, which set the Pioneer League record at the time (I am unsure if it was ever broken) and hit .324/.387/.520 while winning the league’s Most Valuable Player Award.
From there he would work his way up through the Reds farm system and make his big league debut with the club in August of 2010. He played 19 games that season with the Reds and then in 2011 he played in 14 more. Those would be his only two seasons in Cincinnati and he hit .270/.303/.381 with the club. After the 2012 season he became a free agent and signed with Miami. During the 2013 season he played in 22 games with the Marlins and following that season he headed back to free agency once again. That offseason he signed with the Chicago Cubs and played in 44 games with them in what turned out to be his final year in the big leagues.
He would play in 16 games across four seasons in MLB, hitting .238/.282/.351 for the Reds, Marlins, and Cubs. In 2015 he re-signed with the Cubs but spent the season in Triple-A where he hit .267/.324/.401. That would be his final year as a player. He joined the Cubs organization two years later.
During his time as the hitting coach in Cleveland, the Guardians finished 17th, 24th, and 17th in Major League Baseball in wRC+. That’s not exactly a selling point. What Cleveland did do was make a lot of contact, though. They were the best in the league twice at making contact and 5th in the other season. Of course if you are making contact and it’s not resulting in actual production does it matter?
No team is built the same. No one is going to turn Elly De La Cruz into a contact guy to the likes of Steven Kwan, just like no one is going to turn Steven Kwan into a power guy to the likes of Elly De La Cruz.
New manager Terry Francona knows Chris Valaika and what he brings to the table. Looking at what his teams have done while he was the hitting coach – they’ve been below average when it comes to production. Was that because of his instruction or was it because of the players the Guardians had? It’s really tough to answer that question. They’ve had some really good hitters in Cleveland. And they’ve had some poor ones, too. Sounds like just about every team in baseball, doesn’t it?
If Chris Valaika can get the Reds hitters to make a little more contact, that’s probably a good thing. But as we saw with Cleveland, they made more contact than anyone over the last three years and never once were even in the top half of the league in terms of offensive production. Hopefully that part of it was more about the players than the coach.
