Eckstein catches new wave of hitters to improve, sees upside
The Banzai Pipeline on the north shore of Oahu has rules. The locals get the best waves and drop in from the choicest spots. Visitors start in a much more dangerous location on the break, where large, powerful waves cross over a shallow reef.
“I like my career too much,” Rick Eckstein said, “so I stayed on shore and watched.”
The latest stop in Eckstein’s career, which has spanned more than 20 years of teaching baseball players of all levels how to hit, is Pittsburgh, where the Pirates hired him last month as their hitting coach. As Eckstein studied Pirates batters in preparation for his interview, he saw possibility.
“I think there were aspects of what they were doing that were very good,
and there were aspects that I felt like we could create some growth and move in a direction that would really allow guys to kind of reach more of their potential,” Eckstein said. “I saw a lot of huge upside.”
Eckstein replaced Jeff Branson, whom the Pirates fired along with assistant hitting coach Jeff Livesey, after the season. The team recently hired Jacob Cruz as assistant hitting coach. Eckstein has met with and spoken to Cruz, and the two will spend more time together next week at the winter meetings in Las Vegas.
“I can’t tell you how many calls I’ve gotten [from] people that I know, that know Jacob and just rave about him,” Eckstein said. “I’m really excited about Jacob being on board.”
The Pirates replaced their hitting coaches after a year in which they tied for eighth in the NL with 4.3 runs per game. Their .254 average tied for fourth, their .317 on-base percentage tied for ninth, and they struck out fewer times than any other NL team. But they hit 157 home runs, 13th in the league.
“I think the power component’s in there,” Eckstein said. “We can talk about hitting as much as we want to talk about hitting, but I think when guys start to understand who they’re capable of being, and then have a process and plan in place to kind of go after that.”
Eckstein, 45, began coaching in pro baseball in 2004 in the Montreal Expos’ minorleague system. He was the Washington Nationals’ hitting coach from 2009 to ‘13 before joining the Los Angeles Angels the following year as a player information coach, assistant hitting coach and advanced scout.
“That role allowed me to expand myself because it crossed into the pitching realm with Mike Butcher as the pitching coach, and just able to talk baseball nightly with [then-manager] Mike Scioscia before games and after games as far as strategy and implementation of different things,” Eckstein said. “It was a huge, pivotal role for me to expand my wings a little bit.”
After two years at the college level with Kentucky, Eckstein spent the past two seasons as the minor-league hitting coordinator for the Minnesota Twins. Things have changed in the five years since he was a majorleague hitting coach, mostly with regard to the amount of information.
“There’s a blend that needs to go into how to get the information to the player that’s usable and relatable,” he said. “My job is to take all the information and really dive into it deep and try to make it relatable in a way to each player with things that they need to know, versus just data-dumping.”
Eckstein can meld the numbers with his background in biomechanics to relate analytic suggestions to what a hitter physically needs to do in the box.
“I’ve always looked at hitting through a movementbased process,” he said. “When I look at hitters and all the hitters that I’ve ever worked with in my career, it’s always been from a movement, timing, how they’re putting their body in position, angles. That’s what I see.”
Those principles also apply to Eckstein’s hobbies, aside from spending time with his wife and two young daughters: working out, golf and surfing. He has surfed up and down both coasts of the U.S., most of Hawaii, and Costa Rica. After taking a look at Pipeline, Eckstein went north on the Kamehameha Highway to Sunset Beach and caught the biggest wave of his life.