Butterfield defends coaching staff
SPORTSBLOGS Blue Jays fans are jazzed. The Jays are not done dealing and there is more money available to be spent on payroll, according to team president Paul Beeston. In reality, look for final ’13 payroll to settle in at around $125 million, which would break the previous franchise high by $27 million.
New manager, new coaches and new players. It’s time to turn the page on 2012. In truth, there were so many issues on and off the field that scuttled the past Jays season that it’s hard to say which were most important. Two obvious problems were bad baserunning, over-aggressiveness by the young players, running into illadvised outs in ridiculous situations and the additional perception of a dysfunctional clubhouse late in the year, a belief perpetuated by infielder Omar Vizquel.
The fact is that the retiring 45-yearold veteran Vizquel, for those that were around the club a lot, seemed to spend more time with his video biographers working on his personal legacy than he did with his younger teammates, the reason he was brought on board. Vizquel is a Hall of Famer but 2012 is not a year that many will talk about, other than passing Babe Ruth on the all-time hit list.
Both those issues were addressed by former Jays and current Red Sox coach Brian Butterfield, who offered his opinions in a far-ranging interview earlier in the week. Butterfield could believe he was tarred with both brushes as both a clubhouse mentor and the traffic cop at third base.
Butterfield reacted calmly to the scathing criticism describing a clubhouse that was said to be unsupervised where mistakes were not corrected and teaching and supervision were at a minimum.
“It didn’t bother me for long just because I know that one of the things that was said was spoken out of school, because some guys (i.e. Vizquel) don’t know exactly what’s going on,” Butterfield said. “Out of all the coaching staffs that I’ve been on, this coaching staff did an outstanding job at teaching and staying on things and being detailed. It was as good as any staff I’ve ever been on. But when you have a very young club — at the end of July we were even younger — you’re going to have mistakes at the big-league level. A lot of those kids really should have been still in the minor leagues.”
Butterfield then reacted to the idea that the baserunners in general and Brett Lawrie in particular did not know what they were doing on the basepaths and that the Jays’ in-game strategy was a joke.
“You have some young players that are aggressive anyway,” he said. “You’re going to have mistakes made. But repetition at the big-league level, making those mistakes, they will get better. They will get better. You’ll see a definite difference in the approach of Brett Lawrie this year.
Butterfield believes that teams have a better chance trying to train players who have in their heads the next 90 feet, rather than those who assume and are satisfied with one base at a time.