St. Louis Cardinals: Harrison Bader as hitting coach reveals two things

Paul DeJong has revealed that Harrison Bader identified a flaw in his hitting approach. Is Bader the new St. Louis Cardinals hitting coach?

The St. Louis Cardinals have made plenty of changes of late but installing Harrison Bader as the new hitting coach is not one of those changes. That hasn’t stopped him from helping his fellow batting mates.

Paul DeJong himself has admitted the Bader is to be credited for correcting DeJong’s hands. According to DeJong, Bader noticed that Paul’s hands were climbing up the bat when Paul was at the plate. This had negative effects on his ability to make solid contact.

Paul’s “report” makes it clear that the Cardinals are functioning as a team with each out there to help one another. This is a very loud change for the St. Louis Cardinals.

By the way, once DeJong made the recommended changes, boom, success. Monday night’s walk-off home run was just one example of the positive changes to DeJong’s approach.

Here’s the thing: Bader is not the new hitting coach. We all knew that. What this “sample” shows is that the actual hitting coaches of the St. Louis Cardinals are making impacts on the players at the plate. The stats support this.

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Additionally, this sample stands to reveal the changes in culture within the team itself. It stands to reason that the players are now freer to help each other. It likewise stands to reason that either this was happening under the Mike Matheny regime without players saying so, or it was NOT happening under the Matheny regime.

If the players weren’t free to make recommendations to each other under Matheny, perhaps this was based on some insecurity of coaching. Or… just maybe, the players simply didn’t feel free to make such suggestions… or were simply disenfranchised by the coaching staff.

While we will never fully know, what we do know is that players like Marcell Ozuna were left to their own devices (conducting their own video study) under Matheny. That or they were subjected to trips to Memphis for “real” hitting coaching.

At the end of the day, Bader was a huge help for Dejong and we fans of the St. Louis Cardinals should be pleased with that product. By the way, DeJong has just slammed a double in Tuesday night’s game (as of the time of this writing).

What do you think? Does this situation reveal changes to the positive for the St. Louis Cardinals? I, for one, and beyond pleased.