CLEARWATER, Fla. – It doesn't matter what you know if nobody will listen. The man who made this point on Monday afternoon has spent most of his life talking hitting with players, enough to know that the first part matters just as much as the second.
"You've got to be a communicator," Charlie Manuel said as he stood in the shadow of the foul pole behind the leftfield fence at the Phillies' training complex. "You let them talk and you listen to them, too."
When the Phillies announced in the offseason that they'd hired their new hitting coach straight out of their own broadcast booth, the move might have come as a surprise to local fans who remembered Matt Stairs first and foremost for his role on the 2008 world champions, when he was an all-or-nothing pinch-hitter who enjoyed joking about his swing-from-the-heels approach and his aversion to defense.