For decades in baseball, the conventional wisdom was to only hire people for coaching positions who had a history of playing the game. After all, how could you possibly instruct someone to hit a big-league curveball if you’ve never successfully done it yourself? Of course, in our enlightened baseball era we now know this to be untrue—the great Ted Williams was, by all accounts, a pretty lousy manager, unable to tolerate those who came up short against his platinum-level standards—but as recently as 2002, Carlos Tosca was only the sixth person in baseball’s storied history to manage a team without ever playing professional baseball.
Stephen Vogt brings veteran MLB presence to Mariners coaching staff
