Stephen Vogt brings veteran MLB presence to Mariners coaching staff

Photo by Michael Zagaris/Oakland Athletics/Getty ImagesFor 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. Setting aside the question of whether those who can do can also teach, obviously limiting a talent pool to the relatively small number of people who make it in professional baseball is an unnecessarily limiting criteria (to say nothing of the women and others it automatically excludes from the job market, an omission that is just beginning to be rectified in pro ball today).

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