Terry Pendleton Is Not a Bad Hitting Coach*

* Or at least, there is no evidence to suggest that he has been in the past. Human nature dictates that someone must be to blame when well-made plans go awry. For some reason (convenience?), this scapegoat is always a single person, even when the fault clearly lies with a group, or with an organizational flaw that transcends any one member. Nowhere is this trend more obvious--or more troubling--than in professional sports. Paradoxically, the lower a person is on a team's hierarchy, the more likely he is to be blamed for the team's ineptitude. Thus, we will often see a manager throw a hitting or pitching coach to the wolves so as to postpone his own demise. From a manager's perspective, this is an eminently logical action, but it is nonetheless unjust in most cases. Why is it unjust? On the whole, very few hitting coaches have any discernible effect relative to other hitting coaches. There are two reasons for this: 1) most hitting coaches teach more or less the same techn...