Donnie Ecker: non-miracle worker

Take THAT, 2023 Giants fandom

After an extremely successful 2021 season (107 wins is a lot of wins, you know), Giants co-hitting coach Donnie Ecker took a job with the Texas Rangers. With the Giants, he was just a co-hitting coach; with the Rangers, he was a bench coach and an offensive coordinator. In other words, the Rangers thought so highly of him that they hired him to coach a different sport that they don’t even play. Now that’s a commitment!

Things went well for the Rangers, who ended up winning the World Series in 2023. Things did not go so well for the Giants, who, under the watchful eye of co-hitting coach Justin Viele (pause for boos), saw their once mighty offense flounder and struggle and wilt and I did those three without consulting a thesaurus so I’m sure not going to open one now. They were bad. They were bad and the Rangers were good, and fans knew exactly what had happened: the good coach (Donnie Ecker) had left and the bad coach (Justin Viele) had stayed.

It couldn’t have been clearer. The Rangers offense was dynamic; the Giants offense was moribund. The Rangers saw young players like Josh Jung, Leody Taveras, and Evan Carter realize their potential and contribute at the major league level; the Giants were perpetually convinced that at some point, Luis Matos or Patrick Bailey or Heliot Ramos would finally figure out what “hitting” was. The guy who did it right was over there and the guy who did it wrong was over here, and that’s not how it should have been.

Anyway, two days ago, the Rangers fired Donnie Ecker.

What happened? What went wrong? Jeff Passan summed it up in this post:

Basically, the Rangers have been terrible at hitting all year, so they fired their hitting coach. Or, sorry, offensive coordinator. It’s a pretty normal move, honestly, exactly the kind of thing most teams would do. They have Players and the Players are not doing as well as they should, so they will get rid of their Coach and bring in a new Coach who will hopefully communicate better with them.

That new coach, by the way? Bret Boone! Sure, he doesn’t have any coaching “experience” other than managing an indy league team for four games in 2010, but maybe it’ll work! After all, when has Bret Boone disappointed anyone? No, I mean, besides Mariners fans and fantasy baseball players after 2003. Yeah, not so tough now, are you?

Oh, but I digress. We’re not here to talk about disappointments from a couple decades ago. We’re here to talk about disappointments from this decade, and the 2025 Rangers offense certainly qualifies. Hell, the 2024 Rangers offense qualifies too. Even the 2022 Rangers offense was nothing special. 3 out of the 4 seasons (okay, really 2.2 out of the 3.2 seasons) Ecker was there, he was not coaching his charges to spectacular on-field success. So why do Giants fans think that he was the answer?

The answer is simple: he left and then the offense got worse. Never mind that the 2021 offense was massively buoyed by career years from both Brandons and Buster Posey’s last hurrah, none of whom could be expected to maintain that performance going forward, no matter who the hitting coach was. Never mind that at some point, the bloom was going to come off the rose with rigit platooning because eventually players were going to get frustrated that after being pigeonholed as platoon guys, there was no path to more playing time, no matter how they performed. Never mind that no one person can take credit for a season in which nothing really went wrong, and certainly never mind that the actual effect of a hitting coach is massively nebulous at best.

No, Ecker left and Viele stayed, and the team got worse, so Ecker good, Viele bad. But the 2022 Giants hit better than the 2022 Rangers, and yes, they had a much more impressive starting point in 2021 — the 2021 Rangers were truly atrocious on offense — but even still, it’s not like Donnie Ecker worked miracles there. I don’t think he necessarily did a bad job, but if there was a myth that he could singlehandedly make any organization an overnight powerhouse, it should have died then and there.

I think another thing everyone likes to overlook, because it makes them look bad in retrospect, is that the cult of Genius Farhan was in full effect in 2022. Look at what he had done in 2021! It was a miracle! So the offense’s severe regression couldn’t be his fault. He hadn’t failed; he had been failed, and the man who had done the failing must have been an important offensive mind. The rest fell into place from there. Sure, looking back we see Farhan very differently, but that was absolutely not the case when the team started slipping, and it’s perfectly reasonable that fan opinions on Ecker and Viele formed in that environment, calicified, and then just never changed.

So what’s our takeaway? Is it that hitting coaches don’t matter? Is it that you can’t just connect two data points when there are 400 more data points that have just as legitimate an argument to be connected? Or is it just that you should never simply accept the Great Man theory of baseball? Because that can lead to a lot of assumptions that are unfair to Donnie Ecker, and equally unfair to Justin Viele.

Because just as Ecker was not the only man responsible for the success of the 2021 Giants, he’s also not the only man responsible for the failure of the 2025 Rangers. I mean, Joc Pederson is hitting .094/.181/.153, and I don’t think that’s entirely a coaching issue. Similarly, you can’t lay the blame for the failures of the 2022-2024 Giants offense solely on Viele. It’s more complex than that. And after all, if Viele was that bad, then surely his new team would be suffering directly due to his tutelage, right?

SON OF A-