Rangers’ poor offensive showing didn’t shake Magadan’s belief

This isn’t the late 1990s and early 2000s, when juiced-up players swatted homer after homer and made life for big league hitting coaches seem like a walk in the park.

Now, offense is in short supply in the major leagues. That’s not all due to the strict testing for performance-enhancing drugs that has been put in place, but the balls don’t jump off bats as they once did.

Bullpens stacked with flame-throwers and left-handed specialists have contributed to the scarcity of runs, as has the proliferation of advanced scouting.

Throw in injuries to his team’s most productive batters, and life for Texas Rangers hitting coach Dave Magadan was a grind in 2014. In 2013, it was a late-season swoon that caused the numbers for the Rangers’ offense to slide from their usual perch at the top of the American League.

But Magadan is still standing in the batting cages of the Surprise Recreation Campus, despite looking elsewhere in October as the Rangers searched for a manager. Each day players can find Magadan in the cages for early work, to pick his brain and search for answers.

He’s looking for ways to meet the demand for more offense by sticking to his program of keeping the productive hitters productive and making the bottom of the order better.

“I’ve always felt like the more I can get from the back half of my offense, the better off our team is going to be offensively,” Magadan said. “That’s the way I always went about it in Boston. It just so happened last year, it seemed like the whole team was the second half of your offense.

“There were a lot of things that didn’t go the way we wanted them to. Injuries had a lot to do with that, but I think that’s when you earn your keep as a hitting coach.”

Magadan wasn’t actively seeking to leave the Rangers in October when he was courted by both New York clubs, but he wasn’t sure if the new manager would want to keep him.

Jeff Banister did, however, and after an initial phone conversation and meeting in Surprise, Magadan was convinced that he didn’t want to leave for another team.

And he’s completely on board. He has been working in close quarters with Josue Perez, the new minor-league hitting coordinator, to ensure that his program is taught at each level.

Not only do the big league hitters crave continuity, which they have with Magadan in his third season after four hitting coaches in four years from 2009-2012, but minor leaguers want to have the same voice and same message when they reach the majors.

The development of top hitting prospects Joey Gallo and Nomar Mazara, for instance, would be set back if they arrived to the Rangers’ roster and had to adapt to a new routine under Magadan.

“I’d like to see it,” Magadan said. “That’s half the battle with reaching hitters. If you have a guy that has come all the way through the system, when there’s continuity in message, it helps when they arrive in the big leagues. It’s a well-oiled machine.”

Two players who have risen through the system, Rougned Odor and Ryan Rua, rate as hitting highlights in 2014. Magadan, though, missed a chance to work with Prince Fielder and Mitch Moreland, two hitters who were expected to be big contributors before having season-ending surgeries.

Fielder and Moreland are also expected to contribute in 2015. Magadan said that Moreland has made some changes to his swing and is feeling confident again. Fielder has a year’s worth of bad habits, brought on by a neck injury that could have dated to 2013, to overcome.

“When you look at stuff from him from that season, there was a lot of trouble getting the ball in the air, and he hit a lot of groundballs to second and first,” Magadan said. “That to me, when you’re hitting the ball on the ground to the pull side, that’s not good. We’ve identified some stuff that will help him.”

Moreland said that once Magadan’s program sinks in, it’s just a matter of upkeep.

“Mags has been great,” Moreland said. “He’s always there for you to help out and talk about hitting. He’s got a good program set up. He keeps us positive. It’s getting on a good maintenance program, and trying to keep the ‘A’ swing is the main goal.”

That should lead to runs, which are harder and harder to come by in baseball. The Rangers scored only 637 times in 2014, their fewest since 1988. Their batting average, though fifth in the league, was only .256, the lowest in the Globe Life Park era. Only one team hit fewer than their 111 homers

It’s a difficult time to be a hitting coach league-wide, but Magadan is still standing with the Rangers.

“I don’t know if there’s ever been a good time,” he said. “Once I eventually met Banny, nothing else was going to happen. I felt good about coming back.”

This story was originally published February 27, 2015 at 4:54 PM with the headline "Rangers’ poor offensive showing didn’t shake Magadan’s belief."