The Cubs fired high priced hitting coach Rudy Jaramillo today.
This really shouldn't come as a surprise. There was no way he was going to be picked up after his contract expired this season.
Jaramillo's time with the Cubs was not very good, but it was not entirely his fault for the poor results.
His contract, which made him the highest paid hitting coach in baseball, was offered with the idea that, for once, the Cubs, offensively, might actually meet or exceed expectations. That never happen. Each year, the talent he had to work with got crappier, but he never seemed to be able to adjust his philosophy to fit the team he had or the facilities at his disposal. Instead, we heard a number of excuses coming out of his month.
Only his high priced contract allowed him to stay on after the Cubs did their purge this past off-season, but that wasn't enough to even make it through half of this season.
Even if Jaramillo had been successful in Chicago, there would still have been a high probability that he would not have been retained after this season. Jaramillo's more aggressive approach didn't quite fit with the offensive philosophy Jed Hoyer and Theo Epstein are trying to build in Chicago.
James Rowson, the Cubs roaming minor league coordinator, will take over as hitting coach on an interim basis right now. Rowson spent a number of years as the Yankees' minor league hitting coordinator and was hired by the Cubs this past off-season and has been put in charge of installing a consistent hitting philosophy throughout the Cubs system.
I didn't particularly like the Jaramillo signing in the first place...but that doesn't really matter now.
Two things that need to be kept in mind/learned from the Jaramillo stint in Chicago...first, paying a hitting coach a lot of money is stupid...second, hitting coaches really don't make that much of a difference.
