One day last month, while killing time in the visiting dugout at Kauffman Stadium, Cleveland Guardians manager Stephen Vogt was asked what he actually did in his previous role as the Seattle Mariners’ bullpen and quality control coach.
The first half of that label seemed obvious enough — bullpen coaches have been around in the majors for as long as anyone can remember. The other half? Vogt, after some explaining, broke into an impression of a television character from a show famed for sending up things like convoluted job titles.
“Quabity. Quabity assuance,” Vogt said, mimicking Creed Bratton, the eccentric and oft-forgetful quality assurance manager in “The Office.” “Why are they asking me so many questions?”
“The Office” gained prominence for its satirization of corporate culture, with its opaque job descriptions and jargon-y buzzwords. But in baseball, life is now imitating art — or at least imitating corporate America — when it comes to coaching titles.
Across the big leagues, the six-person coaching staff (bench, hitting, pitching, first base, third base, bullpen) is practically extinct. Teams have amassed legions of instructors bearing LinkedIn-friendly titles like strategist of performance and data integration (Miami Marlins), game planning and run prevention coach (Boston Red Sox), and major league field coordinator/director of defense, baserunning and strategy (Guardians). You can find just about any title in the sport, outside of assistant to the regional manager.
On Opening Day this year, the ranks of the curiously labeled included three associate managers, three offensive coordinators, five quality control or quality assurance coaches, nine directors or assistant directors of various departments, and more than a dozen coaches with a reference to strategy or game planning in their designations.
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