Getting To Know Seattle Mariners Pitching Coach Paul Davis
The Seattle Mariners have a new pitching coach this season after relieving Mel Stottlemyre of his duties when last season ended. Paul Davis is now the Mariners pitching coach. He has no prior major league coaching experience and he did not play ball professionally either.
Now Mariners pitching coach, Paul Davis worked the last six years in the St. Louis Cardinals minor league system. He started out 2013 being the pitching coach for the Cardinals advance rookie team at Johnson City. He returned the following season but with a new focus on analytics as part of his responsibility to the Cardinals organization.
During 2015, he was the Cardinals Rehab pitching coach, working with all pitchers at every minor league level to get them ready to return to action. The next two seasons he was Cardinals assistant pitching coordinator.
Last year, before getting the Mariners pitching coach position, Paul Davis was the Cardinals Manager of pitching analytics. With how important analytics is to both general manager Jerry Dipoto and manager Scott Servais, it is no surprise that it helped him to get the job as the pitching coach.
Paul Davis did play college ball with a year at a community college before transferring to Creighton University where he played two years 1984 and 85. He coached at the high school level as well as American Legion before being a head coach at Dana College an NAIA school in Nebraska. He coached five years at Dana from 1995 to 1999.
Results on the field may be the only way we have to judge his success with the Mariners pitching staff. We hope that he will get more out of the pitching staff than we have seen in recent years. How he does with the pitching staff is an important part of whether the Mariners will have success on the field or not.