The Chicago Cubs are going to be getting a fresh start offensively in 2018. That’s thanks to the hiring of former Boston Redsox Hitting Coach Chili Davis. Davis has been thought of as one of the best hitting coaches in the game for a little while, though it appears there is at least one front office that doesn’t agree with the pedigree. In a recent interview, the Bosox owner, John Henry seemed to indicate that he thought Davis was part of the team’s problem last year.

Is Chili Davis going to make the Chicago Cubs better or worse?

The Cubs didn’t go out looking for a new hitting coach this offseason.

Much like the team did with Joe Madden, it hired the new hitting coach because he became available. The question now is whether or not the hiring is really going to make the team better.

Redsox owner John Henry seemed to place all of the team’s struggles on Davis in a recent interview with NBS Sports Boston. “We’ve made a lot of changes other than just the managers." Henry said, "I think our approach last year was lacking offensively and we had issues that the players have already talked about. I don’t really need to talk about it …. I think these were significant changes.”

The changes beyond manager seem to clearly be calling out the rest of the coaches that were fired. When Henry is talking about offense, he appears to be singling Chili Davis out.

The weird thing about this, other than the fact that the owner is blaming the coaches entirely and not the roster, is that Davis has largely been thought of as someone a team would want to snap up if he was ever a free agent. There’s also an argument that Davis was the hitting coach in 2016, when the Boston Redsox offense was a juggernaut.

The Cubs’ faith in a castoff

We won’t know for quite some time whether Chili Davis has had a positive or negative effect. What we do know is that there were long stretches where the Chicago offense was largely impotent. There were plenty of fans of the team that wanted their previous hitting coach fired.

The team ended up doing that, though not when people expected it.

Now the Chicago Cubs are going to have to live with that decision. John Henry isn’t a general manager. He is someone who understands sports in general and has been around baseball long enough that we can trust he knows what he’s talking about. The question is always going to be whether he’s playing the blame game, or he knows more than the Chicago Cubs. We may not see right away, but it won't be long.
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